November 11. Remembrance Day. It seems the older I get the more it moves me. Not an uncommon reaction. Both my grandfathers served in WWII, Grandad Preston in a tank battalion (following a stint as a cook). One of my dad’s oft-told stories is of coming home to find a rifle leaning against the kitchen wall and a strange man in uniform sitting at the kitchen table. “This is your dad,” Grandma said. What she didn’t say until his death from leukemia (those asbestos tank linings?) 40 years later, was that dad’s dad had returned home with a steel plate in his head as a result of being hit with shrapnel. People played their cards closer to their chest back then.

November 11 is also my best friend, Elaine Shirley’s, birthday. Elaine died on January 30, 2009. That day her heart, her huge, generous heart, gave out. I still miss her. Today she would have turned 48. (Grandma, who shared the same birthday, would have been 101.)

I wrote this piece shortly after Elaine’s death. Few people who knew her have seen it so I wanted to share it here today.

AFTER ELAINE

It was a week after she’d gone, or at least a week after I’d learned she was gone, and I was driving along East Point and wondering to myself, as I had several dozen times already, if she’d sent me a sign and if so whether I’d missed it. In what form would such a sign come, and would I be ready for it when it did? After all, it was Elaine who read Runes and Tarot cards and who was attuned to visitors from the other side. I guess when you flirt with death as often as she did you learn to walk with the wounded. She told me a man had hung himself in the spare bedroom of our 140-year-old Hamilton home, and that the ghost of a mischievous child roamed the house—he flapped at the blanket I laid over her when she slept on the couch one night.

Did I ever see or feel the presence of these spirits? Not a chance. But as I passed by Russell Reef and looked out at the water it hit me: I didn’t really want a sign. What good to me was some vague indication from beyond that things were okay? I already knew that she was sitting on cloud eleven mainlining Godiva chocolates and spooning Cheez Whiz straight from the jar; that she was sharing smokes (she was always threatening to pick up her pack-a-day habit again) with Dorothy Parker—I can’t say whether Elaine knew of Dorothy Parker, but I’m sure they’re hitting it off well as I type. Elaine was like that: she had a quiet personality but a huge spirit. Once they got to know her, people turned to her because she lit them up. It is one of the many things I am going to miss about her. A sign can’t replace a person, or what they meant to you.

My first full day back on Saturna, back from travelling and the news that had left me reeling at Toronto airport where I’d expected to find Elaine waiting to take us to breakfast, I was standing at the window, looking out over the Strait of Georgia, and a sea-lion swam by and I asked him if he was her, and he looked right at me. It seemed he even stopped swimming just to stare my way. I’d been on the phone with Elaine the first time I’d seen a sea-lion break the surface of the water, not 10 metres offshore. But we were kind of fighting at the time, without fighting, if you know what I mean, the way I sometimes think women do, so it isn’t exactly the best memory.

There are 101 things you can beat yourself up over when you suddenly lose someone you were close to. But I’m trying not to go there. It’s better to remember all the fun we had, the wine we drank, the chapters we read and reread to each other, the trips we took, your murder mystery, the book fairs, Las Vegas, the humpbacks in the St. Lawrence, you crying at Mama Mia—I saw you—the drive to Grand Canyon with a murderous hangover (yours worse than mine), Pirate Steve and camping at Long Point, your obsession with chocolate and your continued amazement at how much I could eat. The laughter. Yards and yards of laughter.

So a sea lion looked my way. Great. Elaine was saying hello, telling me it wasn’t so bad on the other side. And that she was finally free of the medical bogeyman that had stalked her for all of her 44 years, 2 months and 19 days. Or a sea lion was swimming by. Sign or not, it wasn’t anywhere near the same as having her around, or on the other end of the phone. I pulled into the driveway and realized the only sign I could ever be satisfied with would be Elaine sitting in the passenger seat, giving me a hard time about looking for (and missing) signs. I wanted to talk to her. To pick up the phone and have a good long natter about stuff and nothing, the way we used to, a quarter of the conversation at least taken up with telling each other what our pets we’re doing: “I have a cat sitting on me right now.” “Fergy’s giving me the ‘I’m so hard done by’ routine.” Riveting stuff like that. But better that than some fuzzy, formless sign.

And yet that morning I’d woken up with “What a friend we have in Jesus,” looping over and over in my head. I often—near every day—wake up with some song or other in my head. But Ted Nugent, The Dandy Warhols or even the Pointer Sisters might be easier to explain away than some evangelical hymn of which I know scarcely more than the opening refrain. And on the day of her funeral, too. Elaine wasn’t even religious. I’m trying to pretend I didn’t find that well-thumbed Good News Bible in her apartment, stuffed with death notices. Even her sister, so determined to pack up every book of Elaine’s—“I’ll ship them to Australia if I have to. Every one of these books meant something to her,”—felt disturbed enough to toss it in the bin. But whenever Elaine flew back to visit relatives in Saskatchewan, she’d go to church with her mom. To make her happy.

A few weeks later I e-mailed Elaine’s sister-in-law to ask for a copy of the funeral service, and I asked her about the hymn. She couldn’t recall, she said, but then she was busy running round after two little ones. So I’ll wait for my copy in the mail to find out whether indeed they sang “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” And if they did? Then I’ll take it as a sign. And I’ll smile and look out at the water, or up at the sky, and I’ll conjure Elaine’s face, and I’ll start up nattering to her all over again.

*

Update: A few weeks later Elaine’s sister-in-law mailed me a copy of her funeral service. I was 10 pages long, with a picture of a purple crocus on the front. And there, at the end of page 10:

Recessional Hymn: What a Friend we Have.