Love and Family Theme Analysis

“This is for Sherman,” she said, placing it carefully near the centre of the flames. “You’d better appreciate that. Say hi to your ba-ba-oo, Lisa.”

“But he’s not here,” I said.

“Yes, he is,” she said. “You just can’t see him, because he’s dead.”

I frowned. “Can you see him?”

“She gets it from you,” Ma-ma-oo said to the air again. “No, I can’t see him. He’s dead. He can come to you only in dreams. Be polite and say hello when you give him food.” She handed me a Twinkie and told me to throw it in the fire.

“Hello,” I said. I looked at the Twinkie thoughtfully. “Will he share?”

“Say his name. If you don’t say his name, another ghost will snatch it up.”

Ba-ba-oo had lost his arm in the Second World War, at Verrières Ridge. When he came home, he couldn’t get the money he thought he should get form Veterans Affairs because they said Indian Affairs were taking care of him. Indian Affairs said if he wanted the same benefits as a white vet, he should move off reserve and give up his status. If he did that, they’d lose their house and by this time, they had three children and my dad, Albert, was on the way.

“Geordie and Edith helped as much as they could,” Mick had told me […] “But they had their own family. My father worked hard all his life, and now he would say things like, ‘Agnes, I’m useless.’ She didn’t know what to do.”

Erica’s eyes were shiny with tears. Her face was scrunched up and beet red. She blinked quickly then looked out the window, and her friends turned away and started whispering again. Making her mad had been fun, but making her cry made me feel like crap. It wouldn’t do any good to say sorry. Erica would be more embarrassed and probably wouldn’t believe it, coming from me. She shouldn’t dish it out, I thought piously, if she couldn’t take it. Erica got off at the stop before mine, punching my shoulder as she went by. I sighed.

Food is dust in my mouth without you.
I see you in my dreams and all I want to do is sleep.
If my house was filled with gold, it would still be empty.
If I was king of the world, I’d still be alone.
If breath was all that was between us, I would stop breathing to be with you again.
The memory of you is my shadow and all my days are dark, but I hold on to these memories until I can be with you again.
Only your laughter will make them light; only your smile will make them shine.
We are apart so that I will know the joy of being with you again.
Take care of yourself, wherever you are.
Take care of yourself, wherever you are.

Most people only learn about their body when something goes wrong with it. Mom could tell you anything about skin when she got her first deep wrinkle. Dad could talk for hours about the stomach after he got a hiatus hernia. After she had her first attack, Ma-ma-oo read everything she could about the human heart.

The doctors gave her pamphlets, a slew of nurses sat patiently by her bed and drew her pictures of what had gone wrong, and Mom tried to translate the jargon into something that made sense […] When she came back to the Kitimat hospital, I would visit her after school, catching the late bus home after we had looked at my picture book describing the heart. Even in the kids’ books, the technical words were confusing.

“Good, hey?” she said, pleased with the way I’d demolished her dish.

I nodded. She picked up my bowl, but instead of putting it in the sink, added more uh’s. I kept smiling. I had no idea how I was going to finish it. Ma-ma-oo practically licked her bowl clean. She waited for me to finish, sipping her tea. I hoped she would go to the bathroom, so I could pour it down the sink, but she sat and looked mildly into the distance. I made my way through the second bowl. I ate slower. Ma-ma-oo patted my hand. “We have enough for the whole winter,” she said.

“Oh, good,” I said.

By the end of the week, I had become used to the taste. I didn’t even notice the bitterness any more. It was like whipped cream, but not as nauseatingly sweet as the canned stuff Mom bought.

“Well,” I said. “You’re talking to the queen of fuckups and you’d have to do a lot more to take my crown away.”

He reached over and kept giving me nudges until I looked at him. “You weren’t that bad.”

“You weren’t the one that ran away.”

“You’re back now. You’re dealing with things. I didn’t understand what it was like to lose something. Now that I do, I think you’re doing fine. I mean, Karaoke didn’t die on me. She just dumped me and I flipped. I don’t know what I’d do if someone actually died on me.”

I laughed. “You call that flipping? That was a little spaz.”

“Yeah, well…”

We drifted off in a comfortable silence.

It came then, a light touch on my shoulder. No one was near me. Out on the water, a dark head bobbed. The seal rolled twice, creating ripples that distorted the reflections of the mountains. Then it dived and the water smoothed. I was walking down to the beach. Something in the water was drifting out with the tide and I didn’t want the seal to get it. I thought it might be a cat, but the closer I got I knew it wasn’t. For a moment, it looked like a baby in a christening outfit. But when I was a few feet from it, it was just a bucket […] I reached for the bucket, felt it bump against my legs. My arm went numb as I plunged it under the surface. I had trouble grasping the handle. Something caught my ankle then and yanked me under.