Dear Life

would ever find any use for it.
    But I didn’t go so far as to want it wiped off the face of the earth for that reason.
    When I came down in the morning, Uncle Jasper had already left the house. Bernice was washing dishes in the kitchen and Aunt Dawn was putting away the crystal glasses in the china cabinet. She smiled at me, but her hands were not quite steady, so that the glasses gave a little warning clink.
    “A man’s home is his castle,” she said.
    “That’s a pun,” I said, to cheer her up. “Cassel.”
    She smiled again, but I don’t think she even knew what I was talking about.
    “When you write to your mother, in Ghana—” she said, “when you write to her, I don’t think you should mention—I mean, I wonder if you should mention the little upset we had here last night. When she sees so many real troubles and people starving and that sort of thing, I mean, it would seem pretty trivial and self-centered of us.”
    I understood. I did not bother to say that so far there had been no reports of starvation in Ghana.
    It was only in the first month, anyway, that I had sent my parents letters full of sarcastic descriptions and complaints. Now everything had become much too complicated to explain.
    After our conversation about music, Uncle Jasper’s attention to me became more respectful. He listened to my views on socialized health care as if they were my own and not derived from those of my parents. Once, he said that it was a pleasure to have an intelligent person to talk to across the table. My aunt said yes it was. She had said this only to be agreeable, and when my uncle laughed in a particular way she turned red. Life was hard for her, but by Valentine’s Day she was forgiven, receiving a bloodstone pendant that made her smile and turn aside to shed a few tears of relief all at the same time.
    Mona’s candlelight pallor, her sharp bones, not quite softened by the silver dress, may have been signs of illness. Her death was noted in the local paper, that spring, along witha mention of the Town Hall concert. An obituary from a Toronto paper was reprinted, with a brief outline of a career that seemed to have been adequate to support her, if not brilliant. Uncle Jasper expressed surprise—not at her death but at the fact that she was not going to be buried in Toronto. The funeral and interment were to be at the Church of the Hosannas, which was a few miles north of this town, out in the country. It had been the family church when Uncle Jasper and Mona / Maud were small and it was Anglican. Uncle Jasper and Aunt Dawn went to the United Church now, as most well-to-do people in town did. United Church people were firm in their faith but did not think that you had to turn up every Sunday, and did not believe that God objected to your having a drink now and then. (Bernice, the maid, attended another church, and played the organ there. Its congregation was small and strange—they left pamphlets on doorsteps around town, with lists of people who were going to Hell. Not local people, but well-known ones, like Pierre Trudeau.)
    “The Church of the Hosannas isn’t even open for services anymore,” Uncle Jasper said. “What is the sense of bringing her way up here? I wouldn’t think it would even be allowed.”
    But it turned out that the church was opened regularly. People who had known it in their youth liked to use it for funerals, and sometimes their children got married there. It was well kept up inside, owing to a sizable bequest, and the heating was up-to-date.
    Aunt Dawn and I drove there in her car. Uncle Jasper was busy until the last minute.
    I had never been to a funeral. My parents would not have thought that a child needed to experience such a thing, even though in their circle—as I seem to remember—it was referred to as a celebration of life.
    Aunt Dawn was not dressed in black, as I’d expected. She was wearing a suit of a soft lilac color and a Persian lamb jacket with a matching Persian lamb pillbox hat. She looked very pretty and seemed to be in good spirits that she could hardly subdue.
    A thorn had been removed. A thorn had been removed from Uncle Jasper’s side, and that could not help but make her happy.
    Some of my ideas had changed during the time I had been living with my aunt and uncle. For instance, I was no longer so uncritical about people like Mona. Or about Mona herself, and her music and her career. I did not believe that she was—or had been—a freak, but I