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My work with the Peer Support Services for Abused Women

12/15/2015

Recently I was asked to represent the PSSAW (Peer Support Services for Abused Women), along with staff member Meghan Wright, at the kick off of the Calgary Herald Christmas Fund. Every year the Calgary Herald newspaper collects public donations and then picks fourteen service organizations in Calgary to receive these funds. This money makes it possible for these groups to give to people who need help - from food to counseling - and make Calgary a more caring place for people to live. I am proud to be a part of this organization that does so much to help women about to leave, and who have left, abusive situations and to have helped secure our place among those groups receiving funds this year.

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Chapter 2 Page 12 & 13 After Duncan's Funeral

12/9/2015

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"The sandwiches and tea were served in our garden. I was glad I’d had the small pond dug at the edge of the stone patio at the beginning of the summer. I’d always wanted a pond (photo above). The yellow marsh marigolds and purple water irises were at their peak. The flowering almond tree we’d planted was no longer in bloom, but the leaves were full and dark green. The arbor in the corner of the garden (photo below) was hung with baskets of pink fuschias and partially covered by clematis and night-flowering jasmine. I often came out in the evenings to sit on the wooden bench in its shadow.
The dark pink star lilies Duncan and I had planted the previous autumn were in bloom, and I’d filled the pots on the patio with pale pink, yellow, and mauve annuals. He’d never liked to spend much time outdoors, and had only agreed to help me plant the lilies in hopes that I would appreciate his effort to mend the rips in our marriage. I had appreciated the help, but there’d been too many tears for even the most beautiful flowers to heal.
I sat on my garden patio and talked and drank tea with a couple Duncan had known from their graduate days at Case Western in Cleveland. They thanked me for spending so much time with them, but, in fact, I couldn’t bear doing a round of well-meaning small talk with all the guests. I felt the weight of loss crushing me, and the need to grasp at air so I wouldn’t faint. I was hiding in plain sight.
After the last guest left, I laid the small dark casket, ashes inside, on the fireplace hearth, along with the two framed pictures from the funeral, and surrounded them all with bouquets of flowers. A shrine. At last, it was over. Finished. The lid closed on that part of my life. I was free.
Of course, at the time, I didn’t realize that chains are not broken that easily. The handcuffs were not gone. I couldn’t see then that it would take years before I could walk away a free woman, released from what Duncan and I started all those years ago."

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Book excerpt and photos - Chapter 1, page 4

12/7/2015

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"I glanced down at the program brochure I’d prepared for the service as I continued reading the poem. The picture of Duncan taken at Byblos was on the cover, the poem by Auden on the inside. On the last page was a message from a gravestone beside St. Mary’s Church in Crawley Church End, (see photo to the left) the village where we lived. The graveyard was only a short walk from our house and Duncan had spent time there when he was sick. He even considered being buried there.
One day I asked him, “What if I return to Canada to live after this is all over—would you still want to be buried here?”
“No,” he replied, “I’d want to be in Canada too, in your family’s plot in Ontario. I have no place like that, where all my family is buried together.”
Duncan had envied that about me—that I know my family and want to be with them in life and in death.
While I kept his ashes with me for six years, I eventually took him home to Gananoque, on the shores of the Thousand Islands, to be buried with my father, my grandmother, grandfather, great-grandparents, and other ancestors from Ireland (see photo below)—at least one representative from every generation since the first of my family got off the boat in the 1850s."

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My work with the Peer Support Services for Abused Women

Chapter 2 Page 12 & 13 After Duncan's Funeral

Book excerpt and photos - Chapter 1, page 4

Karen's Blog

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