Thank-you and Good-bye
Chapter 6
“Kitty? You okay?”
My sister’s voice is low and quiet, like she’s trying to wind the words into whatever I’m dreaming. For a moment, I imagine we’re in high school again. Three of the four of us kids went to high school at the same time. My senior year, Tricia was one year behind me, and James, another year back. Jenna, who’d been held back at a time when they still did that, was finishing grade school. Jenna and I never overlapped, but she entered high school the year after I left, the three of them following in my footsteps and shocking teachers when they were neither as academically inclined nor as sullen as I had been. Quickly, our family reputation shifted toward being more outgoing and much less driven. From what I’ve heard, they were all a ‘pleasure to have in class’, but none of them got marks higher than the mid-seventies. It wasn’t until Jenna went through high school that I even realized you could submit papers and projects late or not at all.
“I’m okay,” I say, opening my eyes and firmly placing myself in the here and now. Tricia’s kneeling on the floor by my bed, her face unusually close to mine.
“The Prime Minister is about to do a press conference or something.”
“It’s already 10am?” I ask, sitting up and swinging my legs out of bed, forcing Tricia to shift to the side to make way. Since my cancer diagnosis four years ago, I’ve barely slept later than eight in the morning, even on the nights my mind keeps me up until the wee hours. I do feel surprisingly rested.
“Almost.” Tricia gets up off the floor to sit on the foot of my bed. Penelope the cat trots into the room, her tail quirked high. She hops on the bed and nuzzles into Tricia.
“Can her get her off the bed?” I ask as I get dressed. “Sorry.”
Tricia pulls the cat into her lap, taking care to place all four paws indisputably onto her thighs. “Good?”
I sigh. “Fine.” I pull on familiar sweats and a hoodie, my uniform for the past few years. Cancer and the treatment had me losing and gaining weight so much and so unpredictably that I’d just settled into clothes that could grow and shrink with me. I value being comfortable over almost anything else.
I grab my phone from the charger by the bed. It gives a short buzz to let me know I have texts but I don’t open them. I’m aware of a part of myself that prefers to pretend nothing has happened. I want to be back in high school with my siblings, where the most pressing matters including defending Tricia’s reputation and trying to keep my brother out of fights. Now there’s guns in the foyer and the pantry is stuffed with 3 kilo buckets of honey and boxes of beeswax.
When Tricia and I enter the living room, my mom is on the couch, coffee mug in hand. “There’s more,” she says, raising the mug in my direction.
I nod my thanks. “Want one?” I ask my sister.
“Sure.
“How are you taking it these days?” I ask, sure she’ll have grown out of the overly sweet, cooled-by-cream manner she preferred.
But she hasn’t. I pour her a coffee and give myself the rest, turning hers into a confection and dribbling some cream into my own.
My mom and sister are talking about James. Tricia is in touch with him as well as one of his roommates, a friend of theirs from school. He doesn’t believe it’s as serious as is being reported and is reading online about all the real issues this disaster is distracting us from and sending rapidfire texts to Tricia about what she should really be paying attention to.
No one has heard from Jenna.
I bring Tricia her coffee and sit beside her on the loveseat. She’s in the spot I normally take, closer to my mom with a side table between them.
I can feel a low buzz of fear and tension in the room and I do my best to dial down my part in it. Despite meditation not curing my cancer, I do still consider it an important practice and can admit it has its place.
The first thing I do is check in with myself. Immediately a wave of fear and nausea make themselves known. I am afraid. Will people lose their minds? When will food production stop? And fuel? The internet? Will violence become a part of daily life?
Okay. I breathe deeply and close my eyes. No animal in mortal peril can do that. No animal facing death can breathe deeply and close their eyes. Their hearts race, vision narrows, blood rushes to the primary organs, breath comes quick and shallow. If I can breathe into the bottom of my lungs and observe the inside of my eyelids, I must not be in danger.
In response, my panic eases. I can breathe through my nostrils now. I can feel the pressure of air in my lungs expanding them, pressing my back into the cushions behind me.
Right now, I am safe. Right now, nothing terrible is happening to me. Things might, later, but not right now.
I open my eyes and look into my coffee mug. The end of coffee production had been a huge topic of conversation for some years, but the end hadn't actually come. New climate zones heated enough to make crops viable in other areas. We had been adapting instead of adjusting to the new reality, a reality of no coffee, no almonds, no palm oil. We still had coffee, though if you ordered it with almond milk people thought you were a little self-centred or uninformed. So we ordered with oat milk instead, hoping the glysophate wouldn’t give us cancer.
When I sip my coffee, I explore my gratitude. All the way along the line, people, animals, and the planet had participated in this coffee in my hands. Thank you, I think.
It feels slimy to acknowledge that the production of my vice causes suffering and then to continue to consume it. I sense the upcoming days and months will contain a lot of confronting the cognitive dissonance of living a privileged life. I bring myself back to the present moment again and again until I just zone out and stare at the television with my sister and mom, watching the stage be set for what might be the most impactful speech ever given to Canadians.
Many Canadians celebrated the election of Prime Minister Kline. A centrist, he’d promised to end homelessness and lower taxes, and did neither – in the tradition of our PMs. Extremism in Canadian politics and the misinformation machines operating even in allied countries had manufactured division in Canadian culture to the point where even gay marriage and abortion arguments were back in the conversation, subjects considered cemented in law and long settled when I was a teen. Kline himself never commented on these issues, stating they are settled law, but he didn’t rein in his party members who were often quoted as wanting to “take action toward the preservation of the family and of human life.”
Kline takes to the podium. He is lovingly lit by the lights, his short white hair coiffed inoffensively, his spine straight and his nods and gestures as practised as his words.
I knew. I read the UN reports, the delegate statements, watched the press conferences, the stats and the soundbites. I knew, yes, and yet I’d hoped.
What I’d wanted was those precious words, the ones we’d had most of my lifetime. I’d hoped for, “And if we act quickly, all of us, there is still a chance.” I would have accepted, “This will require untold sacrifice and effort, and even then the outcome is not guaranteed.”
But that’s not what Prime Minister Kline says.
He says, “Despite monumental changes to our systems and institutions in the past decades, we have exceeded what we are unequivocally told are the hard limits of what this planet can withstand.” He says, “Our home is on an irreversible course toward destruction, and there are no efforts, current or future, to correct this course.”
He says, “We are no longer on the precipice of disaster. We are over the edge. This is the plummet.”
There’s a sharp sob, and I look at my mom and Tricia, but neither could have made it. Someone in the room with the Prime Minister has made the sound, guttural and hopeless, an uncontainable grief picked up by the microphones.
Kline stops speaking for a long moment before seeming to gather himself. “What I will now ask of you will be the most difficult request I have ever made. It will be the most difficult to fulfill. I ask you, my fellow Canadians, to be kind. To be kind to the very end, whatever it looks like and however long it takes. We may see other countries collapse under this news, and we cannot allow that to happen to us. We must gather and grieve and I understand there will be demands for answers, for accountability. But we must also go on. We have predictive models of course that offer us ranges of time and ranges of severity of this collapse. But no one can truly know what the next months and years will look like. All we know with certainty is that we have a choice between causing more chaos and more suffering, or less. I implore you, choose less. As your Prime Minister, I tell you that is what I will do.”
He says, “Do your part in upholding this country. Do not let our systems crumble. We must be strong and we must commit ourselves to the greater good. Hospitals must remain open. Farms must be tended. People must be fed.”
He says, “Go to work. Check on your neighbour. Grow what food you can.”
My mom is crying, and Tricia’s hands are in balls in her lap. I whisper, “What the fuck.”
He says, “I and the Office of the Prime Minister will be in constant communication with the Canadian people as we are greatly tested by this calamity.”
He says people can get updates from a website.
He says thank-you, and goodbye.