March 1st, 2009

My mother driving her car, 1965

It’s March 1^st today, my mother’s 93^rd birthday. I expect more people of my generation have parents living into their nineties; I suspect it was an exception until now. When my mother turned 80, I thought she was old; when she was 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, I thought she was really old. But 90, 91, 92, 93 seems beyond old, beyond age. Others born on March 1^st who have been important to me, in different ways, are the big band leader Glenn Miller whose music was a favourite of my father, and I both like the music and feel a closeness to my father when listening to this music, and the poet Robert Lowell. Both are Pisces, as my mother is a Pisces.

My great grandmother, Mary Callaghan, was also born on this day, on March 1^st,1845; she died in 1906, on April 27, my birthday. Mary Callaghan’s father also died on April 27, but in 1905. We are bound to our ancestors in many ways; one way is by synchronistic dates, by meaningful coincidence, by cosmic coincidence. Some dates seem fated and deprived, others are blessed and joyous; some dates have astrological importance and others, still, are historical. Some dates, births and deaths, repeat themselves over many generations of family members—to me, this coincidence of dates has always suggested a greater design to existence.

We are a lineage of generations, a line of people who played, variously, leading roles, or bit parts, in each others’ lives. We exchange roles with each other in our many incarnations—in this life you be the mother and I’ll be your son; you be the daughter and I’ll be your father; you be the grandson and I’ll be your grandmother. Our lives are an enactment of archetypal relationships, each demanding a compassionate awareness of life’s transience and finitude, if we are ever to be free of the turning wheel of endings and beginnings.

The lives we have lived, previous lives, like lives to come in the future, seem inestimable, and inexhaustible; indeed, they are a metaphor for the life we are presently living. This present incarnation, this latest dramatic depiction of existence, seems in itself like a series of incarnations, as we move from childhood to middle life to old age. In this life we experience archetypal roles and relationships—they give a grandeur to existence—in them we find a depth and meaningfulness to life’s journey, the movement from birth to death to birth to death, again and again. I know that we must eventually die to each life, including the events of this life, to complete the cycle, to be done with existence.

In this existence of ours, Fate plays as much a part as free will. I was a soldier in World War One wearing a green khaki uniform, and going over the lip of a muddy trench, bayonet drawn, willing to kill or be killed, for the greater glory, for poetry and God and King, for family and death. That was in 1916, the year Mother was born in Montreal’s St. Henry neighbourhood. A few years ago, when I was driving her one Saturday morning along Notre Dame Street to Central Station downtown, on her way to Toronto to spend Christmas or Easter with my brother and his family, we passed Irene Street and Mother suddenly announced, “I was born on that street!” She always had a mind for remembering the past.