Campbell. “The dream is the private myth.” And what of my dream? Without any prior knowledge of Jeff’s Highland warrior dreams, I envisaged him within his “private myth”—the first sign that we were given.
After my grandmother died, my mother inherited my father’s Second World War service certificate. It hung in her living room gallery of family photographs until her death. Then, at her bequest, the framed certificate and my father’s military medals went to Jeff—linked by name, character andinevitable vocation to the grandfather he’d never known. My father died unexpectedly and unaccountably. When he returned in the winter of ′68 from six months of United Nations peacekeeping duty in Cyprus, he couldn’t carry the garbage cans to the end of our driveway without straining for breath and reddening in the face. Suddenly, my father—whom I’d never seen sick a day in his life—had to travel to Halifax to undergo medical tests at the Camp Hill Hospital.
A weekend in late April, we drove from Oromocto to his childhood home in Tatamagouche Mountain. He was staying there overnight, and his twin sister would drive him to Halifax the next day. Arms folded across his chest, he leaned against the veranda of the red shingled farmhouse—the house built by his father and grandfather, where he’d been born forty-five years earlier. He waved, unsmiling, and watched our car disappear down the lane. I had no idea that this would be the last time I’d see my father standing there, or anywhere. At seventeen, I still believed he was invincible, as rock solid and enduring as his name—a Cliff.
We visited him in the hospital two weeks later; an oxygen mask covered his mouth and nose, so he couldn’t talk to us. But he spoke powerfully through his eyes, wide, fearful eyes that knew of his fate. We drove back from the hospital that day through city streets lined with leafing trees and lilac bushes flaunting their sweet fragrance. The car radio played Glen Campbell’s hit song:
I wanna live
Till I get old
I wanna watch all of this grow
I wanna live, live and let live …
And all I could see was my father’s face, his lambent hazel eyes. A few days later, a week before I was to graduate from high school, he died.
The medical diagnosis was pulmonary fibrosis, an environmentally induced form of lung cancer. The military’s investigation concluded that it was caused by my father’s work in a salt mine for a few years and exacerbated by his military service with the United Nations in hot desert climates—a year in the Sinai Desert in the early sixties, then six months in Cyprus. So this was the story we told ourselves, and others, for many years. But we now suspect a more disturbing reason for his sudden illness and death. Only a few kilometres from home, he breathed in the toxic chemicals that slowly and silently killed him.
In 2005 Canadian media reports disclosed the extensive spraying of herbicides and defoliants, Agent Orange and the more lethal Agent Purple, to clear brush for military exercises at CFB Gagetown during the sixties—the years my father worked every summer in the training area. Dioxins from these herbicides have been linked to many fatal health conditions, including respiratory cancers. In 2007 the federal government admitted culpability. Compensation payments of $20,000 were awarded to people who had worked at CFB Gagetown during the sixties and had since suffered an illness associated with these herbicides. These people, of course, had to still be alive to apply for the compensation—unlikemy father, robbed of his life, betrayed by the country he had sworn an oath to serve.
After my father’s death, my mother—a youthful thirty-eight years old—sank into a black pit of despair so deep that she couldn’t get up in the morning. My older sisters were just setting out on careers as independent working women, and I was about to begin university. Her nest was completely and abruptly empty.
After my grandmother died, my mother inherited my father’s Second World War service certificate. It hung in her living room gallery of family photographs until her death. Then, at her bequest, the framed certificate and my father’s military medals went to Jeff—linked by name, character andinevitable vocation to the grandfather he’d never known. My father died unexpectedly and unaccountably. When he returned in the winter of ′68 from six months of United Nations peacekeeping duty in Cyprus, he couldn’t carry the garbage cans to the end of our driveway without straining for breath and reddening in the face. Suddenly, my father—whom I’d never seen sick a day in his life—had to travel to Halifax to undergo medical tests at the Camp Hill Hospital.
A weekend in late April, we drove from Oromocto to his childhood home in Tatamagouche Mountain. He was staying there overnight, and his twin sister would drive him to Halifax the next day. Arms folded across his chest, he leaned against the veranda of the red shingled farmhouse—the house built by his father and grandfather, where he’d been born forty-five years earlier. He waved, unsmiling, and watched our car disappear down the lane. I had no idea that this would be the last time I’d see my father standing there, or anywhere. At seventeen, I still believed he was invincible, as rock solid and enduring as his name—a Cliff.
We visited him in the hospital two weeks later; an oxygen mask covered his mouth and nose, so he couldn’t talk to us. But he spoke powerfully through his eyes, wide, fearful eyes that knew of his fate. We drove back from the hospital that day through city streets lined with leafing trees and lilac bushes flaunting their sweet fragrance. The car radio played Glen Campbell’s hit song:
I wanna live
Till I get old
I wanna watch all of this grow
I wanna live, live and let live …
And all I could see was my father’s face, his lambent hazel eyes. A few days later, a week before I was to graduate from high school, he died.
The medical diagnosis was pulmonary fibrosis, an environmentally induced form of lung cancer. The military’s investigation concluded that it was caused by my father’s work in a salt mine for a few years and exacerbated by his military service with the United Nations in hot desert climates—a year in the Sinai Desert in the early sixties, then six months in Cyprus. So this was the story we told ourselves, and others, for many years. But we now suspect a more disturbing reason for his sudden illness and death. Only a few kilometres from home, he breathed in the toxic chemicals that slowly and silently killed him.
In 2005 Canadian media reports disclosed the extensive spraying of herbicides and defoliants, Agent Orange and the more lethal Agent Purple, to clear brush for military exercises at CFB Gagetown during the sixties—the years my father worked every summer in the training area. Dioxins from these herbicides have been linked to many fatal health conditions, including respiratory cancers. In 2007 the federal government admitted culpability. Compensation payments of $20,000 were awarded to people who had worked at CFB Gagetown during the sixties and had since suffered an illness associated with these herbicides. These people, of course, had to still be alive to apply for the compensation—unlikemy father, robbed of his life, betrayed by the country he had sworn an oath to serve.
After my father’s death, my mother—a youthful thirty-eight years old—sank into a black pit of despair so deep that she couldn’t get up in the morning. My older sisters were just setting out on careers as independent working women, and I was about to begin university. Her nest was completely and abruptly empty.
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