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Globe and Mail
34 minutes ago
- Globe and Mail
My estranged father died in hospital after years of drug use. He was more than a statistic
Jordan Foisy is a stand-up comic and head writer for This Hour has 22 Minutes. I hadn't seen my dad or heard from him in six years. All I knew was that he was addicted to drugs, his whereabouts could be best described as uncertain, and things were bad for him and getting worse. Everything else was glimpses and rumours. On a visit to Sault Ste. Marie, my hometown, my mom pointed out a men's shelter, and said she'd heard that's where he was staying. For years I'd been expecting the call. It would probably be my mom: 'They found him,' she'd tell me, 'He wasn't breathing.' But the call never came. For years, he existed on the periphery of my thoughts, a living ghost, an aching joint that acts up when I watch Interstellar. Sometimes, I would see an unlucky addict on the street, a face gaunt with misery, and I'd do a double take. Was that him? Could be. Might as well be. And then, one day, my mom phoned me. It was later than usual and I felt silly for all the other times I thought it was going to be the call, because immediately I knew. She spoke softly but deliberately. 'Your dad's in the hospital,' she told me, 'They had to do some kind of surgery. He can't move, he can't talk.' She didn't know the rest of the details. The hospital had called his sister, who had then called her. She didn't know what to do. His sister didn't know what to do. No one did. My dad had spent the last years burning every bridge around him, only pausing the bonfires to make sure the structures were covered in enough gasoline. Favours were done that were never returned, money was loaned that was never repaid, friends were cheated, lines were crossed, and the ends of ropes were reached. No one wanted to take this on. The small-town opioid crisis hidden in the big-city shadow The decision came easily. Maybe there is some ingrained determinism in being a son, especially the first born. A sense of duty or responsibility you might not know you possess. Or maybe I'm still just a theatre kid who knows the appropriate story beats for such a juicy role. 'I can go,' I told my mom, 'I can take care of it.' The next morning I got hold of a doctor at the hospital. He laid it out for me. My father had gone to the emergency room complaining about numbness in his arms. Upon examination, they found an abscess growing near his spine, at the base of his skull. The doctor didn't know for sure the cause but it's common with people who do intravenous drugs. Dirty needles. The infection gets in through the injection site, and moves through the blood to where it can do real damage. You're only lucky until you aren't. He needed surgery immediately and was airlifted to Sudbury. The abscess was removed but he was left paralyzed, unconscious and on a ventilator. They wanted to wait 72 hours to see if he recovered enough to make a decision about how to move forward, and if not, someone else would have to make it for him. The doctor was sure someone else would have to. I called my brothers to let them know and got in touch with a social worker at the hospital who filled in some more details. My girlfriend said she'd come along, and we looked for a hotel room. We paused to figure out how many days to book it for. Two? Five? How long is this going to take? What strange questions to ask yourself, what morbid estimations you make in this process: how many days are an appropriate number of days to wait for someone to die? This isn't gardening or changing a tire – there are no YouTube tutorials to help you. We decided on three nights. Seemed like enough time for whatever was going to happen to happen. Sudbury is about a five-hour drive from Toronto, a straight shot up the 400. It's beautiful. The craggy brilliance of the Canadian Shield is a welcome respite from the overstuffed highways, anonymous glass towers and brusque manufacturing centres of the GTA. We arrived at the hospital around dinner time. I was nervous, scared, but not of him dying. The worst outcome I envisioned on the drive up was arriving in his room to find him awake and alert; still paralyzed and mute but with a look in his eyes that said, 'What now?' It seems cruel but I hadn't come to help or save him, I had come to say goodbye and was horrified by the possibility of any alternatives. We found our way to the ICU. I buzzed the front desk and told them I was there to visit my father, Conrad Foisy. Uttering his name made it real. The hi-def daydreams about fathers and sons were put on pause. Now he was a person, a man, alone and in pain in a city he didn't live in. We walked down the hallway to his room and there he was. He was surrounded by screens and devices, tubes running from his body. He was bigger than the last time I saw him; his upper body was bare and his hair was long and brushed behind his ears, giving him an aura of tattered elegance. His mouth, near-toothless and ravaged from abuse, winced around the intrusive, alien chord of the ventilator. I focused on his hands. Big, meaty things, betraying a lifetime of manual labour. When we were young, and he was feeling playful, my dad would crawl around on his hands and knees and try to smash our toes with those hands. My brothers and I would scream and laugh. 'Look at his hands,' I kept mumbling, 'They're so big.' 'I think they're just swollen,' my girlfriend replied, thankfully puncturing the overwrought meaning I was shoehorning into the scene. The nurse on duty was a kind man, quietly watching hockey on a little TV. He told me my dad was stable and conscious; he could hear me if I wanted to say something but wouldn't be able to respond. It is difficult to imagine a worse fate than that. Trapped inside your own body, alone and unable to communicate, kept company and consoled only by the memories of your decisions and actions that led you to this place. The nurse called his name, 'Conrad, Conrad, your son is here.' I joined in. He opened his eyes and looked at me. There was a brief flash of recognition, before he closed his eyes again. I was relieved. Honestly, I didn't want him to wake up, not from malice or anger, but fear. Fear of the impossibility of that moment. He'd wake up and we'd, what, fix everything? No, we'd sit there at his death's door in a painful, regret-filled silence, with so much to say and no way to say it. My whole life I'd been afraid of him. He was big, loud, and prone to arbitrary outbursts of big, loud anger. I'd come home from high school and he'd be asleep on the living room couch, and I would pray he didn't wake up. Fifteen years later, and I was praying for the same thing. We stuck around for roughly an hour, which felt like the right amount of time to spend looking at an unresponsive, dying man. Again, this question of how much time is appropriate; what is the proper penance to pay for being the ones in the room that are healthy and alive? So much of being around the dying is in that uncertainty: a constant search for the right thing to say, the right thing to do. What will absolve this guilt that I'm not the one lying there with tubes running out of my mouth? Whenever I've been in this situation, I've always been plagued by the question: how long should I stay? Yet, the sight of my father – shirtless, pain etched into his face – should have obliterated this notion that there is any sort of redemptive, narrative arc to this life. Sometimes you mess up and then just keep on going; never learning a lesson. You can never learn your lesson. You can hit rock bottom, and instead of picking yourself up, it turns out you can always find another rock bottom. The next day, I talked to his doctor. We were 24 hours away from the deadline for any miraculous recovery. The doctor explained to me that should I decide to take him off life support, they would give him painkillers and simply let nature take its course. They would make it comfortable, peaceful. I asked what would happen if I zagged and kept him alive. The most likely outcome, I was told, was he would remain there in the ICU, immobile and alone. The doctor emphasized the terrible quality of life awaiting him; he had one patient who had been there for five years. It felt like I was the last patron at a bar, and the staff was putting the stools up. I got the hint. He didn't have to worry, this wasn't a rescue mission. Only one moment shook my assuredness. The doctor called his name, and I followed. This time his eyes shot open, and he caught mine with a look of horrified recognition. He was afraid. He started blinking and furrowing his brow, his mouth gnawed at the ventilator. He was thrashing as hard as he could against the restraint of his own paralyzed body. It was harrowing, a sight that a year later I can picture clearly: the look in his eyes, a fevered pitch of helplessness, rage, and despair, as he tried with all his might to say something, anything to me. I touched his brow and told him I loved him and reassured him that I was there. After what seemed an eternity, he mercifully closed his eyes. What was he trying to say? I still can't get the thought out of my head. In the weeks after, friends would tell me that he was probably trying to say, 'I love you' or 'I miss you' or even, 'I'm sorry.' All possible, all welcome. Though those loving statements don't necessarily correspond with the pain I saw in his eyes. What if it wasn't peaceful acceptance I saw, but pitiful denial? He could have just as easily been saying 'Help me,' or 'Don't do this.' or 'Please, just give me one more chance.' He always liked that last one. Shaken, I went to the cafeteria and called my aunt. I got my uncle instead. He complimented me for me being there and told me he recently went through this exact scenario with his brother. I was struck by how much hurt we're all carrying around with us. The older you get the more tragedy and sickness accumulates, like mollusks on the hull of a ship. The greatest tragedy is we're expected to bear it. Our culture makes no room for grief. We treat death like a chore, a mess to be cleaned up and then moved along from after two-to-three business days. Work awaits. Please make sure your small talk is sanitized and acceptable. That's what this ultimately was: a chore. My uncle emphasized that there wasn't really a choice here at all. He was right. The worst-case scenario had already happened; it just hadn't caught up with my father yet. I wasn't there as some sort of arbiter, empowered to make a judgment and decide on the values and qualities of possible life paths. Those decisions had been made long ago. I was just the last one there, and it was my job to turn off the lights. The next day I came in and told the doctors that they could take him off life support. He had gotten worse overnight, so they had increased his meds. He wouldn't wake again. A relief. My brothers arrived that night. We went for a swim and had dinner. We batted stories about our old man back and forth. It was strange. We each had a similar relationship with him, estranged and sporadic. The stories we told were all different but ended up being the same: maybe there was a surprise phone call or an accidental run-in, or an encounter with one of his associates. While each story was different, they all emphasized the same point: how little we knew about our father. Random encounters with him or surprise phone calls or cryptic conversations with his friends only added to his mystery. Any encounter with him or the life that he lived, instead of illuminating, would add more questions. It was like we were building a puzzle of him but discovering that all the pieces we had were for the corners. Day four, we took him off the ventilator. They gave him painkillers. The nurse told us they used more than usual because his tolerance was so high. One last reminder of why we were there. We said some last words, halting but sufficient. He lasted for another hour. What is that imperceptible shift that occurs when you see someone die, when they transform from a loved one to an inert object, a body, a thing? Is it a trick of the eye, of the mind? Or do we lose something? Before he passed, he was barely alive, but within that 'barely' was everything. In the hours after, I called a funeral home back in Sault Ste. Marie to organize a pick-up for his body. In fact, someone was driving back from Toronto and could pick him up the next day. I envisioned a network of refrigerated hearses filled with bodies, criss-crossing the province, picking up the remains of the loved and unloved. The funeral director also reached out to Ontario Works, who quickly determined they would pay for his cremation. It was one of the smoothest public and private sector interactions I'd ever been a part of, and I thought if only this country was as good at taking care of his living body as they were with his dead body, he might still be around. My grief has been strange. No feelings of acute loss and sorrow, no heart-seizing realizations of absence. A friend afterward told me those would come. A year later, they still haven't. Another friend who lost his mom tells me he feels it when something makes him want to call her and remembers he can't. I guess that's the difference. I had stopped calling my father a decade before he died. Maybe I had been grieving that whole time. His death was not a shock or rupture, but an ending. An end to the sliver of hope that he would get clean, an end to the gnawing guilt that I should do something to help. Along with grief, there was relief. Those doors were closed; our story had been told in full. That's all my father ever was, that's all the father I'm ever going to get, and now I have a lifetime to figure out what that means. My brother and I returned to the Sault later that summer, and we both sheepishly admitted to feeling lighter knowing there was no chance of a run-in. There was no way the pitiable figure slouching toward us could be him. Which was good because there were plenty of pitiable figures. In 2024, Sault Ste. Marie had 38 opioid-related deaths for a per 100,000 rate of 48, the second-highest in Ontario. I don't know if his death was officially part of those statistics. I do know that the final, painful years of his life – bouncing between sketchy motels, shelters, and street corners – could have been featured in grainy, attack-ad footage from the last federal election; one that would be screeching with tabloid hysteria about the lost Liberal decade. It goes without saying that there wasn't a large inheritance from my father. But I did get one thing: empathy. It's a gift I hope to share. As communities suffer through unprecedented housing and addiction crises, there's been a corresponding rise in callousness. We're seeing a surge in Canadian Travis Bickles, hoping for a real rain to wash all the scum from the street, and politicians more than happy to capitalize on this sentiment. I hope that in this rush to demonize and dismiss, to bash safer supply and shut down supervised-consumption sites, that we can remember the humanity of our fellow citizens. That no matter how lost someone is, they are loved and missed; that they have sons and daughters and parents willing to make that last drive for the chance to say goodbye, to put our hand on their brow, and to let them know it's okay – I forgive you.
Globe and Mail
35 minutes ago
- Globe and Mail
Sweet success: The story of Honey Jam
As the concert series for women in music celebrates its 30th anniversary, notable alumna including Jully Black, Nelly Furtado, Haviah Mighty and more share an oral history of its legacy Josh O'Kane The Globe and Mail Photo illustration by The Globe and Mail to view this content.
Canada News.Net
40 minutes ago
- Canada News.Net
Kelsey Mitchell, Fever pull out win over Dream despite Jordin Canada's 30
(Photo credit: Grace Smith/IndyStar / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images) Kelsey Mitchell scored a team-high 25 points and the Indiana Fever outscored the visiting Atlanta Dream by 22 in the second half to earn a 99-82 win Friday night in Indianapolis. Aliyah Boston added 19 points, eight assists and six rebounds for Indiana (10-10) before fouling out, while Sophie Cunningham came off the bench for 16 points and 10 boards. Caitlin Clark contributed 12 points and nine assists. Jordin Canada starred in defeat for Atlanta (12-8), scoring a career-high 30 points and dishing out eight assists. Rhyne Howard added 14 points despite missing most of the second quarter with a knee injury and Brittney Griner chipped in 10 to go along with eight rebounds. The Fever blew it open in the fourth quarter, outscoring the Dream 30-17 and leading by as many as 20 points in the last minute. After hitting only 30.9 percent from the field Wednesday in an 80-61 home loss to Golden State, Indiana canned 11 of 30 3-pointers and finished Friday night at 46.1 percent from the floor. Atlanta was 11 of 29 on 3-pointers and ended the game at 44.8 percent from the field. Forward Brionna Jones, who averages 14 points per game, managed just six in 24 minutes before fouling out. In the fourth and final regular-season meeting of the teams, Atlanta ripped off 10 straight points in 71 seconds early in the first quarter for a 12-4 lead as Canada hit a 3-pointer and set up Howard for a 3-pointer. That was the beginning of an explosion few would have predicted. In a matchup that featured eight All-Stars at one point in their careers, it was Canada, who's not been an All-Star, who went off for 26 first half points. Her sixth 3-pointer enabled the Dream to take a 45-40 edge to the break. Indiana fought back in the third quarter, ringing up 29 points as Mitchell sparked the rally with a three-point play, three flagrant foul shots and a long 2-pointer. That enabled the Fever to take a 70-65 advantage to the final 10 minutes.
