My father was of French and Spanish decent. He was a lot like Grey Owl. He did everything as good as a Dene man. Jacques, my late Dad, could hunt, trap, cut wood, build a woodstove for the miner’s tent, and stretch a beaver hide like any Dene man; yet he was White. He lived in the bush to the day he died. He was found in a pond naked. He ironically died killing what he loved to eat for supper: duck. My Daddy drowned and died the day he went duck diving for dinner. The police said he was duck hunting, and took his clothes off to swim in and retrieve the floating duck he shot. The bottom of the pond was muddy and most likely came alive and grabbed a hold of my father’s leg and pulled him in. At least that is how I imagined it.
Grief has a grip on the living. One that feels like it kills you. As a woman with a Dene mother and a White father, I always see life with two images. I close my eyes and see a Grim Reaper dangling me over a cliff while his skeletal phalanges wrap around my delicate neck. Only I am still alive. I am choking and wondering whether Grim will drop me into the abyss below, or pull me back onto Mother Earth’s plain. In the other image, I see a community feasting and drum dancing to send my father’s spirit home to rest. I close my eyes again, and I see a great white eagle swoop down and catch our prayers on her wings. Our prayers are like clouds of mist that she flies up to the Creator. She will take him home when we laugh longer to remember him, wail harder, pound our drums stronger, and thump our feet to the rhythm of the Creator’s heartbeat.
My last images of my father are stuck to my mind like spruce gum to bark. He was heavily intoxicated, holding a red cap in his wrinkled hand, and a Smirnoff mickey in the other. Like usual he was staggering and howling like a wolf at my doorstep. There was no need for him to knock with his drunken entrances. I opened the door, and he fell into my arms crying, and spilling a bit of his mickey on me in the process. He usually only cried about three things when he drank spirits: how his Mother never let him go trick-or-treating as a child; Isabelle, the first girl he kissed when he was four; and how mankind was killing his Ocean. Like many Dene people, my father believed the ocean had a life force. He saw it as a living creature, and referred to all that it entailed as, “His Ocean.” My dad loved water so much, he named me after it. Marina, which means “by the sea.”
The last day I saw him was different. While he usually only cried about one of three ailments; on that day, he cried about two simultaneously. I remember his words through his sobs, as he fell into me,
“My…my Ocean. Everyone is killing my Ocean. The water around Yellowknife is filled with arsenic. That arsenic will flow into the Great Slave and flow up to the Great Bear. Before you know it, it will be in the Arctic Ocean, and somehow that arsenic will make its way back to my sweet Gaspe Bay. Oh, Gaspe Bay, where I kissed my sweet Isabelle by the water.”
With each tear that he shed, I could see it hurt him more. It took the life out of him, and he would slump into me harder and harder as he continued crying. Before I knew it, I couldn’t hold his body weight any longer, and his knees gave out, and he was crying like a baby on the cold kitchen floor. His cheek plastered against a pea that remained from my children’s supper. He lay there pressing on the pea and crying for what seemed like an hour. I told him, he would have to go before he woke my children from their sleep.
He rolled onto his tummy and placed his palms face down on either side of his shoulders. It looked like he was going to do a push up, and he pushed his head off the floor, tilted to look at me, and smiled with the pea still squished to his cheek. He managed to push himself up to a sitting position, and cross-legged he reached his hand out for me to pull him to his feet. I closed my hand around his, and pulled as hard as I could until he was back on his two feet. Then he took a step and stumbled gently into me, kissed me on the cheek with his rough lips, prickly whiskers, alcohol-breath, and headed right for the door still crying about Isabelle. I held the door open for him. He staggered out the way he came and began yelling through his tears, her name over and over. Isabelle.
I closed the door, and all I heard was my father yelling her name over and over, louder at first, then fainter as he made his way further from my home,
“Isabelle! Isabelle! Isabelle! Isabelle! Isabelle! Isabelle.”
I can still hear that “Isabelle” in my head. It was the last word I ever heard my dad speak. The last time I ever saw him. I felt guilty for just sending him away. I should have loved him better when he was drunk. How could I have rejected my own father? I was no different than him. I was his child. His Ocean haunted me when he left. He would come into my dreams and turn into a dark shade of blue, and crash into me with his waves, so that it shock my body in my sleep. I told people about the dreams when I woke. I hoped that it would cure the nightmares of my Dad’s Ocean. I remember my relation, a Bekale from Deline, told me she knew a song to heal the water. I remembered the words with no clue of what it meant, “Aya Hay.” I would lie in my bed when I woke from these dreams, sweat on my sheets, and tears in my eyes, and sing it four times to tame the Ocean:
“Ayah Hay, Ayah Hay,
Ayah Hay, Ayah Hay.”
When I woke in the morning, my tan sheets resembled the sand of the beaches, and my quilt appeared to hold the ripples of the ocean, as they lay on my bed in a tangled mess.
I rise and pull myself out of bed, skipping my usual stop to the bathroom, and instead tip-top over to my father’s grandchildren sleeping. My beautiful daughter lay asleep with a collection of seashells that her grandfather has collected for her before he died delicately displayed next to her bed. I smile. My heart fills with the gift that my father has left me. I tip-top to my son’s room and it has the remnants of father’s adventurous spirit. A set of my father’s binoculars rest on his dresser, and his grandfather’s pocket knife lay diagonally next to the very binoculars that my dad used to explore “His Ocean.” The song has worked. The water has stopped crashing into my body, and is now healing the grief that gripped me. My father has grabbed Grim Reaper’s thumb and pulled until he released his grip. I am left with my community dancing and feasting. The drum beats and the people laugh, as I can hear in the distance that the song plays on:
“Ayah Hay, Ayah Hay,
Ayah Hay, Ayah Hay.”
