The number game

Back when I was still in the teaching racket, I would often use a popular ice breaker game at the start of each new term. It goes by many names, but I would usually call it the number cloud in my lesson plan. It’s a simple and effective way of getting to know a new class and assess their language level at the same time.

Draw on the board a fluffy cloud and fill it with four to six numbers that relate to your life. Students then ask questions to determine what relevance the numbers have to the person at the front of the class. Once they get the drift of the game and the questions, students can make their own number clouds and interact with their classmates and teacher.

I typically started off with my age, number of siblings, birthday and, later in my teaching career, number of children. These numbers, while significant, aren’t the numbers that have occupied a mystical space in my life. The numbers that have and continue to hold the most significance in my life, are numbers that mark significant events in the lives of my antecedents. Let’s start with the number 15.

In my family a girls’ fifteenth birthday was the first hurdle of recognized womanhood. It was at this age that one of my aunts got married. And on this birthday, that aunt would call you and give you the talk. The talk on how not to get married at 15.

I turned fifteen whilst living in the Newfoundland outport community of Harbour Deep. One road measuring 2.5 miles from end to end. Travel out of the village required a seaplane or boat.

My mother was the nurse at the station in Harbour Deep and my sister and I came to live there that summer after six months of living in almost complete isolation outside of the town of Pugwash, Nova Scotia where the only thing that fed us and the two children we looked after was bear meat that had been left in the freezer from the year before.

Harbour Deep was a dream for us after the winter we had just come through. There was a housekeeper assigned to the station and she made us wonderful meals, took care of our laundry, and basically made our lives very pleasant. We had satellite TV and watched programs until the light of a new day crept into the living room where my sister and I shared a sofa bed.

I was sitting on that sofa, after a fantastic birthday meal prepared by the housekeeper, when the phone rang. It was my aunt, calling from Massachusetts. First words out of her mouth, “Happy birthday-don’t get married.” I assured her I wouldn’t. And perhaps I took that promise a little beyond what she intended because I am now closing in on fifty and have never been married; but I think she’d approve of that too.

The next two numbers have both hung over my life like an executioner’s sword—31 and 36—both ages to conquer if the fates would allow.

According to my mother, her grandmother and namesake died at the age of 31. Given the era, the early 1940s, one might imagine any number of reasons a woman of that age would die, but I was always told that it was suicide. Although not many other people in the family ever gave credit to this assertion when I would discuss the matter, documents we found in my great-aunt’s house after her death (sister to my great-grandmother and my namesake-Lois), led me to believe that my great-grandmother suffered from severe depression. Suicide would not be unusual in such circumstances.

I’ve walked past the small pond where my great-grandmother died and have many questions that will never be answered. I throw them like pebbles on the water to no effect, not even a ripple.

There is a certain bent towards mental illness on my mother’s side of the family and 31 became the milestone to pass. A breath of relief could be released when the 32^nd birthday rolled around. I remember having conversations with some family members—just checking in with each other to be sure that our actions didn’t fit in the crazy category. It’s a very strange conversation to have, sussing each other out; searching for madness.

In the spring of 1998 my aunt, the one who had gotten married at the age 15, became very ill. She was 36. And she died.

The sixth of 10 children, mother of two; died of an unstoppable bacterial infection. A nurse who probably picked the infection up at work, quickly became sick, and left before any of us could even think to prepare for such an outcome.

That spring I was preparing to leave my life in Canada behind. I was suffering through a horrible break up and did a lot of drinking and found many short-term boyfriends to fill the void. I had some money and planned to leave the city where I was living—where every corner led to another facet of life I had once shared with my ex—and move to Asia. Thailand—seemed like a good place to start a new life.

I got a parcel in the mail. A video that was being passed around through the family, the one my grandfather had made of his trip to Alaska the previous summer. The one where he watched trains and commented enthusiastically about flowers in bloom. I was instructed to pass it on to my aunt, the nurse, after I had had my fill of flowers “that was just a bud yesterday.”

I sent the package and the next day got a call from one of my aunts informing me of the situation my aunt in Alaska was facing. I had to decide if the money I had would go towards a ticket to Alaska to see my sick aunt or a ticket to Thailand, to start a new life. I thought about what my aunt would likely advise, and I thought, and still think, that she would have told me to go in search of that new life. That is what she herself did—started over, became a nurse, got a new life.

I was devastated when I heard that she had died. I returned to the family about a month after her death and stayed there until I had all the details arranged for my move to Thailand. I added another number to the list. I was 24 years old.

At the age of 31 I became a mother for the first time. At the age of 36, I had been living in my hometown in Nova Scotia for one year, had two kids, and was living in the deepest poverty I have ever known. But I lived through that year and things got better. And it was at that time I got a new number to add to my list 87.

The spring that I was 36 my grandmother died. She was the one person who I’d always been able to turn to. She was not what I would call a soft person but sensible—the level head you need in a crisis. I held her hand during her last moments of life. I told her doctor she wanted no extraordinary measures. I assured him I knew what that meant.

My grandmother and I had discussed dying many times and she was at peace but knew that it would be hard for those of us left behind. She was 87 years old. Her husband, my grandfather, who I remember lecturing me on how to layer the quilt I was making for the aforementioned ex, as he lay on the sofa, also died at the age of 87.

That is my new number. The age to which I aspire. Eighty-seven years is a good amount of time and I am more than halfway there—but that doesn’t bother me. I just hope it is like all the other numbers on my personal list—something I can look at in the rear-view mirror.

I have been thinking of these numbers as I face 2020 and all that it has wrought to date. I don’t know if other people have these numeric milestones in their lives. I suspect many do but one thing I am certain of is that no one alive today will ever encounter the number 2020 again without recalling this year and the way it changed us all—hopefully for the better.