In the Slender Margin Read Online Free PDF Page A

out of my wallet while I was sleeping. She grew up on reserve in the Squamish Valley in the shadow of the Chief, the second-largest rock in the world. Legend has it that when a piece of granite breaks off and rolls like thunder down the left side of this rock, a death will follow. Mona wore leather pants and a buckskin jacket and had the word
love
tattooed in blue ink across the knuckles of her right hand and
hate
tattooed across the left. In the past she’d pierced her ears the old way, by numbing them with ice cubes and passing a sewing needle, heated over a lighter, through her earlobes and then pulling thread through to keep the holes open.
    I watched as she walked down the hallway and up the three carpeted steps to where Eli was lying. She removed the pillow beneath his head, repositioned a couple of monkeys and settled herself down with his head on her lap. She cleaned inside his mouth with a peppermint mouth swab and cooed to him and rocked him and cradled him and loved him and did everything I was afraid to do. She made herself at home in death’s house and put her feet up on death’s coffee table. “You go, baby,” she said. “Whenever you’re ready, you just go. They’re here. Everyone, they’re all waiting for you.”
    Shortly before he died, there was a loud crack as if a piece of granite had broken off a gigantic rock. Moments before, I had gone to sit in the kitchen as I didn’t want my anxiety to hold him back. Eli’s First Nations uncle, Len, gathered people in a circle around his body to sing a farewell song; his Christian grandmother sang “Amazing Grace.” When he finished singing, Len put down his drum and told us that thecrack we had heard meant that the heavens had opened and Eli was in the arms of the Creator. An hour later, when the funeral home came, Mona lifted his body off the couch and gently placed him, wrapped in his blanket, on the gurney.
    I would spend my years at hospice trying to be as brave as the thief and biker who arrived like a drenched angel, on the back of a Harley, in the middle of a stormy night.
     
    MY BROTHER LEFT HOME WHEN I WAS JUST A KID . I REMEMBER HIS black hair and chiselled cheekbones and the way he bounded up the stairs three at a time. When he was studying English literature at UBC, he took me to the old house he rented on Point Grey Road near the university. His room, on the top floor, was cramped with books piled on every surface and seemed to me to be a kind of castle turret. He threw a red blanket over my head and tackled me and we laughed and went down to the beach together, where he made a fire and we roasted marshmallows on sticks. Later that day, he showed me some empty cages that had been built around the outside of the house at ground level. The cages, eight feet tall by six feet wide, were littered with old peanut shells and were used, he told me, for gorillas the circus no longer had any use for. I don’t know what the cages were really used for. It never occurred to me to question him; even now, I can imagine my brother falling asleep to the grunts and barks of the great apes filling the city streets with the cries of the jungle.
     
    Names
    Every year, between eight and nine hundred people die on the Victoria Hospice program. In 1985, we gathered once a week in the garden to ring a bell and read out the names of those who had died that week. A friend, who started working as a counsellor shortly before I left, says the names are no longer recited and she can’t remember when the practice stopped.
    What do we do when the names keep piling up? Each year, 60 million people die. The year my mother died, we decided to have Christmas away from home. On Sunday, December 26, 2004, we were skiing down Mount Washington through drifts of new snow when the Boxing Day tsunami killed 230,000 people in Southeast Asia.
    In Washington, D.C., 58,267 names are written on black polished granite on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial—“the Wall” as it is otherwise