plate tectonics

geology 101:
PLATE TECTONICS -- a theory in geology: the lithosphere of the earth is divided into a small number of plates which float on and travel independently over the mantle and much of the earth's seismic activity occurs at the boundaries of these plates -- compare CONTINENTAL DRIFT

This post is not about the federal election taking place on Monday, though it could be. It is about the shifts that have occurred in my life.

Yesterday I handed in my last assignment regarding my internship, and well, that means I have completed my journalism degree at Ryerson University.

When I began this journey over two years ago, my plan was to do this for myself and then return home to Windsor to care for my mother in her senior years. She had been struck with a cerebral aneurysm when she was 47 and I was 24. Over the years I had helped her as she moved forward and overcame many of the obstacles in front of her. But though she was in a good place in her early 70s, I knew her capabilities would begin to decline with advancing age. So school was something I was doing for myself. My plan was to return to Windsor and hopefully use my new skills in a community newspaper.

But during the first months of school, doctors diagnosed my mother with colon cancer. After surgery, the diagnosis was positive and optimistic. In May of the following year they told us it had spread to her liver.

So I returned home and helped her die. Dying at home is what she wanted, and what we (my brothers and I), wanted for her. But caretakers take heed; it is a hard, hard thing of which to be a part. I was basically living in a hospital and expected to administer medications and make decisions I was not trained to make. The home nurses were sent from God, administering the care and medical attention that we had long ago stopped receiving from doctors. But they were only there a few times during the week, preparing the medication for the caretaker to administer.

I returned to school the following January, after taking three months following my mother's death to close up her house and prepare it for sale. In April, my father went into hospice in Florida and two weeks later passed away. He had been sick and in pain for almost a decade, but he fought like mad not to go. He involved my stepmother and me in bizarre plans to escape. Eventually he gave in to the medicated relief from pain.

Then I was back in Toronto, now looking like my permanent home. It is strange to go back to my hometown in Windsor and not have my childhood home in the family. Even as an adult, one is set adrift. My father's home too, outside of Detroit is being sold. Things that were always, and are no longer.

Now I am done school, and I face a future full of possibilities. So many plausible and implausible scenarios, that I have to sort and speculate as to where I am and where I am going. Everything has shifted, connections fractured and lost. But it feels like the shifting is done, the ground has stopped moving, and I can see the lay of the land.

I hope to stay in Toronto for a few years if I can. I like the city and see it as full of opportunity. But there is also a part of me that feels the world beckoning. It is a world given to me by all the love and support I have had in my life, and I think, it will be a strong world. Even the earth moves.