Rose's Cantina

Embed from Getty Images "A fatherless girl thinks all things possible and nothing is safe." -- Mary Gordon Over the years, I've tried to make sense of it, my father dying when I was just a baby. Losing a father, or mother, at an early age is like losing a limb. There are fixes, a re-marriage of the single parent perhaps, but step-parents are prosthetics, nothing more. The limb will always be missing, you will always feel that hand, and there will always be a constant ache, phantom pain, perhaps, that never goes away. Fatherless women, the sensitive ones at least, are often seen by other relatives as attention-seeking victims who act out in public and embarrass the family. That is what I was called last week by a relative who also called me "crazy". "You always have to be mad about something," he said when I railed against someone who had written erroneously in my Ancestry.ca Life Story that I was the love child of my fat...

In recent months, I've been helping to support my good friend Jennette through the end of life process, as she watched her father Jim transition to his next life after a lengthy battle with heart disease and cancer. It's been a tough road for Jennette who lost her husband Roger just two years ago, also in the month of May. She's also battled oral cancer, and has had to live with disfigurement to her face, and mouth. She's a tough cookie, our Jennette. She faced down the doctors who wanted her to have radiation which would have meant further disfigurement and the loss of her entire set of teeth. They wanted to do radiation to be absolutely sure the cancer would not return but, as they say, the cure would have been worse than the cancer, so she passed on it. Jennette and I have been friends for more than 30 years. She and Roger helped me through the debilitating loss of both my own mother, and my marriage. I lost both within a year and it nearly killed me. L...