Plenty of Nothing

Annie Hamilton

Today (or tomorrow) is Annie Hamilton's birthday. Born March 16, 1866 in tiny Brookfield, Hamilton went on to be the first woman to graduate in medicine in Nova Scotia in 1894. (Dalhousie has an annual scholarship in her name. For about a decade she ran a practice in Halifax's North End before emigrating to China as a medical missionary in 1903 and lived there until her death in Shanghai in 1941. 

I happened on her name somewhere in my background reading about Jean Ewen and the co-incidence of name and birthplace sent me to my files. And, yes, indeed she is a very distant maternal relative (second cousin, fourth remove). Not so distant in time when you realize that she was ten years older than my great grandfather and grew up in the same county.

Not surprisingly there's little online information about her. The Brookfield IODE chapter is named in her honour and notes that she learned Chinese while going to Dal and used to make house call by bicycle.

A little more can be gleaned from Arthur J. Lindsay's Knox Church, Brookfield, Nova Scotia. A History of the Congregation. (1976). You're unlikely to find this in a library close to you but somehow I have two copies (or I did before the great book exodus of 2010), including one once owned by Franklyn Hicks (yes, Henry's brother). Though I'd take Lindsay's account with a grain or two of salt it adds some details to Hamilton's story:

Annie Isabell Hamilton was fourteen when she first became involved in Missionary work in the church. That was in 1880 when she became a collector for the Home and Foreign Missionary Society in Brookfield. As she walked the miles from house to house collecting the nickles and pennies, she may well have dreamed of becoming a Missionary to help the heathen in exotic foreign lands. In any case, she brought in $12.63, which was more than a third of all the money collected for missions in Brookfield that year.

Determined and persuasive.

And some of that determination may have been fostered by what seems to have been a difficult family situation. Her father William "Queer Bill" Hamilton was roughly 62  when he started a second family with roughly 26 year old Mary Irwin McShannick (alternately Muckleshanick) who had been married twice before and brought her eldest child Harriet into the marriage. After having five children with Mary, William "went off to New Brunswick to live, leaving the mother and the five children to manage the farm. This they did as well as they could and when 'Queer Bill' returned home several years later he was too old to farm again. He died soon after, in 1887, when Annie was twenty-one. Her mother died two weeks later." 

There's much left unsaid in that description of a complex family life and migration with William leaving the family sometime in his 70s and returning home to die in his 80s. During his absence Hamilton finished Normal school and worked as a teacher. After her parents' deaths, she helped her siblings finish their educations and maintain the farm until they emigrated to the United States.

At that point, Annie Hamilton put herself through medical school. You can find a bit more about Hamilton's medical career in Enid Johnson MacLeod's Petticoat doctors: the first forty years of women in medicine at Dalhousie. My copy is among the missing feared discarded.

Not much remains in the public record of Hamilton's life but I'm looking forward to exploring further once we're moved the Halifax. I suspect she was a formidable woman.

Heather

Looking More Carefully: Vernon Fisher

Vernon Fisher
Originally uploaded by heyther

One of the blogs I make sure I check every morning is Elizabeth's. I check because I want to read what she has to say and I check because I want to make sure she's still alive.

I started reading it because I liked her novel Zed. I've stuck around because her voice is compelling (though usually NSFW) and she makes me think about what it means for an athlete to move from figuring out how to make it onto the Olympic fencing team without a sponser to figuring out how to live, really live, in a wheelchair with a progressive, terminal, rare, and poorly understood medical condition. 

If you read Elizabeth's stuff you'll learn a lot about goth lolly culture and anime, wheelchair sports (sadly not as egalitarian as you'd expect), despair and cutting, the underbelly of the Canadian health care system, the limitations of home care agencies, disablism, memory loss, rage, and most important, determination.  (If you ask, she'll send you a labour of love and hope: a postcard that takes much effort to put together.)

What's that got to do with the photograph? The man in the wicker wheelchair: that's my great uncle Vernon.  He died the year before I was born. And since my family loves secrets, it was many many years before I learned that he had probably died of ALS and more years before this snapshot came my way. 

When I first got the photograph what I saw was the chair. Now what I see is Vernon: smiling, open, and as mischievous as he was in boyhood photographs. And in an odd, round about way, that is Elizabeth's gift to Vernon: I see him.

Heather

Back Home

Week one of vacation has passed in a blur of traveling, visiting, clearing, chatting, and waiting. Not a particularly restful time but needful things were done.

I meant to take pictures but didn't manage to drag out the camera in time to grab shots of the happy new nephew or the dancing niece or relatives or my old home town.

I spent most of the week clearing out my mother's house, getting it ready for sale. She moved into an apartment with a better support system in November but the house was still full. It's a small, post-WW II house, about 1200 square feet with a full attic and a full basement.

Exactly how full? Well, we filled a 12-foot dumpster and the house still wasn't empty when I left. Somewhere over the last 4 or 5 years, frugality turned into hoarding. And hoarding coupled with memory problems meant that every nook and cranny was stuffed.

Some of it was easy to deal with: twenty years of nearly empty paint cans, broken and ancient appliances, empty cardboard boxes, empty bottles, packages and bottles of stale food, years and years of paid bills and receipts.

Some of it was odd: cracker boxes stuffed randomly amid the linen, caches of sanitary napkins, kitchen objects wrapped in tinfoil.

Some of it was smelly: cheese left on top the fridge, butter left on the the counter, and used kitty litter bagged up in a corner.

Much of it was sad: Bag after bag of fabric and sewing supplies, piles of craft supplies and projects for herself and her grandchildren, hundreds of reference photographs for her paintings. Each object represented a plan, a hope, a possibility. All that hope is gone now and that's the hardest part. Not the sorting out of family heirlooms and memories but the discarding of projects she'll never be able to finish.

She still thinks of herself as a person who can paint and sew and still has plans to make more art, more clothing, a new home. But the dementia has taken away much of her visual understanding and her understanding of spatial relationships. She's only partially aware of this and so her plans go on even though she can't thread a needle, draw shapes, follow a pattern, or easily manipulate tools like TV remotes or coffee makers.

She was a fiercely independent person and doesn't and can't understand why she is thwarted by the objects around her. She's much diminished. Her bouts of sadness and frustration come and go with her attention span. We hope for a long plateau before the next inevitable set of declines and the next move away from independence.

Heather

Storm Stayed

We're storm stayed. Stuck, absolutely stuck inside. Well, sort of. We do have snowshoes but a soft chair and a little nippy sweetie (aka Bailey's) is far more interesting than figuring out where we're going to put all the snow once it stops blowing around. While the sight of a neighbour skiing down the street makes me happy, the sight of another one using a broom as a pretend golf club is worrying. Cabin fever has struck early and, obviously, he needs another nippy sweetie.

I've been holding up the nothing side of this blog very handily don't you think? I could, I suppose, deploy a random list to fill up the nothingness, a shaggy list of things semi-accomplished. I'm too chicken to actually check how long it's been. Okay. I checked. Two and a half months.

In late September my mother had a health crisis that's rendered me silent. For the last two and a half months I've written nothing and read very little. I've spent lots of time on the phone with her, with family members, with doctors and nurses. I've travelled hundreds of miles there and back by train and somehow over the course of the journey stopped reading, stopped writing.

My mother is going through one of the most difficult transitions in her life, a transition that she doesn't fully understand, can't fully understand. The loss of her short-term memory has taken away her art at the time when she needs it most. Her failing memory and a sudden plunge into dementia has taken away her home, her car, and her independence.

As she settles into a new apartment and mourns the loss of her self, we're moving toward a new normal. There's great sadness here and little hope for improvement. I hope for slow progression, kind nursing care, and peace amid the losses that accumulate.

Heather

My Favourite Chicken Picture

Donald looks very pleased with himself.  The chicken looks calm.  My mother and aunt look solicitous, most likely of the boy since they didn't like the chickens.

The man taking the picture, I've recently learned from my mother, was probably laughing.  Vernon, it turns out, was a bit of a joker.

Heather