Margaret told me about the place near Tobermory about three years before she got sick. We were sitting at the kitchen table after supper, the kind of evening where the dishes are done and there’s no particular reason to move, and she said she’d found somewhere on the Bruce Peninsula where she could finally breathe. I remember nodding, the way you nod when someone says something pleasant that you don’t expect to come to anything.
After forty-one years of marriage I knew Margaret’s patterns, or I believed I did. She had always talked about getting away from the city the way people talk about learning a second language or taking up the cello. A pleasant thought they carry around without any real intention of acting on.
I was wrong about that. As it turned out, I was wrong about several things. Margaret Anne Kowalski was sixty-three years old when she died, and she was the most quietly capable person I have ever known.
We met in 1982 at a dinner party in Kitchener where I was working as a site supervisor for a construction company and she was teaching grade four at the local public school. She had dark hair and a way of listening that made you feel like what you were saying actually mattered. I asked her to dance even though nobody else was dancing.
She said yes anyway, which was the most Margaret thing she ever did, accommodating the slightly ridiculous gesture with complete sincerity. We built everything together. The house in Oakville, the savings, the life.
Our son Derek was born in 1986. My nephew Owen, my late brother Frank’s boy, came into our orbit a few years later when Frank passed and his mother was working nights, and Margaret treated Owen like he was hers without making any announcement about it. She packed his lunches.
She drove him to hockey practice. She showed up to his university graduation even though she was already tired in ways she wasn’t fully acknowledging. Owen was thirty-two years old when Margaret died and still had her quality of being comfortable in silence, which I found unexpectedly moving in him.
Derek had moved to Calgary in 2014 with his wife Pamela. They called on birthdays, came back for holidays, and loved Margaret in the way that people love things they see from a comfortable distance. When she got her diagnosis in 2021, they called more.
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