In the last days of October 2008, six of us from across Canada had an interview with possibly the twelfth landlord we'd met in two months. The house had four bedrooms, and was just a block from Remedy Cafe. We were facing the unhappy prospect of another month homeless, and the memory of a dozen previous denials. We were nervous.
Two days after the interview, he told us we had the house. That night, he told us we didn't. The next morning, he apologized, and said we could move in on Halloween day.
We moved in and called ourselves "Monk Punks". We started sharing our home, our lives with each other, chores, and food. For the next months, we began the process of taking the dream of intentional family living and practically living it out. It was tough.
At the same time, we started trying to put our roots down in the Edmonton community. Kate and I especially new that we wanted to live our lives among the anarchists and other social activists. We through ourselves into meetings and collectives and actions as often as we could.
We began meeting as a church community on November 7. About twenty of us prayed together, ate together, shared communion, and talked about what could be. We continued to meet weekly from then on, and have been continuously learning how it is that we share church together.
In January, I began working at the L'Arche Day Program, assisting people with disabilities.
By March, we had been living together and having church community for four months, we'd all found work, Kate and I knew which activist groups we supported each week, and life had started to feel "normal". It was around this time, in the stability and routine that I hadn't experienced for well over a year by this pont, that the events that had transpired in Lethbridge really started to affect me. I was a few months away from being formally ordained, Kate and I were pastoring in a church, and I was coming back to re-examine the core of what I believed and how I practiced my faith.
During the month of March, I began seriously considering stepping back from it all, and just trying a "normal" life. I talked with Kate about just finding a house, pursuing regular careers, and pulling back from the social action scene.
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During the most normal and routine times in my life, I had made a habit of talking to my dad on the phone on a weekly basis. He loved talking on the phone, and our conversations would usually last over an hour. During the more busy or unstable times, like during moves or finals, sometimes our conversations would happen less often, maybe every three or four months.
In March last year, as my life was beginning to gain stability and routine, and as I was becoming free to be reflective and deal with my own pain, I remembered my dad, and that it had been since before our move that I'd last talked to him. During the garbage that we experienced in Lethbridge, I had hidden a lot of details from him, because I was so confused that I couldn't figure out the details myself.
I knew I wanted to talk to him, and tell him the whole story. I knew I wanted to reconnect to our weekly calls again. And I missed him. We called back and forthe during the Month of October until we finally got ahold of each other on March 30, his birthday. I told him the whole story as I've written it here. He listened and encouraged me. After I'd told him everything, and that I was soon to be ordained, he told me he was tired, and that we'd have to continue another time. I was disappointed that he hadn't talked about himself, and felt sad that I'd talked so much, but he assured me that it was okay. He said that he didn't have much to share. It was unusual for him to be done a conversation so soon (thirty minutes), and to go to bed so soon. We planned to talk again on April 8, in the evening.
That was the day that he went to the hospital. His kidneys had been failing and his heart was weak. He had a heart attack that night, and after seeing his sister, teasing the nurse, and eating an orange he died peacefully on the hospital bed.
These were the last stories I told my dad.
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