My son is at his Dad's, recuperating. Since there is no communication between households, I have to rely on what my daughter tells me. Apparently they are looking into rehab for 6 months, which I feel is too long. Because the girlfriend's son is dealing with ongoing addiction problems, my son cannot live there. Adrian, my son, is, of course, welcome to live here, without any conditions or reservations. There is a whole network of support in Toronto for him, from my entire family, who visited him frequently in the hospital and have offered any and all help he needs, to friends of mine who have contacts in various organizations and can connect him to young men in similar circumstances, to the wonderful and loving friends he has made during his year here, as well as the various doctors and therapists he's been seeing in Toronto.

The room that became his in the basement has a separate entrance and so I could not 'keep an eye' on his comings and goings, but then it would not be 'my thing' to oversee him since he's an adult.

My approach is one based on trust. On openness. On a 'good enough' relationship where he felt he could talk to me.

For the most part, we have had this. The couple of weeks before his breakdown, he had become more distant, but then he was much busier with college, so the encroaching difficulties were masqued. The weekend of the binge, though, which began during the power blackout, he was nearly unapproachable and was obviously in emotional difficulty and would not call a distress centre. He was angry and depressed and questioned the meaning of life, how he felt trapped, how little he saw ahead in the way of positive change. The night he took the acetaminophen, I talked with him for 2 hours, and then his sister talked with him for another 2 hours, but I think he was just desperate to exit the vicious cycle of addictions that he had not been able to break out of with will power alone.

In most ways, his life was going well. As he said in hospital, he was actually happy with his life. He liked his part-time job, liked the people he worked with, liked living in downtown Toronto, liked me, his sister, and our dog, liked his classes and the people in them, and liked the women he's dated and become good friends with, and was perhaps developing a closer relationship with someone who had become more special than the rest. He wasn't sure why he wanted to end it.

I don't know why either, since I could see that he was starting to come 'into his own,' and it was exciting to see him creating a new life for himself here. He's been seeing someone at CAM-h, an addictions centre, where the philosophy is 'harm reduction,' and it wasn't working for him. In fact, and I hate to say it, he seemed better before the CAM-h therapy, something his father insisted on as a 'condition' for visiting, because Adrian had been clear of everything for half a year or so and was working on giving up his 'vices.' Rehab is 'abstinence-based' and that would be a better approach. Once he starts on a binge, it's hard to stop. And I think that's what happened - and it spun out of control, and it was the addiction cycle that tore at him, made him desperate, rather than his actual day-to-day life here.

He was so mad at its control - the addictions, what they represent, which is very personal and very complex - that control over him, the addictions: a master who was a monster from within, the addictions: what he would do to annihilate inner pain, a cycle which caused more pain than it relieved, that he would sacrifice his life to it to appease it. Like destroying the host that the virus was over-running. Short-circuiting the process by removing the victim. Or so it felt through the days I spent sitting beside him in hospital.

And perhaps he has done the miraculous thing he wanted to do. Deep within. Where it counts. A true success that no-one can guess or truly know about except him.

As I write this, I find myself bowing to my beautiful son, in recognition and honour.

Thank you to those of you who dropped by with a message of warmth, support, healing. I deeply appreciate...

My son will be discharged from hospital tomorrow or the next day, miracle that he is, and is going to stay at his Dad's for a bit until he can go into a rehab program. His Dad's is not an ideal place for him to go, and there is his Dad's girlfriend's son, who is not a good influence, but neither is my apartment ideal. While neither place is quite right or appropriate to his needs, I support his desire to go there, where he may find some inner healing from the unexpected, sudden and total rejection he received from his Dad at the turn of the year last year when he was banished and wasn't allowed to return even to pick up his belongings after the few days he was spending with me over Christmas. He slept on my couch for 4 months before we cleaned out a room downstairs. It hasn't been an ideal situation here, though we all tried to make the best of it that we could.

In many ways I felt helpless to 'fix' or 'heal' what the other household had done to him, and saw difficulties, or perhaps it's better to call them wounds, of the heart, of the spirit, that were scary and deep.

So, in a day or so I will bid him adieu with the hope that the 'other' parent may find compassion within to rescind some of what has passed so that this dear, intelligent, and sensitive young man may heal inwardly and find a greater peace in his world.

Day Four at the Hospital

Today Adrian started sleeping, finally. But in hospital they wake you for so many things! Blood pressure. Bloodwork. Glucose tolerance test. Lunch. Dinner. This test and that test. Team of doctors here. Et caetera. In the midst of terrible worry, I had to smile - last night was his worst 'crazy' night and the guy on the other side of the curtain in the room they shared was growling, so my son growled back, and was moved into a ward. He ripped his IV out twice and escaped from the ward, going up to the top floor, where everything was locked before he was caught and brought back to the ward! He was only trying to go for a cigarette, apparently. So they moved him into another semi-private and have "a sitter" with him 24/7, and as his vital signs normalize he is calming down. He's enjoying the company of the various "sitters" too I think.

I'm at the hospital about 8 hours a day, have stayed over two of the four nights he's been there. I love my son. I am grateful he is alive. I am grateful for him. He is a beautiful son, a beautiful person. The worst of the crisis has passed, and it comes with jolting awareness. I knew my son was complex, often depressed, sensitive, creative, intelligent, generous, feeling, carrying far more than he ought to, responsible, and yet I thought with the progress we've made this year, after his father kicked him out and refused to let him even go to pick up his clothes or anything else, so humiliating, this year he's spent with me, that as we worked through everything he was okay. He'd enrolled in college, was working part-time, has been dating and become close friends with some fantastic women. He seemed to be stabilizing. It's been a hard, uphill struggle for him, but something cracked. I'm not sure what. He is as fragile as are we all. I don't know how to be there for him in the ways that he needs. But I will try harder. Changes are ahead, what or how we don't yet know.

__
Cell phone photograph taken on Jan 23/09 by Natu, Adrian's sitter yesterday.

My son took an overdose of Tylenol while drunk on Sunday night. I wasn't aware of it. I didn't get him to the hospital until late Monday afternoon. I spent the night in a chair beside him at Emergency. He was still lively and talkative, though nauseous and couldn't keep even water down. They gave him the antitode, liquids, gravol.

He was admitted to hospital that night.

His condition today is much, much worse. He tells me he's drifting in and out of reality and is having trouble differentiating a dream-like state from where he is. He is barely audible on the phone.

I'll be going to the hospital after his Dad leaves this afternoon (I'm not allowed to be there, the father's girlfriend's rules), and don't plan on leaving unless he starts to improve. I'm taking a camping mat and sleeping bag and will stay beside him, hospital rules be damned.

He's 21 years old. He's a beautiful young man. Oh, my son..........

Sorry.

my son is still in hospital, his condition worsening, but perhaps today will be the day of peak and reversal and of healing back to health

Bruckner's Symphony No. 7 in E major

Listening to Bruckner's 7th, which I haven't heard in over a dozen years, not since my ex left and took Bruckner with him. It's the Jochum recording with the Dresden orchestra. Magnifique!

While I once heard Bruckner on huge speakers with booming bass, I now listen on a Tivoli hi-fi, with its inbuilt sub-woofer, and seriously, the sound is decent.

Bruckner to me is spiritual strength. We boldly reach for what we desire, and we dance with it. No light New Age-y airy stuff here. Dense, an impenetrable storm of instruments at times, like an orchestra of mountain ranges with dangerous sloping rock and deep bottomless crevices that plunge into the depths of the earth, beyond human range. And towering storms that move in a musical mass over the peaks. And the clear endless sky that opens out to the universe. At the centre, the heart that sings, with such passion!

Bruckner doesn't uplift me so much as buttress me against the oncoming tides of difficulties in their manifest forms. I find Bruckner in my bones.

Tarkovsky, in Sokurov's 'Moscow Elegy,' which I watched last night, says, of film, but it could be any art, that it is "a serious, difficult art, with great sacrifices."

Tarkovsky says, "It's you who must belong to the art, not vice versa."

Bruckner reminds me that we belong to life.

In the Dark of the Night

I

After a shower in the evening, I look for the hairdryer. A wind chill warning in effect, I don't want to walk the dog with wet hair even under a hat.

My hair is long and takes a long time to dry. I'll blow dry it a little and wait. We have time.

As I stand in the bathroom at the mirror, I disappear. The apartment is torn from the world.

I move like a blind woman through the rooms, searching for candles. At the window I do not see any lights, except distant cars. I phone my son at work. The grocery store where he works part-time has its own back-up generator.

Darkness retreats from the candle flame, leaving small globes of golden light.

II

Our apartment is heated electrically. Base board heaters line every room, and every room has its own thermostat.

My daughter keeps her room at 10C; I like mine about 22C. We keep the apartment at 17C. Tonight we plunge into frigidity together.

III

As the temperature drops, holding a candle, I look for my soft-fabric snowpants made by the Sundown lady who lived on Toronto Island and ran a cottage industry making warm bright down coats for babies, children and adults. She knew how to make coats for Canadian Winters. The snowpants are as warm and supple as they were 20 years ago when I bought them at her little store in a house on Richmond Street.

Or perhaps I am already wearing them when the lights go out, I don't remember.

IV

The first night is slightly exciting. Bravo and onward. My son insists his room in the basement is warm, and I go to sleep on my bed fully dressed, with wool socks and the snowpants, two down covers and a huge faux-fur coat from the late 1990s.

I talk to my brother who works nights for a couple of hours, till perhaps 2am.

The air is cool and yet faintly damp, like there is a cold fog.

Do I sleep? I don't remember.

V

My daughter is out of town, and I'm glad. In the morning I discover we have hot water and make a drink out of chickory and barley and a drop of table cream, something akin to coffee.

When I go downstairs to wake my son for his classes, I am overwhelmed by the smell of gas. He's alright. Upstairs my old Northern Telecom phone that's plugged into the jack works fine. I call the landlord and am on hold for 5 minutes before I hang up, find the Consumer Gas number and call and report the smell of gas. Men are here within the half hour, and they are downstairs about that long before I am asked to sign a form saying that they discovered one of the water heaters was leaking gas and so they turned off the gas and capped it.

This team only responds to emergencies; they don't do repairs. That's another appointment and another team.

Is it my hot water tank? Mine is the only new one of the four in the basement, having leaked last Summer and been replaced.

It's too dark to tell.

I don't know.

VI

The power failure and the leaking gas are two unrelated events. It is a bad day.

VII

At some point I sleep in my nest of a bed with its layers of covers. I don't know when, but wake groggily.

By then, my son is home, having missed his first class due to the bus service taking the place of the subway that isn't running due to the power failure which occurred because a major transformer station was flooded.

Flooding and heat.

Like my heart.

VIII

I buy a coffee at a Second Cup that has just had power restored. It's patchy, who has power and who hasn't.

My superintendent lives a few blocks away and though his house is in the blackout grid, he had nonstop power. He's sympathetic. He's glad I called the gas company. Because each of us rent hot water tanks for our units and pay our own heating bills, he says he can't put in an order for Consumer's Gas to come and fix the tank that was leaking, the tenant has to. We don't know who the tenant is.

In the roulette, it could be me.

IX

Fully weather-proof, I have only to put on mitts, hat and jacket to walk the dog. The neighbourhood is empty, save for a few other women walking their dogs.

It's unnatural.

X

I send updating tweets out over Twitter that go to my blog and to Facebook and friends there leave comments that come back through my email.

Obsessively, despite my cell phone being nearly dead. I siphon battery power from my netbook to feed the cell phone which gives me internet connection.

I feel dislocated from the world. Yet without lights, computers, TV, radio, the hum of electically-powered living, I am located in the world that is the world.

XI

Evening, and the inner temperature drops. The apartment is getting colder. I am wearing my full-length faux-fur coat with the hood on all the time now. I am shivering.

I call my other brother, who isn't home, and my mother, who forgets what I'm calling about and talks about the bank books she has for all of her grandchildren.

I phone a "warm house" and am told they can send a car round to pick up my dog and I right away. Thank you, but I'll wait and see later in the night. Okay, you have our number.

My son's friend phones to offer us warm refuge at her parents' place. She is very sweet. He and I are more comfortable with family, though. We'll wait for my brother, his uncle, who will surely rescue us.

He doesn't.

XII

Severe weather bulletin. A wind chill warning in effect. Temperatures are between -20C and -30C. Only 25% of homes originally affected by the power outage are still without power. That's us.

Warmth! Heat! Wherefore art thou?

Inside is like outside without the wind.

It's like winter camping, without the tent heater or the fire. Late one Christmas about 30 years ago I was in a bachelor apartment in a rooming house that had lights but no heat. The landlord and his partner had gone away and hydro cut the heat. I remember this particular type of coldness, its fog-breath. The ceiling cracked and paint fell all over the apartment that night and I broke my lease and moved within weeks. I put some of that broken ceiling paint in the journal I wrote, didn't I.

I sit on my bed wrapped in layers of clothes and the large coat under two down sleeping bags, my dog in a fleece coat beside me. I'd be gone if it wasn't for the dog, to a friend's or family or even a coffee shop. My breath is foggy.

My son will not leave. I am determined to stay, too. I buy a thermos-carafe of coffee while he picks up pizza. We eat by candlelight. He says he's tired and makes his way downstairs. I don't want him down there and to his protestations insist I will check on him later.

XIII

I only know this. I struggled and then lapsed into meditation, deeper and deeper, intoning a mantra, finding layers of calm beneath the water flooding the transformer station, finding what I'd forgotten, when, flash, the lights blinked on as if they'd never been off. The world began. Again.

___
When a Hydro crew arrived at the Dufferin transformer station, a relay station that turns high voltage electricity into usable energy in our offices and homes, they discovered dangerous flooding. The station was filled with water up to knee level and rising. They immediately cut power to 100,000 homes in Toronto. Power was restored gradually over the next day or so as they pumped the station and dried the electrical components. The blackout began around 10pm on Thursday, January 15th, and power was fully restored around 9:30pm on Friday, January 16, 2009. In the last area to be restored, we were without power for nearly 24 hours, a severe wind chill warning in effect for our region throughout.