tuck in, tick down
It has been really hard for me to decide what to write for my first story here. It has been so lovely reading all of these memories from when Dan was healthy, and I thought I should be sharing from that time too. And while I have lots of those stories (and I’ll share them eventually), what I keep coming back to when I think about Dan are our last few months together. He was very sick — but that’s not what I remember most about that time. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I realize how much Dan was really still himself until the end. Maybe not in body, but in mind and how he made people feel. How he made me feel.
The thing that keeps coming up in these stories is how Dan went out of his way to make people feel special, throughout his life. What is crazy is how he still had the energy to do this, even at the very end. In the last few months of Dan’s life, I was living at his house a couple weeks on, a couple weeks off (switching on and off with my fellow house mom, Alanna Youngblood). When I would arrive from Vancouver, I would always feel a little bit overwhelmed and useless — actually, incredibly useless, because how do you help in a situation like this?
I started to make breakfast and bring it upstairs to Joc and Dan in the mornings. It was nothing special — I do not cook and am pretty bad at it, but I couldn’t think of anything else to do. Dan eventually started requesting his daily “Frenches” — a strange and precise take on French toast topped with a layer of peanut butter, then a thin layer of jam, lots of maple syrup (it was never enough), and finally, yogurt dolloped just so. I took this job VERY seriously. Not only because I selfishly needed to feel like I was doing something in this situation that we all had no control over, but because Dan said it was what his mom made him as a kid. His brother Thomas later told me he had never heard of this recipe. True to Dan’s dry, long-form sense of humour, he was fucking with me. He knew how seriously I was taking my “role” and liked to watch me (more than once) panic-text my little sister to bring me plain yogurt IMMEDIATELY because Dan couldn’t have the wrong dollop-to-toast ratio. And while he was fucking with me and was thoroughly amused, in classic Dan fashion, his joke was also doing me an incredible kindness: One morning, I remember being told my Frenches was not needed that particular day. He just said, “I don’t feel like it today.” I seriously remember feeling disappointed — had I stopped making it well? Was I doing a bad job? How was I going to be useful to him now? DO THEY EVEN WANT ME HERE? I didn’t verbally express any of this, but honestly, they were real thoughts (maybe an overreaction, but it was a high-stress time and ALL I wanted to do was make Dan feel better). But I think he could tell, because he said, “tomorrow we’ll have Frenches.” And then… he asked for it every day after that. Looking back now, I know he was doing it for me. He asked for it even when he couldn’t eat it anymore, feeding most of it to Nash and leaving the rest on the plate. Dan was just making sure I still felt special and needed. He did this in so many ways.
The first time I helped him get in bed, he told me I gave the best tuck-ins — and then he asked for them every night. When I was in Vancouver, he would send “tuck in tick down” (TITD) updates — a countdown he made for when my next visit was scheduled. Always taking shots at Jocelyn’s weaker tuck-ins that he was having to endure in the meantime. He sent me proper lifting technique videos so I could keep up my strength for my next visit when he needed help moving around. He asked for me to give him regular facials, even though I once gave his pale, sensitive skin an allergic reaction and my tools were sometimes too cold. But more than just making up these little jobs so I could feel needed, he just expressed love and care constantly.
When I was feeling like I should give him and Joc some alone time because I literally NEVER left their house, he would text me while I was out with friends and ask when I would be home. He gave me a onesie of his to wear during our nightly cocktail hour, since him and Jocelyn both had one. I loved those nights where the three of us ordered food, watched terrible movies, and then he would sneak an on-the-lips kiss when I went for his cheek at the end of the night. He made us laugh constantly.
I didn’t know his friends very well prior to this, and they were around a lot. Now I know them and love them — they are exactly the kind of people someone like Dan would have in his life. But I’m a little shy, and in the beginning, it could be kind of exhausting to be around so many people I didn’t know all the time. And so often, when I was sitting quietly in the same room as them all, Dan would text me. Sometimes with a “is it cocktail hour yet?”, or asking if I wanted to partake in his weed pen that we would occasionally sneak mid-day, and sometimes just sending a random funny gif (he had a knack for finding especially good ones). It makes me cry thinking about how sweet this is — Dan surrounded by his friends there to see him and taking a second to make me feel like I was supposed to be there.
He made the effort to comfort the people around him throughout such an incredibly difficult time for him. And he did such a good job of it, that I am able to look back at those months and feel so thankful for all the laughs and good times and lessons he gave me. If he did this for me, I can’t imagine what he did for his close friends and family. I feel so, so lucky to have had that time with him, and I will never forget it.
I love you, Dan.
-Murray