Once I have been sick for more than a week and I am still too tired and depleted to be my busy self, I start to mind travel.

The last flu in 2019, laid me out. It was a Music Festival ‘Flu, arriving with my first son’s Sappy Fest partying. Lying flat out I found myself traveling through my childhood friend’s house, room by room.

I was amazed to find that this house existed in my mind, in every detail. I found I could travel there and the memories would come to life. The dark wood siding on the wall, the smell, the light. All those details were lying dormant in my mind. 

After some time meditating on this home it occurred to me to wonder why I was there. Then I remembered that I had been left at that house, with my best friend’s family, when the rest of my family went to Expo ’67. I would have been four years old. I am assuming my memories are incredibly sharp and detailed because of the heightened emotions.

My little brain was adjusting and calculating. I remember crying alone in the living room and the mother coming to comfort me. My strongest emotion of that memory is not sadness. No, it was the interesting discovery that her attempt to comfort me, though very kind, was completely futile.

I knew I had to be nice and pretend to be comforted and that moment has always stuck with me. Her kind words and hugs, my pulling it together knowing I was on my own. A meta memory, I think, especially rooted in the mind because of being conscious of being conscious.

And what happened this time? Another case of the Music Festival ‘Flu! Another son, another festival. Another period of time contemplating life from my back.

Where did I go? This time I contemplated all the nasty ‘flus that I had experienced throughout my life. From being a child carefully tended and tucked into bed, to a college girl at my boyfriend’s place crawling from a sweaty bed to a couch and some dry blankets.

I must have had a ‘flu during the last thirty years of parenting but I don’t remember them. I tended my children’s illnesses and pushed away my own symptoms. I do remember gathering three children in the car for a trip to an emergency clinic when a few of us had a fever, including me, and my oldest had recovered but suddenly got worse again. It was pneumonia checking time, and as a mom, a ‘flu doesn’t stop you from cooking, cleaning or driving.

But now I am officially old and when I am sick, I am down and out. The house became a tip as I lay flat out. This time I remembered when I came down with the ‘flu when I was 16 years old after my 21 year old sister jumped off the Granville Bridge in Vancouver.

My mom, dad and sister and I were all living together in my mom’s apartment in Vancouver, preparing for Christmas. Normally I lived in Victoria with my dad and my younger brother so this was odd and I do remember the unpleasant effect of trying to pretend my parents were a loving couple when they had been separated for some time by then.

There was an underlying stress and my sister, just recently released from three months in a psychiatric unit, overweight and miserable, was feeling it too. I had been trying to cheer her that very afternoon, talking about going Christmas gift shopping. But that night she went for a walk and then later we were visited by two police officers who took us to the hospital where my sister lay, broken but not dead, and not happy about it.

I do remember that my parents both went into shock at the policeman’s words, they went quiet. But I ran around the apartment crying and screaming, why? Why? She ended up on a ward, her fellow patients old and dying. I spent a lot of time there but first I got the ‘flu.

I remember curling up on my mom’s couch in her apartment, under a window, as cold as can be. And then spending a few days there, covered in quilts.

It felt wrong, somehow, to need to be cared for, when our family was going through the trauma of my sister’s failed suicide attempt but it was undeniable, I was sick. I was allowed to be sick.

Looking back as an older parent, I see that it was a gift for all of us, for me to have an illness that could be cured by love and hot drinks.

When I am very sick I always remember my mom. Her cool hand brushing the hair off my forehead. Her comforting bustling around, the sound of her working in the house. Her loving tending. Does she come back and visit?

Every day I feel a bit better. But I feel touched by eternity, deep raw emotions have been exposed. I can’t help but wonder, why am I here? And simultaneously, I am here.