We could still play pool, my father and I. Even after he lost the ability to remember passwords, to navigate his email, to take his pills; even after he started to have outbursts, to see plots forming around him like shadows, to muse aloud about murdering those who were after him; after he attacked his sister and his sister again and then two men in the middle of the night, confused and angry and lost. He was losing his mind in drips, in jumps, and you could see it leaving. Occasionally he could, too. But pool was simple, quiet, serene. There was a table in his retirement home in Victoria, B.C., and my father was the only one who played. When he got there other residents tried, but it wasn’t fun for them. My dad used to hustle a little in university, among other places — “my misspent youth,” he would say with a grin. You could hobble over with a walker and hold a cue in your shaking hands, and my dad would place his reading glasses on an end table and he would quietly, pleasantly beat your ass. And when I visited, more than anything, we would play pool. He would, most of the time, beat my ass. That was before it really got bad.I think I remember the day my father left us when I was 5. He was packing up his things in the bathroom and I asked, why do you have to go? Before that I remember sitting at the top of the stairs in the slanted light from downstairs, listening to him and my mother argue. My brother Brian, two years younger, remembers hearing them yell angrily in another room. There was more stony silence than anything, apparently, and maybe that’s why those are among our earliest surviving memories. We were the first kids we knew whose parents got divorced. We weren’t special, but it could feel that way.So we visited his Burnaby basement suite every second weekend. Henry Arthur was a professor at BCIT, a technical institute, then a dean, and eventually the head of their international education program. He worked a lot, t ...
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