Leaving, on a jet plane
To build a new life, you have to begin by dismantling some of the old one. The dream of retiring to France—or anywhere else—can't begin until you start sifting through all your STUFF
Leaving is rarely a simple exercise. Even packing for a day-trip can involve dozens of moving parts (pun intended), so when you’re arranging to leave for months, years, or for good, you are both building a new life and dismantling your old one.
My father began dismantling his own life decades before his death from covid in April 2020. For years, every time my four siblings or I came home to Dollard des Ormeaux for family events, my father would have packages of DVDs, books, old photos, and mementoes of every description that he would wheedle us to take home. He was downsizing, tho he didn’t call it that. I think he was trying to both prepare us for his eventual death and to spare us from having to sort through the memory chest that all these objects represented.
As he got older, the giveaways became his tools and furniture as he slowly emptied the home the Wheelands had lived in since 1963. The suburban split-level bungalow was too much to handle now, so he sold it and moved with my mother to a residence for “independent seniors.” Then, when my mother’s “independence” was deemed by the residence to be impaired because her arthritis prevented her from using the stairs during a fire drill, she was served an eviction notice by management and had to find a new home. Although my father was still very much autonomous, he of course chose to stay with my mother in their next home, the now infamous Herron CHSLD (long-term care home) in Dorval, Québec. So, once more, much of the remaining furniture was handed down or sold as my parents’ new home shrunk to the size of a studio apartment.
My father’s example has been haunting me of late. I remembered the pleasure I had had as a kid looking though my dad’s high school yearbooks and the pictures of him on the football team and the wrestling squad and the mentions of his place on academic honour rolls. They showed me a side of my father I would never have imagined, especially since he was not the kind of person who boasted about his accomplishments.
So I began wondering about not just WHAT I would leave behind, but WHY? I have clippings of articles I wrote going all the was back to my first column in my high school newspaper. I have numerous full issues of newspapers I have written for, edited and even published, and I even have bound volumes of the entire first year of Hour, the alternative newspaper I worked for in the early ’90s.
But I have no children who would gain insight into who their father was through these preserved treasures, these records of what “Dad” thought, fought for and cared about. No children to spare from going through my stuff after I pass, just four siblings who are so close in age that the Vegas odds are pretty even on which of us will pass first. Or last. Not that I’m planning to go anytime soon soon, but when you lose both your parents in a year, it really brings home the certainty of death and the need to prepare for your own.
So when I started exploring the germ of an idea that maybe, just maybe, I might retire to France, it became the impetus for a major downsizing. If I was going to do it, it would force me to examine everything I had acquired in life and make decisions about what to keep, sell, give away or trash. Better yet, it would relieve whichever one of my siblings was later tasked with going through my stuff from having to sift through it all to figure out what was worth keeping. Instead, souvenirs would be all sorted into a single box or two that could either be careful examined (sister Barb, the family historian) or tossed straight in a blue bin.
It was these preparatory steps that slowly but inevitably made my French daydream come alive. What next? What would I do with my furniture? What about my apartment, which I love and which, after 10 years of lease renewals, remains well below market rents? Why not sublet it fully furnished? Better yet, leave all the appliances, cutlery and dishes, just like an Airbnb? So that’s what I did. And once the 9-month sublease was signed, staying was no longer an option. I had dismantled enough of my life that I was now free to travel, but not so much that I couldn’t return if it didn’t work out.
I have no idea what’s going to happen with me in the next nine months. Although Toulouse, France, is the main attraction, the idea behind this trip is to explore various parts of Europe and North Africa, get to know its landscapes and its people, to go wherever the winds of fate push me, gently or otherwise. I have a skeleton of a plan, but also a firm belief that all good plans change, that adaptability is more valuable than predictability. “No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy,” said Sun Tzu Helmuth Karl von Moltke (thanks, David Hunt, for the fact check).
What I know for certain is that I’m getting on a plane today and landing in Toulouse tomorrow. Hopefully there won’t be any enemies waiting to upset my plans, just new friends ready to share their culture and kindness with a sixty-something soul seeking to build a second life from scratch.
Thanks for coming along on the ride.