End of Summer? 

End of Summer?

For my family and me, this will always be the summer my daughter died, a few days after her 16th birthday.

Katie was born severely handicapped, and she always needed a lot of nursing care just to stay fairly comfortable. Yet she had some good days, and everyone who worked with her came to recognize her personality--a bit bossy, a fighter (as she showed when she got through some severe medical crises), making her wishes known, yet sometimes curious, gazing around her, taking in sounds.

Her memorial service was about as good as it could be, as far we were concerned. We planned the music, and a minister in the Salvation Army presided. There was a good turnout.

We are still in mourning, and I guess we always will be. My wife doesn't like me suggesting that our grief is less because Kate's life was so difficult. I guess we are mourning not only her death, but her birth. As one of the books on life with a handicapped child says, you have to mourn the child you were hoping for, because this child is not that child; then, or simultaneously, do everything you can for the child who has been born. We did.

On our life with Kate, I contributed an article to this volume some years ago. As my wife says, other fathers stress the positive, the good things they have discovered through their handicapped children; then there is angry me.

Our 14-year old son starts Grade 9 (High School in Ontario). He got his Bronze Medallion early in the summer, and he was absolutely great in the way he handled his sister's death.

My wife will once again be baby-sitting at the home of two teachers. The oldest child will be in full-time kindergarten; the two younger twins are at home.

I will once again be teaching American Constitutional Law at the University of Toronto, where I got my Ph.D. in '93 after 6 glorious years as a grad student (81 to 87) and then a rather halting process of writing a dissertation while teaching. My day job continues with the Government of Ontario.

I'm trying a new textbook this year, in order to be as up-to-date as possible on cases: Mason and Stephenson, published by Pearson/Prentice Hall. One complication is that I'm going to have to refer to comparable situations in Canada every so often, and this text seems to make no mention of such things. I'll be sorely tempted to photocopy from another copyrighted textbook, such as Kommers et al, published by Rowman and Littlefield. But, to paraphrase Richard Nixon, that would be wrong.

We've had a chilly summer on the whole, and today it really feels like fall. Fall is usually the best season here, and that's what I'm hoping for again.