Tag: cancer

Remembering Lyn van Lidth de Jeude

A woman with long straight white hair in a dark brown knee-length sweater and black pants, stands looking down and smiling at a golden retriever, who is also smiling, sitting on her feet, where she stands in her garden. There are forget-me-not flowers all around her feet, and in her hands she is holding a bouquet of raspberry-pink and violet rhododendron flowers, and parsley leaves.
Lyn in her garden with her dog, Kalea.

Our mother and life partner, a lover of song and beauty. A singer, a gardener, wife, mother, grandmother, friend, teacher, and creator and spreader of love, died peacefully on September 18th 2024, five months after receiving her brain tumour diagnosis.

Lyn van Lidth de Jeude helped raise countless children in her 40 year career as an early childhood educator, infant development consultant, and music therapist. Through her dedication and constant love for every child in her care, Lyn worked tirelessly to ensure that they all started off with a strong foundation.

While you may not have guessed it, Lyn was born in Daytona Beach Florida, and a piece of her identity was her deep ranching roots in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Her father Horatio Ham, an engineer, moved the family of 5 kids many times until the final move north to West Vancouver. Once here, Lyn attended West Van High and Capilano College ending with a degree in music therapy.

Music was always a fundamental part of her life. From her many many years with the Vancouver folk song society to her participation in Bowen Island choirs (the Madrigals, Song Roots, and the Community Choir). She also instilled the love of music in her children and shared her songs whenever she could.

Lyn and her husband Everhard moved to Bowen Island in 1978. As she engaged in life with her young family, Lyn quickly grew to love her community and developed deep friendships, choosing to see her friends as family and treating them as such.

In 1993, the family moved to the interior, where Lyn worked as a music therapist and infant development consultant in Kamloops. Lyn and Everhard returned to Bowen Island in 2006, where Lyn again joined the Bowen Children's Centre, with a desire to give back to her own community.

Throughout her life it was most important to love, help, and respect people who needed it. From volunteering at the Nook or the Recycling Depot, the Garden Club or the Conservancy, or delivering food for the Legion, or the countless other community endeavours, Lyn loved to help.

She is survived by her family and many, many friends.

Shortly before she died, Lyn dictated the following message, which she asked us to pass on to her loved ones after her death:

For the people I love,
My time is finished, now. I would like you to know how much you mean to me. I have appreciated the connections and love we’ve shared. I hope you will continue to find beauty in the world.
Lyn

A beautiful woman with long straight white-blond hair sits on a porch, playing a small acoustic guitar. She's looking down at her fingers forming the chord. She's wearing a pale lilac dress and a pair of glasses. It's a sunny day.
Lyn playing guitar on her own porch.

More links, videos and photos for those who might want to spend some time remembering the beauty that was Lyn:

Obituary from the Vancouver Folksong Society: Remembering Lyn van Lidth de Jeude

A man with short stand-up brown hair in a plaid shirt sits holding a baby on his lap, and she's holding a dolly on her own lap. He is smiling at the camera; she is laughing and pointing at the camera. Wearing a little white baby dress.
Lyn on her father's lap.
A black and white photo of a band on stage. Woman on left plays bass violin, woman in the middle is Lyn and stands not singing at a microphone, waiting as the man on the right, with a large acoustic guitar, appears to be taking a solo. Lyn is wearing a loud printed dress, 60's style.
Lyn performing with her band in the late 60's.
A young woman in a blue jacket is riding a horse in the wind on a beach with large ocean waves crashing in the background.
Lyn in the early 1970's
A woman in a white printed blouse and dark orange pants sits on a low seat in a living room, singing and playing guitar. She has long brown hair falling down her shoulders and back, and is pregnant.
Lyn, pregnant with Emily in 1975.
A woman holds a young child on her lap, reading a book. THey are both visibly laughing because they are reading Little Bear's Visit, the child's favourite book.
Lyn reading Emily's favourite story, where the gnome loses his shoes and they come to find him! Watch Lyn reading a funny catalogue with her grandson, here: https://youtu.be/WBWCPy9LpXM
A woman sits on a dock with seaside bluffs in the background. She is laughing at the camera, and holding a little laughing boy ontop of their big fluffy dog.
Lyn, baby Adrian, and Chis Chila.
A wild-looking yard with a line full of laundry on the left and a makeshift shed on the right. In the shed, a man and woman stand slaughtering two rabbits, which are hanging from strings at the edge of the shed. The man is handing the kidneys to the couple's black fluffy dog, who is sitting politely, waiting.
Lyn and Everhard on their first homestead, slaughtering rabbits. Everhard is feeding the kidneys to Chis Chila.
A woman with short grey and white hair stands on a handmade footbridge in the Swiss alps, smiling at the camera because the love of her life is behind it.
Lyn in Switzerland, smiling at the love of her life, Everhard, behind the camera. 1999
A man and a woman in winter clothing and hats, standing in cross-country skis on a snow-covered frozen lake.
Lyn and Everhard skiing in the interior.
A woman stands bending over her two grandchildren, hugging them. Her long white hair tumbles down over them both. The boy has long brown hair and looks safe and happy under her hair, where she's kissing his head. The girl, with long blond hair, is peeking out from her grandmother's white hair, and smiling.
Lyn's love for her grandchildren was perfect. This photo was taken at her retirement party. Watch Lyn singing traditional Canadian folksongs with her granddaughter's class, here: https://youtu.be/LQ7VeLUyZz8
A woman in a large garden stands on a tall folding ladder, measuring a huge sunflower, that was over 13 feet tall. It hangs over her and the flower is bigger than her head.
Lyn measuring her award-winning sunflower that was over 13 feet tall!
A woman standing singing at a microphone, with a beautiful open smile!
Lyn singing a traditional ballad at the Princeton Traditional Music Festival. Watch Lyn singing at the PTMF, here: https://youtu.be/VrBNiLGm_0Q
A man with short dark blond hair and a very short beard, wearing a black cartoon t-shirt and a blue ribbon, stands with his arm around his mother. She is shorter than he is, and has long straight white hair, glasses, and is wearing a pink sleeveless shirt. They are both smiling happily.
Adrian and Lyn on Adrian's 40th birthday.
A man with a short grey and white beard and glasses sits smiling in a pale yellow collared shirt, looking to the left. A woman with long white hair pulled back looks at him with her hand held partially in front of her face. She is smiling and really her whole face beams with love and affection for this man, who is her husband.
Everhard and Lyn at friends' wedding celebration.
A woman sits at the front of a canoe, paddling. She has long white hair pulled back into a bun, and is paddling on her left side. The man who took the photo, from the back of the canoe, was her husband and the love of her life.
Lyn paddling in BC's interior. Photo by Everhard.
A scene with an orange Kobota tractor hauling a black utility trailer with foot-high sides. A young long-haired man in a grey hoodie is driving the tractor, but turned to the camera, smiling. In the trailer an adult man with short dark blond hair, jeans, and a grey sweater, is smiling, with his hands holding a smiling golden retriever. A woman in a blue rain jacket with long straight white hair stands at the side of the trailer, and is lifting the dog's floppy ears up so it looks like she's flying. This is a happy family portrait on a work day.
Adrian, Lyn and Taliesin with the happiest dog in the world, Kalea.
Two woman are partially obscured by a large red currant bush, where they are harvesting berries. They are leaning, heads close together. The woman on the left has dark brown hair pulled into a bun, and the woman on the right has white hair pulled into a bun.
Emily and Lyn harvesting red currants together.

Listening for Birds: Cancer Is Not a Journey

A small graphite-drawn Swainson's thrush is swept up in a mess of green, white, and graphite swooshes. Abstract painting by Emily van Lidth de Jeude
“Go and Make Yourself Content, My Love” (detail).
Swainson's thrush in my mother’s garden, to the tune of the Unquiet Grave.
Painted with acrylic, graphite and coloured pencil, by Emily van Lidth de Jeude.

I was walking down from my parents' house to mine, over the crest of their driveway where the wind blows steady. Not like the rest of the property, through which it tumbles this way and that, scatters just a few leaves, or bursts out of a single storming fern. Over the crest of the hill at the top of my parents' driveway, the wind passes smoothly and calmly, sometimes crisp and smelling of leaves, sometimes damp with the weight of snow and sometimes full of the heaviness of summer and dragonfly wings. I've walked here alone and with my children after Christmas dinner, my heart and belly and arms full of treasures. I've walked here holding my chest against hidden sobs when I couldn't be what the world wanted of me. I've walked on my parents' driveway even when they lived in a different house and I visited rarely, and always it has been a place of the wind and the gathering and freeing of perception and feelings. A place of reckoning or accepting. Not that night.

I was walking down from my parents' house on the evening we came home from our first trip to the Cancer Clinic, two weeks after the sudden and unexpected removal of a stage-four tumour from my mother's brain. I was walking down that driveway and there was no wind. The driveway felt flat, although it's not, and it's rocky, but the rocks were dead that evening, which they never are. The April grasses and blossoming trees were bereft of colour. Impossibly grey. There was no birdsong, no frogsong, not even the sound of leaves, and when I looked at the hillside I thought it might just go away, if my mother died. When my mother dies. She keeps reminding me: "We all have to die, sometime." But I don't want those words. That was one of the many logical thoughts that evaporated when the doctor told us we won't be returning from this trip. And we stared blankly into the empty air and our tears were silent.

I find the word "journey" as people use it for cancer absurd. We use it like we can pack for a trip and just take in the ride. But it's not that kind of ride.

Glioblastoma. Someone should make a horror carnival ride called Glioblastoma. You get in a little comfy bucket seat and it chucks you out into the sea. Then down a vortex you go, into a drain where you almost drown but NO! You're not allowed to drown! There are things to live for and places to see and you might have a few days or weeks or months or years of good life, so LIVE!!! And you can't feel your right side, and you can't find all the words that were here just yesterday, but now more than ever, you want to, need to LIVE!! So you come out of the vortex on the chemo train, where you get whipped back and forth over trestle and track without warning or reason through whacking slaps of sheer terror and poofy clouds of deep love and acceptance: A bird? NO! Slash! You're going to die! Slash! Maybe not so fast–Slash! Everybody is trying to help you–Slash! You're so strong–Slash!–Take some more pills–Slash! Love, love love–Slash! 

Love can't save you and everybody's talking to you like a child–Slash! Now you're the wise one–Slash! Let's finish your sentences for you–Slash! We could get an ice-cream!

Slash! You get to meet the guy who will administer your death–Slash–but only when you want him to–Slash–Be GRATEful!!

Slash!

Nobody wants you to die!–Slash–Let's go shopping!–Slash

Why are you so tired?           Slash.

Slash. 

You fall out from the carnival ride one sunny morning, and you smile up at the sky and look for birds. 

But there aren't any. 

My mother loves birds. My whole life has been decorated with her hushed exclamations of "oh! A warbler!" and "Did you hear the snow geese go by this evening?" My mother hears things many of us don't notice, like the pips of babies and the tone of ducks that tells her whether they're coming or going. When my father gently delivered a helpless baby owl into my childhood, my mother raised it on chopped liver and caught mice until it grew up and flew to the trees. But she heard its voice separate from the other owls, and she answered it, and taught us to make the hungry-teenage-owl call, too: Psssshhht! Pssssssshhhhhhhttt! That owl and its offspring came back to visit us for decades.

Terminal cancer is a strange thing. We want a timeline. Something to hang a hat on. To work with. To put in the calendar, and at the same time we want to live in the moment and not have to plan for death or even how to visit with all the loved ones. But just to sit and hear the birds. Except the chaos of medical interventions, social supports and emotional upheaval means not a minute exists of just. Peace. 

Until one day, we can't take the chaos anymore. Out of necessity we ignore the forms we're supposed to be filling out and decline the offers of new prescriptions, new dosages, delivered meals and all the services we know are needed. One day we just need to be.

This week I saw my father's eyes in a rare moment of stillness. They used to shine with his intensity; they used to sparkle and shoot beams of aliveness. But recently they've looked tired, and there were big wide tears balanced on his lower lids and he was just making a sandwich. I don't hear so much as I see, and I am starting to see again. I saw my brother's cheeks, this week, taut with small lines of agony as he pulled me into his arms and didn't let go. As he asked if he can take our mother to have her broken arm looked at. Cancer is not a journey. It's a horrible carnival ride, and sometimes we catch glimpses of the world, as we spin. Sometimes, also, we catch glimpses of the beauty that brought us here to begin with; that holds us up through the fear and the changes we didn't see coming. My parents walked out, hand in hand, today, to look at the blossoming of the world they share.

And I began to hear the birdsong, this evening. The teen-aged ravens are pillaging the robins' nests, to a great outcry, as you can imagine. We thought the black-headed grosbeak that my mother says only comes for a short time every spring had left, but it's been singing again. The wrens and towhees are hopping in the bushes, until they flit out to the pine, to make their plans. The offspring of our owl are impressing people along the trails, these days. And for some reason the flickers keep sitting around on the ground. My father says get the aphids out of my apple tree, but I can't reach them and we both know that's OK. Bats are out, tonight, delighting my peripheral vision. And as I walk up over the crest of my parents' driveway this evening, I hear the nighthawks dropping on their prey, all around me. The wind is warm, and it's summer now, and my parents are just watching a movie with a couple of mosquitoes like it's a normal evening. Just living this incredible life in an incredible world, and learning to step off the carnival ride and hear the birdsong.