Alexander Ovechkin signed a one year deal with the Washington Capitals.
I was doing my normal doomscrolling, learning all about NHL free trade frenzy and Taylor Swift’s wedding, when I saw the news that Alexander Ovechkin had signed a one year deal with the Washington Capitals. After seeing the news, I did what I had done for so many years; I dialled my mom’s number to tell her and also tell her how he wasn’t handsome, he looked like a weird muppet. The call said the customer I had reached had not initialized their voicemail.
The number was active. Someone was using it and hadn’t initialized their voicemail. They were possibly putting it on business cards or giving it out at bars, hoping to make a connection. Maybe it was on a resume for a job. But there was one thing that it wasn’t; it wasn’t my mom’s number anymore.
Truthfully I haven’t dialled the number in a long time. My mom’s decline was slow and by 2024, she didn’t really know how to use her phone often. It was a number I called to get that familiar message that voicemail wasn’t initialized, wishing maybe dementia wasn’t real and I could have a conversation with my mom about what to make for dinner or reality TV. But grief doesn’t care about facts or logic. It only triggers a memory that makes you want to talk to your mom about a weird looking hockey player only to remember there is no one to talk to anymore.
My mom’s passing has been an odd period of grief. I didn’t really allow myself to feel the weight of loss because I was the executor of her estate. I had to close bank accounts and pick up ashes. I had to plan memorials (with the help of my sister) and call family, and bite my tongue when I learned that family doesn’t always mean what you think, as I waited for condolences from relatives that never came. Then I threw myself into my job, into helping my husband cope with the devastating loss of his own mother, and pretending that I was fine. I was perfectly fine until Alexander Ovechkin signed a new deal with the Washington Capitals and I remembered my mom would never watch another Capitals game ever again.
My mom loved hockey. As a kid, I never liked it. It always felt like a secret thing my mom and brother did together and my sister and I weren’t welcome. As a teenager, I developed a passing interest in the Red Wings and became a goalie apologist because Chris Osgood was dreamy. In Edmonton hockey is enmeshed in our culture. Ryan Nugent Hopkins helped my kid plant a vegetable garden at his school when he was six. But it wasn’t until I became friends with a born and raised Oilers fan that I realized how much fun the sport (or how emotionally devastating) the sport could be.
Unlike me, my mom always loved hockey. She named my brother after a Maple Leafs Goalie. When I was a kid, Wendell Clark was her guy. She was a ride or die Leafs fan, and told me stories about when she followed their farm team to every game for an entire season with her friends before she met my dad. However, over the years, she stopped being a fan of a team and just enjoyed the game until Alexander Ovechkin became her guy. He was THE hockey player. She read books about him, knew every stat, and collected Ovechkin merch. All of it played into silly fan superstitions that we would tease her about and when the Capitals won the Stanley Cup, she sat there drinking a bottle of Baby Duck wine and celebrating like it was the greatest day of her life. My mom didn’t drink; she had one rum and eggnog every Christmas and one pina colada at Mother’s Day brunch. But here she was pounding back glasses of the world’s shittiest Prosecco (while clamming it was champagne) and breaking my good wine glasses with joy. It was that serious.
One of the last things we did together before her stroke was go to a preseason game with my kids. My son was terrified of the Oilers mascot and ran away like he saw a fire. We ate popcorn. We cheered. She didn’t ask me when I was going to meet someone because kids need a father figure. She didn’t criticize my hair or tell me I worked too much. We just had fun. We finally had a common interest that we enjoyed, even if we didn’t like the same teams. But most of all, she was excited that she finally had an interest we could talk about, that is, until she couldn’t talk about anything anymore.
In the early days of grief, I didn’t feel any. I felt relieved. My role as caretaker was over. But those turned to anger when I saw that life just went on without any condolences, or baskets of muffins that people send in the wake of death. There was just a call from a doctor and unreturned messages and voicemails from extended family, as they carried on with their day like nothing of note happened.
There was anger that my mom’s ashes were spread on my father’s unmarked grave that hadn’t been visited. The anger that comes from feeling like someone whose life was complex and difficult was gone, and it felt like the universe moved and no one noticed. So I moved along and threw myself into my life, all while feeling guilty that I wasn’t grieving like I should. After all, my mother in law had passed and my husband needed me. He was struggling and I wanted him to be okay. My kids were grief stricken, wondering why the Earth just kept spinning as if the little old lady who made Pillsbury cookies with them while she yelled at the Blue Jays was gone.
In this space, I sit in a weird limbo, waiting for calls from aunts and uncles that will never ever come telling me “I’m sorry your mom died and you did a good job taking care of her for so many years. I’m sorry she missed your wedding. She would have loved it I’m sure.” But also wondering how one day you’re sitting at Rogers Place celebrating your daughter’s birthday, and then just a few short years later, you’re unable to go to your granddaughter’s graduations, the very dates you swore you had to stay healthy enough to attend, and gone 18 months before you even have the chance to attend your grandson’s, passing alone in the Royal Alexandra Hospital because your caretaker daughter couldn’t get there in time. That guilt settles in like an old friend I don’t want to talk to anymore. I wonder if she knew she was alone. Was it a rare moment of lucidity, aware that we couldn’t get there. Did she think we didn’t want to be there? Or was she content in her ALS induced delusions, thinking we were all still by the fireplace at a house I haven’t lived in for a long time, imagining a long ago Christmas morning or birthday with a Betty Crocker cake her grandchildren made.
I’ll never really know.
But I do know that her old Ovechkin Bleacher Creature remains on a bookshelf in a long term care facility. They begged me to let them keep it as a reminder of her after she died. The Ovechkin Funkos remain in my eldest daughter’s collection. The jersey in my youngest daughter’s closet. These once important collectibles are no longer good luck charms for games or decor for a room in a home I no longer live in. They are scraps of a person whose number has been reassigned and doesn’t know that her favourite player renewed with his team. But they exist to remind us that she existed, even if only to us.
The Misadventures of MHC 