Since I can remember I have been affected and exposed to the concept of death. It was about 1950 when I was 8 that my mother took me to an open casket funeral next door. The young man of the family had crashed at a level train crossing on the train while riding his motor scooter. I saw a face that was all bandaged.

At about the same time some neighbours across the street won the lottery. For many years I thought that only neighbours ever died or won the lottery.

It was in 1966 that my almost uncle Leo Mahdjubian called me at my office at the US Naval Advisory Group where I was a conscript of the Argentine Navy seconded to a US Naval Captain. My uncle said, “Alexander your father kicked the bucket today on Calle Monroe and was taken dead to the Hospital Pirovano. You will have to go to the police station tomorrow to sign some documents." This I did but I was astounded when the policeman at the desk told me that the dead man’s son had already signed the documents. It was then that my mother’s story that I had a half-brother was corroborated.

That evening I was called by the Police Sergeant who took my father to the hospital. He said that he had been a friend and he took the liberty to empty my father’s pockets. He had a large sum of money  that he had accumulated so that he could bribe a general to send me back to my mother in Mexico. With that money, this peniless conscript paid for my father's funeral.

Death was not always of the human kind. As a little boy I remember well my mother going to the garden in the evenings with scissors and a lit candle. She would slice slugs.

In our Athlone Street garden in Kitsilano, I started doing that in the late 80s. Those nasty slugs were chewing holes into my hostas. But I soon squirmed at this action and simply sprayed household ammonia in the evenings under the hostas. The slugs would die without further nasty action.

In the last few years in my Kitsilano, and especially since Rosemary died on December 9, 2020, I have become a pseudo-Budhist. I simply let the slugs eat my hostas. Insecticide of all kinds is prohibited in Canada. When I see little bugs on my roses I just spray them away with my hose.

Of course, at my age of 82, it is plainly obvious that I am waiting for that separation of me from this planet. I think of death a lot and try to figure out what oblivion would feel. That is obviously a contradiction in terms.

A few days ago when I went to see my cardiologist I saw the remains of a dead rat on the sidewalk. In my new approach to death I thought that this was somehow a vision of no respect for death. The rat was alive at one time. I am alive; my slugs in the spring will be alive. I think we have an obligation to show respect and the carcass of the rat was inelegant. It almost felt like seeing a person lose all their clothes and being seen naked without any recourse.

The rat's death was a "personal" death. On the sidewalk it became a sight for everybody. That was not right.