In this vulnerable, honest, beautiful memoir, award-winning writer
Charles Foran offers a brief and powerful meditation on fathers and
sons, love and loss, even as his own father approaches the end of
life.
Dave Foran was a formidable man of few words, seemingly from a different
era than his sensitive, literary son, Charlie. Among other adventures,
Dave had lived in the bush, been snow-blinded, hauled a dead body across
a frozen lake on a dog sled, dodged a bullet from a rival, and gone
toe-to-toe with a bear. Aspects of his life were like tall tales while
others were more somber and enigmatic: A decent father to Charlie and
his siblings, and a devoted husband to Charlie's mother, Dave was a
tough, emotionally distant man, prone to gruff cynicism and a changeable
mood. As Charlie writes: "He struggled most days of his life with wounds
he could not readily identify, let alone heal . . . Not only did my
father never get over what had happened to him as a boy, he didn't try.
Men usually didn't try back then. Their families just had to deal."
When Charlie turned 55, his father began a slow and, as it turned out,
final decline. And Charlie felt something he'd never imagined before: a
mysterious desire to write about his relationship with him. On the
surface, the motivation was to help lift an inchoate burden from his
father's shoulders, to reassure him that he was loved. But there was
also another, more personal motivation. "Late into the middle of my own
lifespan," Charlie writes, "sadness took hold of my being . . . I wanted
to say so frankly, never mind how glib it sounded, how uncomfortable it
made me."
In spare, haunting prose, Just Once, No More pulls on these
threads--unravelling a fascinating personal story but also revealing its
universal context (suggested by the title "Just Once, No More," a quote
from a poem by Rilke that applies to all of our brief lives). With its
skillful prose, humour, affecting intimacy, and love of life even in the
shadow of death and uncertainty, this short but very full book presents
a nuanced, moving portrait of a fond but distant father grappling with
the end of life as his son acts as witness, solace, and would-be guide
while shakily facing his own decline. What story can we tell ourselves
and those we love, this memoir asks, to withstand the insecurities of
self and the inexorable passage of time?
