We’re sitting, cooped up inside Elsie’s newish apartment, part of a larger assisted-living complex she moved to after parting with the old family home and cottage over the course of the last year or so.

“Not the best time to be unloading real estate, Barnaby,” she told me throughout the process, twisting and difficult at various points, “but absolutely necessary. For my state of mind.”

Her new digs were nice. All the mod cons. Entirely self-sufficient with the option down the road to scale back further if and when she became less self-sufficient. The shrinking of age.

Now we sat together, the three of us, Elsie’s dog, Shirley, our plus-1, and barely tolerating the forced confinement due the air quality warning in effect. Another summer. Wildfires raging in the north, raising and ravaging communities up there, sending the toxic smoke south and west on this particular day. Elsie and I looked out the window at a sickly sky, the colour of our bleak hearts. Shirley stared at us, wondering what we were waiting for.

Elsie worried about me coming over, risk making my way through the ashy, burnt tire smelling atmosphere but I assured her I was fine. I knew my way around an N95 and would take my time, keeping indoors as much as possible on my journey. It was not the kind of day either of us wanted to be trapped inside alone, ruminating over this the world we have wrought.

“I’ve been thinking about my Uncle Jerry,” Elsie told me, as we sipped our wine. Afternoon wine? Scandalous! If not now, these days, I’m figuring, when? “My mother’s brother-in-law. Jerry married my mom’s sister, Phyllis.”

“And why have you been thinking about your Uncle Jerry?” I ask. Shirley has sat down at my feet, staring hard at me. What are you going to do to break us out of here? is the look in the dog’s eyes.

“More the entire generation, I guess,” Elsie clarifies. “But Uncle Jerry specifically because he had it really tough growing up. His family poor as dirt during the Depression. Broken family. In and out of orphanages, state care. Dropped out of school early. Worked wherever he could find it. Terrible jobs. And then made his escape with World War II. Can you image, Barnaby? War as a career opportunity! That’s how bad it was for him. Ended up seeing a little bit of action too, late in the war. Italy, I think it was. Although don’t quote me.”

She takes a sip of wine and stares out into the bile dyed sky. Shirley wiggles her butt, still firmly set on the floor, nudging ever closer to me. Seriously. What are you going to do about our situation here?

“The thing is, Barnaby,” Elsie continues, “he was the nicest man you ever met, Uncle Jerry. Funny. Courteous. He worshipped my aunt, Aunt Phyllis. Loved playing cards. I remember that especially. Loved euchre. Bridge.”

“So why have you been thinking about him now?” I ask.

Elsie takes her time to respond. Long enough to make me wonder if she’d heard my question. I reach out to give Shirley a scratch of the ear, a pat on the head, but she circles her head away from my hand, wanting none of it. She wants her freedom. Nothing less.

“After the war, Uncle Jerry returned home, eventually got work at the Ford plant, met my aunt. It was all an upward trajectory for him from that point on. For a lot of my parents’ generation. Life continued to get better for them.”

I waited before responding, figuring there was another turn in the story. Because, so far, it wasn’t travelling along a particularly surprising or unique narrative arc. But she seemed to have told the gist of it as she stared out into the forbidden zone, wine glass in her hand. I did not see the connection. HaHa. A Boomer joke.

“The Greatest Generation,” is all I could think of to say, to fill the silence, for whatever reason I thought the silence needed to be filled.

Elsie shrugged off my unwarranted intrusion. Obviously I had spoken too soon. Her thoughts were unfolding in a more unhurried fashion. What’s your rush? You have someplace in particular you need to be? In this weather?

The dog Shirley is making be edgy. What can I tell you.

“Uncle Jerry died at 57,” Elsie said. “Heart attack, just sitting in his backyard, rye and ginger half-finished. Not unusual at the time. Sad. Still. That’s how it was. Don’t think it was far off the average life expectancy at the time.”

I think of Elsie’s late husband, Phillip. Technically speaking, he hadn’t made it that far. Older than Uncle Jerry when he died but still too soon according to today’s actuarial tables. Although, life expectancy wasn’t trending in an upward direction these days, I had read somewhere.

“The thing is, Barnaby,” Elsie says, turning to look at me. Shirley takes this as a positive sign, springing up to attention and focusing hard on Elsie. Maybe, just maybe, there was going to be a move outdoors in the near immediate future. “My Uncle Jerry lived long enough to die believing that everything was getting better. There had been a positive direction in his life, and it gave it purpose, meaning.”

She reaches out a hand to pat her dog but Shirley’s having none of it, remaining on high alert, ready to blow this pop stand.

“It had all been worth it in the end,” I say.

Elsie gives me a nod, a nod on the grimmer side, and turns back to look out the window.

“That’s not how we’re going out, is it, though.”

How to refute that? if one were so inclined.

“Phillip certainly didn’t, didn’t go out on a high note, did he,” she adds.

He most certainly did not.  No kicking and screaming at the dying of the light, or whatever it was Dylan Thomas counselled. Just a dismal acceptance that we hadn’t really made the world a better place by our being in it.

“We really dropped the ball,” Phillip said to me one time shortly after the terminal diagnosis. “Kicked the legs right out from under the idea of progress, didn’t we? Sacrificed nothing. Exacted everything our wretched hearts desired.”

More or less. In so many words. The bitter sentiment exactly that.

“No matter what we do now, Barnaby,” Elsie continued, “what we try to give back before we’re dead, it might clear our conscience, but it’s not going to make a lick of difference to the direction the world’s heading, will it.”

“I guess we can try our best to make things less worse,” I reply, “and make a point of not embracing nihilism on the way out the door.”

“Is that what this is?” she asks.

We both stare out at a near colourless gloomy sun, an unsettling darkness at noonish filling what is usually a bright and cheery apartment of Elsie’s. It feels all very symbolic. Shirley recognizes that no one is going anywhere soon and huffs from the room, letting her doggie displeasure be known.

“Critical self-assessment is good, I think,” I offer. “If we’re honest with ourselves, we’d be humbled, I’d hope. Force us to ask what we can do now, now before it’s too late.”

A gesture, maybe. A late in the game gesture. A for what it’s worth.

We continue to sit and watch the world burn, wine glasses in our hands, only now making the connection. (Look it up. It’ll make sense.)

“Well, all I can say, Barnaby,” Elsie says eventually, “is that I’m glad Uncle Jerry to live to see this.”