28 Seconds

by Michael Bryant

  After Alan died, I immediately went home to Toronto to hug my kids. Susan was supportive throughout the ordeal, and was herself ripped apart by Alan’s loss. She had a brother Alan’s age, Seth, and she had also been close to Alan.

  During my time in the Memphis hospital, I’d been at peace with the care Alan received and thought I was able to accept the lottery of tragedy as part of life. But for the rest of that summer, I lived through a moderate but very real depression. I was dysfunctional, slow, distracted, and lifeless. It got to the point where I didn’t want to get out of bed. My psychiatrist told me to go for a walk for 20 minutes, every day. Apparently, as long as I could do that, we could avoid something more serious. I got better.

  Still, over the summer I began to question my faith. How could God allow this to happen? And if God wasn’t there to save people, or to decide when they lived or died in a far more just fashion, what on earth was God’s role, function, purpose? How do I square a just God with this unjust result of my brother’s death? I started to get over the existential crisis, later that year, when I stopped craning my will toward salvation. I can’t answer those metaphysical questions any more than a cow can be fluent in Mandarin. I can only tell you what it feels like.

  It was through this loss, and the process of trying to fathom and accept it, that I could better understand what it had been like for the family and friends of Darcy Sheppard to so suddenly lose him. I miss my brother, terribly and often.

  THE FIRST CHRISTMAS after Alan passed, his biological mother, whom I’ll call Judy, Googled “Alan Thomas”—his name, minus our surname. The British Columbia adoption registry has a disclosure veto. When she had requested to contact him many years ago, Alan declined, thinking that it would upset my parents too much.

  Nevertheless, she’d discovered his given names through an error by the provincial registry. The Google results put Alan’s obituary front and centre. She recognized him immediately.

  By reading through a blog I’d created for those wishing to eulogize Al, she learned a lot about the boy she’d given birth to when she was very young. She also discovered the names of Alan’s siblings, and as she lived in Victoria, she called Janine first.

  At first they agreed to meet later in the week, but then they called each other an hour later to say they couldn’t wait that long. They met that afternoon. Soon enough, I was exchanging emails with my brother’s biological mom. She announced that she’d be visiting Mississauga, just outside Toronto, in a few weeks. So we agreed to meet.

  As I entered the hotel lobby where she was staying, she greeted me with Alan’s eyes, and Alan’s smile. The last I saw Alan, comatose in the ICU, I hadn’t seen his eyes, or his smile.

  “I don’t know where to start,” I said.

  “Just start,” she replied. Her manner was warm and welcoming.

  I shared as many telling stories as I could remember. And then realized I’d been talking for over half an hour.

  “Tell me about what it was like at the end,” she said. She wanted to know how he died.

  “No. I will. But your turn. Tell me—”

  “Back then, in 1972, in the town I grew up in … Well, this has been my secret. A secret I’ve been holding my entire life. And now … No more secrets …”

  Judy shared with me how she’d left her home province to have her baby adopted by a family in Victoria. She had ten days after the birth to change her mind. She did not feel old enough to raise a child, let alone by herself, let alone with the birth as a secret.

  In fact, despite enjoying being an aunt, she never wanted to raise a child herself.

  “All that goes into raising a child … Just never for me,” she said. “I have no regrets.”

  Judy was incredibly generous and thoughtful with her words, for my mom and for all of us.

  I wondered how it felt to discover Alan’s identity, to find him, like she did in his obituary, learning of his death.

  “For me, I feel like I’ve found him. Maybe I’d never have found him if he hadn’t passed when he did. So it’s a loss for you and your family, but it’s something else for me. And I feel like I’ve extended my family. We’re family now, if that’s okay.”

  It was okay.

  NINETEEN

  Home Unalone

  By the time of Alan’s death, I was still adjusting to the parade of dramatic changes that seemed to have become my new normal. At some point during our marriage, the two opposites that had formed a vessel of compatibility and support and love started to change, but didn’t change together. I had changed dramatically since we married. At times, I didn’t recognize my present self any more than Susan did. It’s not that we hadn’t done the work. We had worn out the carpet in counsellors’ offices. Our marriage had been put through too much. We found that, even with the best efforts, we simply weren’t able to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

  The comedian Louis C.K. says that “no good marriage has ever ended in divorce,” so lamenting a marital split is foolish. It’s a joke but we get the point. That doesn’t mean there isn’t enough guilt and regret to sink a tanker. To me, the end of our marriage feels tragic, sad, mysterious, right, inevitable, hopeful, and bizarre.

  On December 9, 2010, we decided to separate. Then, Susan and the kids headed to visit with their grandparents in New Hampshire, while I raced around the city making arrangements for a new life as a single father.

  I lucked into a gem of an apartment, thanks to a tip given to my real-estate agent. It’s a 1920s building, which has seen little in the way of renovation, thank goodness. Art Deco lobby, large, 12-foot ceilings, expansive hallways, huge windows, and parquet floors.

  In double-quick time, I bought and assembled furniture and decorated the children’s rooms and the living room. I’d researched the state of TV technology, to determine the largest TV a human could fit through my apartment doorways without requiring a second mortgage. It was The Guilty Father Television, and it would be bigger than the one at their mom’s. On this one point, I would be a small person.

  We wanted the kids not to fret, about what their new lives would be like. Instead, the plan was to tell them on Boxing Day, then show them immediately the new apartment, their new second home.

  Boxing Day came and went. The apartment, miraculously, was ready, including a fresh coat of paint. Not bad for a guy who had no thought of an apartment less than two weeks previous. But I wasn’t ready to tell them, and Susan was willing to wait another day before getting on with the rest of our lives.

  On December 27, as the kids were eating sandwiches at the kitchen table, Susan and I sat down to tell Sadie and Louie the hardest thing I’d ever had to tell anyone.

  It couldn’t have gone better, and it couldn’t have felt worse. Afterwards, I ran up to the walk-in closet in my suddenly former bedroom, threw myself on the carpet, and buried my face in my hands for the biggest cry since I’d sobered up.

  Susan and I had rehearsed the moment several times, after consulting with our now-divorce therapist. The goal was to transmit the facts to the kids, and just the facts, with as little emotion as possible. Then immediately show them their new lives.

  Susan asked me to speak first. Deep breath.

  “You’re going to have two homes,” I told them, “because Daddy is moving out today, and you’re going to see your new apartment in a few moments. It’s going to be—”

  “What?!” Sadie said, the 8-year-old objecting to this sanitized version. “Are you two not going to be married anymore?!”

  “No,” we said simultaneously.

  “I’m sorry, Sadie,” I said. “We’re getting unmarried.”

  Sadie broke into tears. Susan took her in her arms, on one side of the banquette. I was on the side with Louie, who just looked at me, a little grumpy face, and no words.

  “You can punch me, if you’d like,” I told Louie, so he proceeded to do so, although they felt like love-taps to my cheek. Sometimes when we were playing, Louie would say: “Come here so I can
punch you in the face!” and I’d oblige. Now he was doing it not out of fun, but necessity. Sadie crying in Mom’s arms, and Louie punching me, repeatedly, in the head.

  “I just need a minute to process this,” Sadie said, as if she were my mother-in-law rather than my daughter.

  “You’re stupid!” said Louie.

  So they were processing it all, and that was good news. May you never have to go through this in your life. I will never do it again.

  We went over to my new apartment, all of us, soon thereafter. Louie ran around, loving the open space, and Sadie gushed over her poster-bed of pink and blue. Louie had daydreamed aloud about having a bed nestled in a hockey net. So I made that happen. It was pretty cool. The gigantic TV was a hit.

  When school started the next week, Sadie had show-and-tell the very first day back. She brought her backpack, explaining to everyone that she used it to travel to her new second home, declaring her parents “divorced” like a thing of great drama, even pride. Sadie had also composed a song: “My Parents Broke Up on Boxing Day,” replete with a catchy melody.

  We soon enough settled into a new routine. Tuesdays and Wednesdays at my place, to allow me to attend my fellowship meetings for recovering alcoholics on Monday and Thursday nights. Weekends were rotated. (The division of property was settled in a five-minute conversation between Susan and me. The papers wouldn’t be signed for many months, but only because of my procrastination.)

  AN ALARM RINGS at around 7 a.m., the sound of church bells emitting from a mini-stereo I inherited from Alan. (For the Millennial Generation, a deceased bachelor’s estate resembles more an electronics store clearance than a garage sale.) Sometimes the alarm is redundant, if my 7-year-old keeps to his bio-rhythmic schedule: Sun up, Louie up, and climbing in my bed, silently but urgently, his feet pummelling me. It’s quite a wake-up call.

  Up now, out of bed, after a run-down of his dreams and nightmares the night before, or his request to go on the computer, usually denied, because it’s a school day and we barely make it in time for playground play before the bells ring at 8:45.

  Louie is reading the back of the cereal box while sitting at the plastic folding table in the kitchen. Vitamin D is squeezed from a dropper into their plastic cups of cold water. Now to Sadie’s room: open shutters, kiss her forehead, thereby allowing a gradual awakening and the eventual arrival of her 9-year-old butt onto the plastic folding chair in the kitchen. I’m ripping shells off a boiled egg, chewing on raw almonds, gulping espresso, and making sandwiches while scouring for the small lids to fit the small tubs that look so neat on the grocery shelf but end up overpopulating a refugee camp of plastic in your cupboard.

  It’s a galley kitchen, the only thing in my apartment I wish were otherwise. The kids’ rooms are slightly larger than their rooms at the ex-matrimonial home, literally two minutes away. That room size was enough to take the apartment on the spot, for the living room was massive and able to house the Guilty Father TV (Sharp Quattro 50-inch LED) and Elte white sectional couch (yes, snow white, as in “clean slate”), and a dining-room table made out of wood from an old bowling lane, rebuilt onto cast-iron painted roughly green, all with plenty of room to spare. I didn’t care that my bedroom would be in the old dining room, with old-fashioned sconces and wainscotting that made it always look like a … dining room. A veranda big enough for one 45-year-old to smoke a cigar was as much a bonus as the real fireplace.

  But the kitchen is cramped and far away from the dining room table, so I got the folding table and chairs from Costco to be with the kids while they eat breakfast and Dad makes lunches. None of the foregoing activities took place at the house when married, for reasons I can’t explain. In fact, despite my assumption that I was a great hands-on dad, I would have no idea what it was like to be a mom until I became a single dad.

  After breakfast, I finish making lunches and getting their homework in their backpacks, occasionally completing the uncompleted homework assignment in the morning. French immersion for them means French immersion for me, too, and my vocabulary is increasing daily, with theirs. Sadie was soon so proficient and bilingual that she became our living, breathing Google Translate, which I resorted to often. Shoes re-tied, jackets re-located, jackets zipped up, and in the winter, scarves and hats assembled, matching gloves remembered. Backpacks on, and then the elevator door button gets pushed. Wait—sign the homework, return it to the backpack. Wait—it’s library today, find the books. Push the elevator button again. In this building, there are only three units per floor, and the elevator is inches from our front door. The kids think it their own.

  Then we walk to school together, a two-minute trek, at most. I had found Question Period at Queen’s Park much less stressful than getting my kids to school on time. This was especially so after I found out that for the first four months of single dad-hood, I’d been delivering them to school ten minutes late, every day I had them. An 8:50, not a 9 a.m., start, I learned. Who knew?!

  Well, Susan knew, but she delivered the news without rancour. Our relationship was always, and remains, as amicable and transactional as two partners in a highly successful dentist practice. No resentment, no envy, nothing negative. We swallow any of that when it burbles up, for the kids. It’s easy, somehow, even if it was impossible when we were married.

  With my newfound single dad-hood I learned many things: do not starve or over-sugar, find shoes, stop saying “shit,” smell milk before pouring, get them to Tae Kwon Do or dancing or piano or Hebrew School, or a play date, or a birthday party, or the paediatrician, on time.

  As time passed, my Bay Street job became less important to me. Most of my work at Norton Rose Canada (formerly Ogilvy Renault) was with my former classmate Richard King, some with Phil Fontaine, former national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, whom I had lured over to the firm. Basically, we helped companies do business with First Nations. It was less law than commercial matchmaking. But it was gratifying work, nonetheless, in the field of aboriginal affairs, which was no longer my job description but still a vocation.

  So, there was I, no longer living under the threat of criminal charges. But I was also no longer a cabinet minister, no longer a politician, no longer the president and CEO of anything, no longer a husband, still mourning a beloved sibling, and ever adjusting to a life led sober. I’d led a charmed life, and now I was leading a changed life.

  SOME CHANGES WERE PROFOUND, others pedestrian. When the news media came calling, as they occasionally did, for comment on public-policy issues that I’d had lots to say about in a previous life, I ignored them or politely declined. The only exceptions were issues involving aboriginal peoples (now the mainstay of my law practice) and anything about gun control.

  If a friend wanted me to speak at a political fundraiser, I did so, but they were always modest affairs. Some charities asked me to speak at events as well, and I happily obliged, but my performances were no longer the self-indulgent Michael-fests of old.

  For a time that year, along with working at the law firm, I worked with my former neighbour, Michael Scot-Smith, from Gordon Head, in Victoria, who, among other things, owned Slimband, the gastric banding operation of notable success. Michael was a great entrepreneur, who had made his first million while I was still in high school. He asked me to run one of his new companies, which I did for a few months.

  During those early months being a single dad, without a vehicle to transport the kids, Michael kindly let me borrow the Hyundai compact cars driven by his nurses to visit Slimband patients during after-care.

  These two cars were utilized as much for advertising as transportation. Painted onto the deep blue Hyundais, which we called the Slimband-mobiles, were before-and-after photos of successful Slimband patients: typically, obese before, and leopard-skin bikini-ed afterwards. On the side door, it read, in huge, bold letters: “I lost 200 Pounds!”

  Initially, the kids thought these cars were hilarious. And Louie enjoyed the gigantic breasts pictured on the car’s hood.
But soon enough they were suitably mortified, and asked that I pick them up a block away from wherever they were coming from. Plus, when I parked the car in the Whole Foods parking lot, the Porsche and Maserati owners literally sniffed at me. I needed to get a real car, one suitable for transporting two children.

  So I bought the second largest mini-van on the market, the mammoth Honda Odyssey. The kids could sit in the second or third row and catch the DVD lowered from the ceiling, with enough cup holders to excite anyone under age 12.

  With me at the wheel of a grey mini-van, whatever else I wasn’t any longer, one thing was now official. I was, first and foremost, a single dad.

  IN THE SPRING OF 2011, I was sharing the stage with some local celebrities for GetLit, a charity promoting literacy for underprivileged kids. We were all to read from a book that had a huge impact upon us in our younger days. After I read from John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany, and admitted the book brought me closer to God, I was approached by Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente (who’d read from A. A. Milne), while everyone was mingling around.

  “Oh, my God! Michael Bryant! You have completely transformed!! What happened!?” Wente said.

  The people standing around me stopped chatting to see what this was all about.

  “Oh! … Ok!” I said. “Wow. Er … r … thank you?”

  “Yes, no—I mean: you’re completely different? What did you do?”

  I was wearing Peter Parker–esque glasses and sporting a beard, which someone told me was slimming, but I suspected that her observation was more about my character than my appearance.

  I’d never try to finesse Margaret Wente, for fear of ending up in her column as a phony. So I just answered the question as bluntly as she asked it.