by Liz Levine
The forgotten variables seem unimportant in the moment, but they’re not. They matter because they carry value and, therefore, affect the outcome.
Like Poppy.
Poppy was dragged home by Lex on Remembrance Day from a puppy mill the first year all us kids had moved away to university. I think he felt my mother needed something else to care for. Of course, my mother was adamant that we were NOT keeping her. She could stay in the kennel while we all had family dinner, and then she was to be returned.
Lex spent dinner describing the horror of puppy mills to all of us. And my mother, who we all know has a soft spot for fragile creatures, began referring to her as a Remembrance Day poppy. By the time the table was cleared and the dishes done, my mom had Poppy wrapped in a blanket, cradled in her arms, and was singing her lullabies. Fifteen years she was with us, tearing up presents under the tree, bounding through the sprinkler in the summer, curled up on our laps during the news. Poppy died nineteen days before Tamara did, and this loss hasn’t been factored into the equation at all.
Then there is the variable of time. The variable I wish I could affect. The one I want to speed up to see the end of. The thing in the way of the solution. Or maybe, the thing that IS the solution.
I saw Judson’s mother for the first time in almost a decade today. It was mostly about morbid curiosity. How had she survived this? How would my mother survive this? What happens to grief (X) over time (Y)? Kathy tells me she is surfacing for the first time since Judson died a dozen years ago. My mind is instantly trying to do the math. If Judson died of cancer and it took his mother a dozen years to surface, and Tamara died by suicide, then it should take my mother… I can’t figure it out—I don’t know what value to put on suicide.
Maybe it’s about how to encourage the transition, how to urge time forward, and I ask Kathy what makes it better. “Just hearing about him helps so much,” she tells me. “It keeps him present and with us.” She cries with me and thanks me for the good stories about him—she admits that people are alway reticent to talk about him, to bring up his name, for fear that it will upset her. “It does the opposite,” she confesses. “It makes me happy.”
And I realize that is true for me too. Telling stories about him makes me happy.
Perhaps I have a clue here. I’d like to do that for my mother, to tell a story or to let a positive memory of Tamara surface in the hopes of reducing the temporal framework exponentially. In the hopes of making her happy. And I wish I had more of those memories with Tamara, but they’re hard for me to find. And if not me, then who? The actual loss is so extreme that with Mom, nobody ever talks about anything but the end.
There is no solution here for me. No answer.
Y
YOU
At the end of the day, it’s all you have. You are alone.
YEAR
When people ask me about Tamara almost a year after her death, they want to know what we shared. But the more I get pushed on this issue, the less I can see of what we might have had. In the months following her death, I was quite convinced we shared nothing but a high school uniform, some hallway space, and a dinner table.
When I was young, I didn’t want to share anything of mine with Tamara. I didn’t want to share, and I didn’t want her to even have her own copies of the stuff I had.
When Tamara died, I didn’t want her stuff. My mother wants us to have everything. She is allocating small bits of her to each member of the family. She wants everything used. I am sent home to Vancouver with bath towels. When I return to Toronto, half-empty bottles of shampoo, conditioner, and body wash are mysteriously on my shelf. My sister-in-law is given piles of clothes and used makeup supplies that she may or may not ever use. I think most of us just throw those things out. They are just stuff. They don’t connect me to her—there is nothing shared in half-empty shampoo bottles.
And after years of not wanting to share anything with her, I’m desperate for something we had together, something that would make us a “we,” something good that I could tell my mother and something of hers and mine that I could hold on to. So I started looking for that shared thing. I searched backwards through emails and text messages. I emptied my box of old birthday and Christmas cards. I went through photographs and tried to find those places but I couldn’t. And it reinforced my working theory—we had nothing.
Now it has been almost one year, and I’m cleaning out my bookshelf and I find a small travel bag that my mother gave me from Tamara months ago. Something I kept. Inside is a handful of jewelry I will probably never use, but in a curious moment of sorting and organizing, I really look at what’s there. I can hear the blood rushing in my ears as soon as I find it. It’s a ring. And then I have to find mine.
And now I’m sitting, stunned, on the edge of my bed, holding in my hand the totality of the only universe that we shared: two matching high school graduation rings.
Z
ZIPLOCK
Uncle Brian’s best friend Lily from California could not make it to the funeral. So before we spread the ashes we took a small ziplock bag and a children’s shovel and saved a scoop of him for her.
ZEPHYR
It’s been over a year. I’m in the car on my way back to the Whistler Film Festival. It feels like yesterday and like a lifetime ago that we did this drive on the heels of her funeral. I am anxious about this moment. The memory of it.
France is driving my car and the conversation. Sometimes we are focused on one idea or one conversation for days on end. Other times we have six conversations on the go, all at varying stages that weave in out of our daily existence like the air we breathe. Today, she is talking about this book. She wants me to read it out loud to her. So I do. Every word. The window is open just a little bit, and I can feel the temperature dropping as we get farther north. I can feel my words escaping from the page, out the window, whipped away around the twists and turns. Like they’re not contained there anymore. Like I can’t trap them here in black and white to protect myself from them.
We arrive at our hotel in a whirlwind rush and unpack and dress and race to the first event of the festival and then the third and the fifth. My friend Charles joins France and me as we leave the screening of the film I produced, and my team jumps into a waiting car, but we, the three of us, decide to walk in the falling snow.
We walk across the village in the eerie muffled silence. We walk up the steps and away from the lights and the people and over the creek, and the snowflakes now are as big as I have ever seen them and the white is piling up on our heads and shoulders and the snow makes it seem brighter than it really is outside. And I look at my friends, laughing, snow-covered, heads tilted up with the light reflecting in their eyes.
I could watch them like this forever.
But I still remember. I remember all of it. And so everything feels different now. It’s like going back. To innocence, but without it.
I wish I could share this moment with him, and with her.
And in so many ways, I am.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With special thanks to my family for their bravery: to my dad for being my greatest fan, my mom for being my hero, and my brothers and sister-in-law for being the best allies a girl could ask for. To Josh and Kathy Glober for their unwavering support in this often personal and painful venture. To my soul sisters: brilliant illustrator Jax Smith for knowing me; and France Perras for seeing my heart, drawing these first stories out of me, and reading them all over and over and over again.
To Anthony Windle, Adrian Salpeter, and Robin Kester for being my readers, provocateurs, and champions for so long.
To Deborah Williams, Mary-Lynn Young, Paul Deadder, Kendra Reddy, Skye Matheson, Solveig Johannessen, Shawn Angelski, Jessica Boudreau, Nick Torokvei, Charles Officer, Mark Bernardi, and Kyra Sedgwick for their support throughout.
To my wonderful agent, Hilary McMahon, for seeing something in the infancy of my first brushstrokes and pushing me through this. To my brilliant editor, Laurie
Grassi, for her patience with my process, her sage advice, and wonderfully dark sense of humour.
And, finally, to Robyn Daye, who has shown me what it means to be happy again.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photograph by Robin Nielsen
LIZ LEVINE is an award-winning producer whose credits include Kyra Sedgwick’s directorial debut, Story of a Girl, and Douglas Coupland’s television series Jpod. She completed her Master of Journalism degree at the University of British Columbia and has written for the National Post, The Walrus, Playback magazine, and the Vancouver Sun. She divides her time between Toronto, Vancouver, and Los Angeles. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @thelizlevine.
www.SimonandSchuster.ca/Authors/Liz-Levine
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Illustrations by Jax Smith
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Nobody ever talks about anything but the end : a memoir of loss / by Liz Levine.
Names: Levine, Liz, 1976– author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190098430 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190098457 | ISBN 9781982109332
(softcover) | ISBN 9781982109349 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Levine, Liz, 1976–| LCSH: Sisters—Death. | LCSH: Sisters—Biography. | LCSH: Loss
(Psychology) | LCSH: Grief. | LCSH: Suicide. | LCGFT: Autobiographies.
Classification: LCC BF575.G7 L48 2019 | DDC 155.9/37—dc23
ISBN 978-1-9821-0933-2
ISBN 978-1-9821-0934-9 (ebook)