This Side of Sad

by Karen Smythe

  ***

  Mom was the outgoing one. Dad let her do all the talking when they socialized, and Gina and I didn’t expect him be anything but reserved at his wife’s funeral. It put us on edge to listen to Dad’s chattiness. We didn’t want to speak with anyone, so we went down the hall into the Remembrance Room and sat in front of the closed casket, waiting for a brief, generic script to be delivered by a minister we’d never met.

  ***

  What was found in James’s pockets:

  – loose change, adding up to $4.63

  – his wedding ring

  – three used bandages, gauze yellowed from broken blisters

  – the cellphone he promised to keep with him, its battery dead

  ***

  I chose the simple wooden box for James, because it gave me the most flexibility for personalizing it later. James’s ashes were in a sealed plastic bag, I was told, which had been placed inside the company’s standard blue-velvet sleeve with a gold drawstring tied tightly at the top. This was tucked inside the wooden box. I carried it to the car; it was heavier than I thought it would be. I put it on the passenger seat and buckled it in. Then I buckled myself in.

  We sat there for a while.

  ***

  Gleans from the information I read while James was piling rocks at the farm:

  – A Finnish study of people with depression determined that they had a higher risk of stroke than the control group.

  – In northern Sweden, during the winter, office workers take “sun breaks” instead of coffee breaks. They lean against the outer walls of their buildings, with their faces held up to the sky, to mitigate the risk of seasonal mood disorders.

  – If you answer yes to three or more of the following statements, you are suffering from or are at risk of clinical depression:

  1. Does the smallest action or task seem to take a major effort?

  2. Is it difficult to get yourself going in the morning?

  3. Do you prefer staying indoors to being out in the sunshine?

  4. Have you lost your motivation for finishing a project you’ve started?

  5. Do you feel sad for part or all of each day?

  According to these symptoms, James wasn’t depressed. Maybe I was right when I thought he had more energy that summer, since his wall had started to take shape. Yes, I thought, he was experiencing pleasure again. Some pleasure, on some days. I was sure that I saw joy coming back to James.

  sixteen

  To: Ted

  From: Maslen

  Subject: Last Words

  Dear Ted,

  I wasn’t surprised to get your email this morning — not after your wife responded to my Facebook message. No one I know would log into a spouse’s account, unless… well, never mind. She did. And I suppose if I were Sarah, I wouldn’t be happy about some of our exchanges, either. If cutting electronic ties with me feels right, then so be it. But first, I want to tell you something, something I’d have said in person if we’d gone to that café and become real friends: I am grateful that you broke my heart all those years ago. Really. I am.

  When you and I met, I was still working out who I wanted to be — not only career-wise, but in other, deeper ways. Then, when you started med school, I tried not to cross that line you’d drawn between us — the line you insisted be kept in place until you’d taken the Hippocratic Oath. It was supposed to be temporary, that barrier, but something changed for you along the way. Maybe you got used to the distance it imposed between us, or maybe you saw me differently, from the perspective it gave you. Whatever it was, you decided you needed more time, time away from me. But not long after you left, I met someone who was ready for me, for “we.” So it was the right thing, what you did. For both of us.

  I don’t know if I can explain why I wanted to reconnect with you, but it had something to do with time passing, with getting older. Despite Sarah’s concerns, it was not another beginning I wanted. We had our beginning, when we were young. I can still see you standing on the hood of your car to climb up the balcony at my apartment, to kiss me goodnight one more time. (You were full of surprises back then.) But that’s an old, finished story.

  What I wanted was to hear about the middle of your life, yours and Sarah’s. I wanted to find out where your decisions have taken you, and to tell you about the joy I’ve had as a result of the choices that were mine to make. So part of the answer lies there. I know that this plumbing of depths is not your style, though, so no more explaining, and no more trying to find a time or place to meet, to talk about our lives as old friends would do. Alas, our fate has forked once again. Well. We never did say a proper goodbye, did we? So now we have. At least there’s that.

  — Mazz

  ***

  We had a falling out — that’s what this electronic split from Ted felt like. Falling in love, falling out, falling apart: people seem quite accident-prone, when it comes to love.

  In Jewish creation myth, the world began by falling apart. God created a space in order to make something from nothing. He filled vessels with a divine light so powerful that it shattered and scattered many of them. Every material thing is made from these shards, and sparks of light from the vessels became our imperfect human souls, capable of both good and evil. But if people perform mitzvahs, carrying out works for the good, the world can be mended, and the light made whole again. Time doesn’t heal wounds, but light does.

  It’s hard, the work of mourning. You’re building on an absence. You’re building on a vacancy, a void. You are making something from nothing.

  ***

  I thought about veneering the wooden box using chips of the flagstone James had knapped when he built our patio at the farm, but I decided against it. I had to find the right way to honour him.

  ***

  James knew more about rocks and earth and clay than he needed to, to teach his grade ten Science classes on geology and evolution. I knew very little, and when we started to see each other, I worried we’d quickly run out of conversation. On one of our early dates, James asked me what I found interesting about my pottery course, and I wasn’t sure how to answer. So I started to tell him about my trips to China, where porcelain is considered an almost sacred material. I went on about the little I knew: porcelain was not a British invention; the first potter lived in China, thousands of years ago; the word we still use for dinnerware refers to the place where pottery was invented. That part of our conversation makes me cringe even now, when I think of it. But James didn’t seem to mind my clumsy misfire; he waited a moment, then used it as a bridge to tell me about one of his own interests, the Burgess Shale fossils.

  I loved the words he used to tell me about them, like “varve” and “schist.” They seemed to have an inner life, when he spoke them. We fell into an ease, talking with each other after that, which other people noticed. “He gets you, Mazzie,” my sister said, after dinner at her house, when James met Ben and the kids. “You seem so comfortable together. He’s a keeper.”

  ***

  Memories of Chengdu:

  – Touring Sichuan University, seeing row after row of work benches in the ceramic lab to be filled with hundreds of new technical-program students, whose marks on the National Examinations were below the cut-off for academic university study.

  – Watching hundreds of people practising Tai Chi in the lush, treed front grounds of the campus, on a day that must have hit ninety-nine degrees in the shade.

  – Hearing that the school over-admits by forty percent because of attrition by suicide.

  ***

  When I went to our students’ home countries, parents took time away from their labours and travelled for hours by bus to see me at education fairs. They came to thank me for admitting their children to our school, which might lead to university or college in Canada. I’d carry home handmade tablecloths, wall hangings, rugs, and give most of it away — my apartment was so small.

  One family in Beijing invited me to dinner at an exclusive restaurant.
I was seated as the guest of honour. A large platter was carried out by three waiters and placed on the table in front of me. It was a chicken head, a delicacy, and it was for me. I’d been warned by a more experienced colleague that if this ever happened, I’d be expected to eat the eyes before the others could begin to eat, so I was prepared. Unfortunately, I said, I was a vegetarian, for medical reasons. My hosts did not express disappointment facially, as they passed the many other dishes my way. The double treat went to the student’s father, my host, who twice hoisted an eyeball tined on his fork as a toast to me.

  ***

  Josh became a vegetarian on instruction from the modelling agency: “Your body is your temple. Be very careful and watch what you put into it.” After a year in Italy, when he came back to Toronto and had Christmas dinner with my family, he said he felt like he’d been a homeless person. Dressing up for poses with pretty girls all day long while living out of a suitcase wasn’t what it was cracked up to be, he said, and we all laughed. I was still determined to be a doctor, then, and he told me to let him know when I got rich, that I was still on his prospect list. He’d quit modelling if I would support him for life.

  Josh took me to a popular kosher restaurant on Bathurst near Eglinton a few days later. There was a long lineup out the door and onto the sidewalk, and when we were finally seated in a booth not far from the window, Josh glanced up. “Turn around, Mazz,” he said. “Take a look at that woman in line.” I expected to see someone from school, or Jennifer, or even the Princess, but she was a brunette, about thirty years old, simply dressed in a blue buttoned-up cotton blouse and a plain white skirt. She wore no makeup. Her hair was messy, not deliberately tousled, and her figure was curvy; I’d have said she was fat. She was holding a sleeping infant against her breast, rocking him, humming to him, kissing his head. “There. That’s beauty,” Josh said. We both stared until the line moved forward. “That is real beauty.”

  ***

  I spoke to Leah’s mother-in-law at the AGO reception, where she was the guest of honour for donating the Picasso. She was very friendly, so after some chat about the sketch, I mentioned that I knew her daughter-in-law’s brother, Joshua. I was trying to reconnect with him, I said. Would she mind giving Leah my phone number to pass along to Josh, by any chance? I watched her facial muscles slacken. She did not say, “Of course. I don’t know his number or I’d give it to you now,” or “Certainly. He was in Spain, I think, the last time they spoke.” The longer she did not say these things, the stronger my feeling was that something was wrong. “I’m sure Leah will want to speak with you,” she said, touching my shoulder.

  ***

  Josh had told me midway through our friendship about his history — the appointments with psychiatrists, the anger at his mother, the moodiness that would swing so high and so low that he thought he was going insane. So that was why he changed schools — his reasons were emotional, as mine had been. But I didn’t tell him about my dark days before I registered at the alternative school. About how I had to claw my way out of the tar pit to daylight most mornings, or the sense of scrambled hopelessness I couldn’t shake for months. I couldn’t tell Josh how easy it could be for me to slide over to the other side, especially not when he seemed to love me for being his best audience. “I don’t know what it is, Mazz, but after I get off the phone with you I’m all sweaty and hyper, as if I’ve just done a comedy routine…”

  ***

  I almost did a stint on Seven, as the psychiatric ward at the North York General Hospital was known, about a year before I met Josh. I wasn’t there long — just a few hours, while I tried to convince the on-call doctor that it had been a mistake, that my mother had misunderstood. I really wasn’t suicidal; carrying one hundred Tylenols in my knapsack helped me to cope, let me think I had an option to get out if I had to. Desperate loneliness had dug in and deepened over two years, but I wasn’t at rock bottom, not yet. True, I had swallowed a handful, but I also made myself vomit them up. I was only testing whether or not I had the chutzpah to get that far.

  The doctor let me leave only because my mother promised to go through my bag and pockets every day, before and after school. I was discharged into her care with a prescription for Ludiomil that would zombie me into compliance. I couldn’t kill myself if I couldn’t concentrate long enough to remember what it was I wanted to do.

  Gina was in university and my father was at a conference in Saskatoon. Mom and I agreed that it wouldn’t do either of them any good if they were to learn about it. I didn’t tell Ted about the Tylenol episode because it would have frightened him; I didn’t tell James because there was no point, by then; I wasn’t that person anymore.

  Should I have told Josh? I almost did, once, during a conversation we had about his mother, about her depressions and the multiple attempts she apparently made, according to his grandmother. Josh had said he didn’t think he’d have the guts. I said he’d never need guts for that — he was living a glamorous life, a successful life! He could make anyone in the world fall in love with him! That’s how young I was: I believed that what Josh had in his life then would be enough to keep his head above water forever.

  I also thought that if he knew how far under I’d once gone — that I had come that close to nothing — then he’d turn away. So I didn’t tell him. How that haunts me now.

  I thought I knew James through and through, too. James and me, together. Would James still be alive if I’d loved him differently?

  ***

  I stood up as soon as I heard Leah say hello, the day she called in July. I placed the receiver at my neck and pinched it there with my shoulder, and I began to pace, holding myself with arms crossed over my chest, bracing for what I knew she was about to tell me. I had suspected it all along, at some level — there was no other explanation for Josh’s absence from the virtual world — but it took a few sharp and audible breaths before I could respond to Leah, after she told me that he had passed. She was patient with me, but when I asked her what had happened, if he’d been sick, she wouldn’t answer. “He just… he just passed,” she said again.

  She did answer my other questions. I asked if he’d been married; he had, to the Norwegian model, but they’d divorced, and it was hard on him, that failure. No, they hadn’t had any children.

  Because I didn’t know her, and because of her gentleness in the telling and her generosity for contacting me, for putting an end to my detective’s search for her brother, I tried to explain — in broken, hyperventilated sentences — how important her brother was, had been, to me. I calmed myself just enough to share a few of my memories about Josh, things that I thought she might like to hear: the laughter we could trigger in each other; the pleasure he found, after leaving school, in reading fiction and philosophy; the depth of attention he gave to people he cared about.

  When I thanked her for the call, she thanked me — for giving her a picture of Josh she’d not seen before. “When my mother-in-law gave me your message, I remembered your name — we went to a concert together once, didn’t we?” Yes, I said, we went to hear Genesis. “That’s right. Josh didn’t stop talking about his friend Mazzie all summer. Anyway, it’s good to talk with you. I learn more about my brother by hearing from people he cared about. It’s nice for me to hear what he meant to you, and what he was like when he was with you. It’s another piece of him to add to the whole person I’m trying to put together for myself, so I can tell my own children about him.”

  At the click that ended our conversation, I dropped back into the chair and my head bent down by itself, to my knees. I keened. I wailed. My stiff body cracked, and I bled sound. The lining of my throat was rent. I was silenced for many days.

  ***

  Once the official grieving period is over, Jews are to turn back to life, to living well in the here and now. To the light.

  But the dead are not forgotten. They are honoured through remembering. Memories are returned to, ritually, and passed on from generation to generation.

&
nbsp; Again in the heart.

  Again in the mind.

  Again made whole.

  ***

  Rachel, Josh’s friend from childhood, is now a professor of English out west. She was the other smart girl back home, and she’d loved Josh for longer than I had. He told me, that morning he called to talk about my Letter, a few intimate details about their friendship: they’d damaged it when it became sexual and complicated. They stayed friends after their failed attempt at romance, he said, but it was different after that — different and difficult. He didn’t want that to happen to us.

  To us. His voice, saying those words.

  ***

  To: Rachel S.

  From: Maslen

  Re: Josh G.

  Dear Dr. S. (Rachel),

  I am an old friend of Joshua’s and have recently spoken with his sister, Leah, who told me that he passed some time ago. But she wouldn’t tell me how he died. I know you were very close to him, so please forgive me for opening old wounds — but please, can you tell me what happened to Josh? And can you tell me anything about the last few years of his life? Was he happy at all? He was always searching for something, for peace or contentment or love… I’d like to think that he found it, at least some piece of it, before the end.

  ***

  After Leah’s call, I did an online search for Josh’s obituary but found nothing. No funeral notice, nothing. I realized that this made sense, if Josh had taken his own life. Jewish custom meant that no eulogy would had been given at his funeral, either.