All We Knew But Couldn't Say

by Joanne Vannicola

  Death has been slowly creeping up, and as much as I am prepared and ready for it, it is happening so quickly. I want her to go, to be gone, but not like this, not in this way. But it is the only way.

  I touch her face. She breathes, deeply inhales. Pause. Exhale. I wait for her next inhale while holding my breath, in rhythm with hers, but it doesn’t come. I breathe in and she is gone.

  Maybe on her way up she can see that we are there for her as she crosses to another horizon, and perhaps, like looking through a telescope, she can see us from the top of the room, can see upward and out, the trees, streets, animals, continents, oceans, the endless sky, until the Earth itself is a distant shining light, like the moon from Earth in reverse.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  LOU AND I DECIDE we will help the other four people who have agreed to hold my mother’s coffin up as pall bearers. We stand on opposite sides at the back of the coffin. When we pick our mother up, Lou lets out an audible sound of distress as we hold over three hundred pounds of her.

  “Oh shit.” I start to giggle; then Lou giggles. We can’t look at each other or we will be in fits, or worse, we might drop the back end of the coffin.

  Walking inside the church isn’t any better. Lou and I sit side by side on the wooden pew in the dark cathedral filled with lit white candles. A priest stands in white robes, with one altar boy on either side of him. The priest holds a large chain attached to a round silver object. It has smoke coming from it, the smell of incense. He swings it in front of his body while he talks about God and the afterlife. He doesn’t know anything about my mother, doesn’t even say the names of her daughters, as if we are invisible. Only Diego is mentioned. It doesn’t go unnoticed among us girls; Sadie, Lou, and I eyeball each other as if to say What the fuck?

  “She had her good days and she had her bad days,” the priest sings with no emotion and a badly crafted script. I start to giggle again, the sound low and deep like the turning over of an engine; then it grows, and Lou starts to laugh, and then we hear someone not far behind us whispering “Amen,” and Lou and I come undone, like little hyenas, suppressing our laughter and bobbling up and down as if we are crying. We cover our mouths with our hands. I am hoping everyone seated behind us thinks we are overcome with grief as our bodies continue to jerk up and down, faces masked.

  At the end of the funeral we carry the coffin again, down the aisle, out of the church. Memories and senses take over as I pass by the faces of friends and old family members I haven’t seen in years: Mother at a table of family members playing cards; Aunt Connie and her beer; my mother trying to breathe; singing with Lou as children; the women who had graced my life; the sound of tap shoes — a life review and distraction from the faces that stare at me while I hold my mother up. These are the people who did not believe she was raped by her father. I try not to look too closely and continue toward the exit, toward the sun.

  I don’t wish to be in this repressive Catholic church, an absurd funeral with a male priest who couldn’t even say my mother’s daughters’ first names, who made us invisible. A gothic theatre with the little boys in robes and the priest with the chain and ball of smoke and the cross that dangles from his chest. I envision my mother laughing. I can bet that had she been able to sit beside me at her own funeral, she would have laughed at the silliness of it all.

  This funeral is for those extended relatives mostly, but for me, or even my mother, it is pointless.

  Oh, come on now, stop that laughing, she might say with a smile, suppressing her own giggles.

  I think back to one of our last conversations. “Didn’t one of your sisters try to kill herself? Why?” I asked her in the hospital room just a few days ago, before she died.

  “Yeah, my sister was depressed. She came to see me in the home for unwed mothers when I was pregnant.”

  “Do you think something bad happened to her when she was a kid? Maybe even while you were in the home? Maybe your dad —”

  Mom shushed me when I asked that question, but it was hard to believe nothing happened to the other five girls. But it was possible, and if anyone knew that, I did. Mom was raped, molested by her father.

  “You stop now, Joanne. No more questions,” Mom said, drifting, fading.

  Those were some of our last private words together.

  I look around at the faces of relatives I have not seen in a couple of decades and know that my mother is free now. No more pain.

  No more.

  Sleep now, Mother. It’s okay to sleep.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  SADIE, LOU, AND I gather in Mother’s apartment to divide her belongings before Sadie and Lou leave Toronto. Diego has already called dibs on what he wants, leaving us to do the work.

  “I went off my friggin’ diet and I’m smoking again!” Sadie says from the living room, where she is seated in an armchair. “That goddamn funeral and the stupid nicotine patch just wasn’t e-friggin-nough to cope with all that.”

  “Well, you can get back to it when you get home,” I say. I try to be supportive, but all I can offer are the stupid words of a little sister. Hundreds of pounds have made their way onto Sadie’s frame over the years. A few times she has referred to us — me, Lou, and her — as small, medium, and large. It always made me laugh. Sadie is excited about weight loss and is feeling good, or was until Mother died.

  “Gonna have to start all over again,” Sadie says while lighting up.

  For every meal I skipped through the years, she ate enough for two people, followed with chocolates and candy and cakes, stuffing everything down — pain and desire buried under flesh that contains it all, like our mother, like our mother’s mother.

  We all have our coping mechanisms.

  “Sadie, Jo, look at this. It’s totally vintage.” Lou is in Mother’s closet and pulls out some old clothes she’d kept for decades. “Look at the velvet and fake fur,” she says, holding up a black dress my mother made over thirty years ago for herself, a checkered pattern of black flowers and black sheer material, long sleeved, delicate from head to toe, beautiful.

  “I want the Princess Di stuff, and Elvis,” Sadie says.

  I can’t argue, even though our mother has already given me the Elvis albums. The only dishes I want are the golden ones that Mother brought back from Italy, but Sadie wants those, too, so we pack them up for her in bubble wrap and paper, delicate hand-crafted dishes with gold-dusted squares. Sadie promises to give them to me when her time comes. Then she starts hiding things in her luggage and I can’t figure out why she is doing that, why she feels the need to take small items like photo frames or a tray with a creamer and milk jar. I decide it’s not the stuff per se, but that she just can’t get enough, like somehow the things will make up for everything else that has been lacking or taken away. I know it will never be enough. No trinket or glassware, photograph or golden creamer will ever fill the emptiness and grief, will ever make up for the torture Sadie endured at the hands of my father or the psychological degradation by our mother.

  I am reminded of Sharon Simone, who sued her FBI father for child abuse and was awarded money, both as a form of compensation for the abuse she and her sisters endured and as public recognition. It mattered, made a difference in how they lived in the world after the court case, and after the movie about their lives. I did think about taking my parents to court, too, but I let it go.

  I look at the wall of photographs in my mother’s apartment. A few of them are old headshots of me that hang in black frames. Mother loved the fantasy of a star for a child. The daughter she thought she loved was the one in movies and TV shows: a one-dimensional image behind a frame that wasn’t real, but posed, created from a photographic negative, a filmstrip. I take the headshots off the wall, put them face down in a box and walk toward the kitchen. I must tell my sisters.

  “I have to talk to you guys. I need to tell you something about Helen, something she told me last week.” I grab a Corona from the fridge that I stocked with beer and wine. Lou com
es out of the closet with Mom’s pink dress, the one she wore when I was a girl.

  “Oh shit, ha ha, that dress is so ugly!” Sadie inhales smoke and sits in a large brown armchair facing me. Lou also sits with dresses in her arms and on her lap.

  “We don’t have a lot of time. Can’t it wait ’til we finish with the stuff?” Lou asks.

  “No, I really need to tell you now.”

  “Well, go,” Lou says, annoyed that I have pulled her away from the dresses and fabrics.

  “Mom had a baby. She had a baby boy when she was a teenager.”

  “Whaaat? What did she tell you?” Sadie blurts out as she shifts her frame toward the edge of the seat, back straight, waiting for me.

  “She named him Luke, after her father, and … she was in a home for unwed mothers in 1955.”

  “Who did she say the father was?” Sadie asked right away. “Was it Dad?”

  “No.” I take a big sip, gulp down the mouthful of beer. “Luke? She named him after the father …” They don’t get it, so I decide to come right out with it.

  “She told me it was our grandfather. It was her own father.”

  “No fucking way, that’s a fucking lie. She’s lying,” Sadie says.

  “Holy shit,” Lou says.

  “It’s not a lie. She told me it was her father that molested her. They wouldn’t let her keep the baby.”

  “She’s lying, that slut. She just made it up ’cause she’s a sick bitch!” Sadie gets up to light a fresh cigarette. “I know she was a slut. She slept around on Dad.”

  “Even if she did sleep with a hundred guys, it doesn’t mean that she’s lying, Sadie. You don’t have to stop hating her to know that once upon a time she was a kid who got hurt.”

  “Oh, come on!” Sadie says, her rage turning on me.

  “Well … it does make sense, Sadie,” Lou says. “I mean, Mom wasn’t normal. She was cruel as shit and did stuff to Jo and me and —”

  “Oh, please,” Sadie interrupts and stares at me as if I am a liar.

  “Why are you so mad?” I ask her. “It’s not that far a stretch. It makes sense to me, and I don’t know why anyone would ever make something like that up.”

  “How long was he screwing her?” Sadie asks. “How do we know anything? How do we even know if Dad is our own dad?” Sadie sits down again. The hairs on my body stand up, wondering if our father fathered all of us.

  “There’s no fucking way. She’s lying. She’s lying,” Sadie says again.

  Lou and I looked at each other. What if?

  “Are you fucking nuts? You fucking believe that shit?” Sadie stares at me. “She’s so full of shit. She would do anything for attention.”

  The room falls quiet. My body feels like it has no bones to hold it up. I sit down.

  “I don’t believe it. I think Luke’s father is Dad,” Sadie says with determination.

  Lou cradles a cushion. “We could have a blood test?” she says.

  Sadie perks up. “Yeah … we should all have a blood test and see if we are all from Dad!”

  “I don’t think Dom is my dad,” Lou says. “I mean, look at me, I have orange hair, freckles, and I’m white as a ghost compared to you two.”

  “Oh fuck.” Sadie finally giggles. “That’s fuckin’ true, eh? Ya are a freakin’ ghost. Probably some Irishman. Ha ha.” We all laugh.

  “Possible, right?” Lou says, hopeful.

  Sadie tosses a cushion at her while we name nationalities we think we could be: French. Indigenous. A Scot! I think it might be the moment to tell the other part.

  “There’s something else … actually, another baby, a girl. Mom said she also had a girl.”

  Lou and Sadie stare at me in unison. “But it wasn’t our grandfather! See? Something normal!” I say.

  “Ahhhh …” Sadie hollers, exasperated by the conversation. “Shut up.”

  We argue and pack dishes, pictures, books, and games; toss out garbage and continue to debate how many babies, who the fathers are; curse, eat, put on CDs. Somehow the tension and pain metamorphose into a childlike scene. We are girls again, as time stands still and we listen to music. Together again. Sisters.

  We may have been broken, but brokenness itself is something that can be held, like gathering the bones and parts of each of us, embracing those parts, protecting them, and hoping to put them back together again. Lou, Sadie, and I have done the best we could. We have made our way to love. Even in the face of despair or in our well-kept secrets, even in our disbelief of the others’ experiences or memories, we love one another.

  It is possible to love the broken.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  MONTHS AFTER MY mother’s death, I decide to call Alvin, her doctor in BC. She visited him weekly when she lived in Bella Coola, in the absent years. I don’t think he will speak to me or break his therapy code of ethics, but I feel a need to reach out.

  I am prepared for the things that come out of his mouth. He talks as if he has been waiting for me to call so he can tell me everything. He claims that my mother had fragmented consciousness and didn’t always know who she was. He tells me she was sexually and physically abused by both her mother and father. They locked her in a pantry for long periods of time. She was handed to other adults for sexual purposes. She was abused by a man who ran a funeral home beside her house, a mortician who raped her in coffins. Her parents threatened that they would cut out her tongue if she told. She couldn’t recall abusing her own children, but wondered if our grandfather had hurt us. He says that my mother had multiple personalities, some with names, with varying characteristics: threatening parts, childlike parts, cruel and angelic. Mother also wondered if our own father had done anything to us sexually. The list goes on and on. The call lasts nearly an hour. I scribble notes, afraid to interrupt in case he might stop saying all he knows, until he finally stops.

  “I have boxes of files stored in my basement,” he finishes.

  “Can I … can I have those boxes, Alvin? Can I see the files?”

  He doesn’t answer right away and I can sense he feels he might have said too much, that he wants to protect me, or my mother. “No … I don’t think that will be possible.”

  “Okay. Thank you, Alvin,” I say. We hang up.

  Everything seems to fall into place. Even if some of it is questionable, who cares? Hearing about my mother’s life, the stories she never told, her fragmentation, the abuse, her history, I have, for the first time, a window into those years, can look in from an outside perspective.

  I finally understand where she came from and how she chose not to break the cycle.

  I’m sorry, Mom.

  I’m sorry she was hurt so viciously as a child. It truly hurts to think about it, and I wish to be magical, to rescue the child she was, and to rescue my siblings and myself. We could have had such a different life. But the damage was too great. She did make a life in BC, though. She had Alvin, the Nuxalk tribe, and the village. She had surrogate daughters and grandchildren, and community members who loved the woman she presented to them. And she had us at the very end again: a full circle.

  I close my journal, put it away, and think of my teen years, the voice inside, and how I, too, was fragmented. But I am here now, in 2002, only it feels like it could be 1976 or 1984 or 1998. Time, sound, light, DNA, all mixed with memory — mine, my mother’s.

  Time is fluid.

  I can feel my younger self inside, and if it were possible, I’d pick up my five-year-old self and tell her she’s going to be all right, that I’ve got her.

  EPILOGUE

  IT TOOK ME SOME TIME to find the ground after my mother died. There was this imposed idea about the loss of a mother — the mythical mother — and the way I believed I was supposed to feel. In reality, I had long been motherless. Her death made it finite. It caused a shift in my life. It served as the end of something; it stopped the not knowing, the wondering, the what ifs.

  What if she denies everything?

  What if she
dies before I know why or what happened to her?

  What if I crumble?

  Instead, I broke open, understood the root of my wounds, and I fed them as much light as I could find in order to heal.

  My siblings and I eventually found our way to love. Yes, we struggled deeply — and sometimes we still do — but at the heart of it all is love.

  There are now children, the next generation. Cycles of violence have been broken.

  My father is still alive as I write this. He has been ill, and I’ve been to Montreal to see him, and even help him. He has denied ever hurting us, but I have learned to let it go. There’s nothing for me to prove.

  There were many days after my mother died when I remained inside my nest and wrote, painted, even tried to make music. I needed to be creative. Be alone. Be myself. To find a new reality.

  It was during that time that Sharon Simone found me. She was searching for the actors who had worked on the TV movie about her life, The Ultimate Betrayal, which told the story of how she had survived her abusive FBI father and of the precedent-setting case in the States that she and her sisters had won.

  Sharon had lost her daughter to a heroin overdose just before my mother died. We became comrades, friends. We achieved a lot together in the years that followed. We did anti-war work and spoke out about the invasion of Iraq, befriended a woman in the midst of war and helped her escape the Middle East. We also worked on child-abuse and anti-violence initiatives in Washington and other states. I founded a non-profit, Youth Out Loud, which raises awareness around child sexual abuse. Later, equal marriage rights became important to me. LGBTQ2+ people deserved equal access under the law. Period. I showed up to protest against groups such as Focus on the Family. I gave speeches at demonstrations and rallies, was thrown down the stairs at Queen’s Park by police officers wearing gloves because they assumed we all had AIDS. Those days and the struggle for child-abuse awareness and equity issues propelled me forward.