My Dead Parents

by Anya Yurchyshyn

  Once they were back in London, my father began traveling through Europe, Asia, and the Middle East for the bank, visiting companies involved in aircraft chartering and container leasing, as well as those interested in shipping natural gas to global markets. His job was to assess requests for credit and to identify companies that might be in need of a loan.

  My mother began working for the Sierra Club’s London office, where her primary responsibility was influencing the UN’s negotiations of the Law of the Sea Treaty. It was an unpaid position, but she took her job as seriously as my father took his, and buried herself in books and reports on oceanic environment and underwater mining. These were topics she’d never even thought about, but soon she was an expert on them. She was overjoyed to be part of the international political community, where she was one of only a few women. She became the club’s London representative and was their delegate at the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972, which resulted in the creation of the United Nations Environment Programme.

  My parents rented a duplex in Mayfair and decorated it with rugs and sculptures they’d acquired during their trip. They hung their favorite photographs from their adventures next to bright, abstract posters. Soon those pictures shared space with nudes of my mother and her growing belly. One of their friends told me, “George had photographs of your mom everywhere, naked, this beautiful big bump. He really celebrated her.” My father documented the curves of her changing body in portraits taken in bathroom steam or in the squares of light thrown by their tall living-room windows.

  My mother found pregnancy “wonderful.” She told Sylvia that toward the end she “felt sort of sad, knowing that I would miss the feeling of life thrusting about. It’s such fun to actually sit there and watch your tummy gyrate, wave, and jump.”

  Still very pregnant two weeks after her due date, labor had to be induced. My father booked a private room and read to my mom from Kurt Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House as her contractions increased, then held her hand and coached her as the delivery began. My mother told Sylvia the birth “was not bad at all.” She didn’t remember the pain, just the “incredible moments of watching your baby being born, slipping out from you into the world.”

  They named their daughter Alexandra. My mother thought she looked like a “sphinx, brooding and ageless.” My father pulled out his camera and began taking photos of their baby. When a nurse placed Alexandra in a cot in the room, he “kept running back and forth to the little crib to see his daughter, who was lustily crying.”

  My mother “felt a tremendous surge of love for her daughter from the very beginning.” When Alexandra cried, she cried too. When she thought ahead to “all the tears which shall inevitably be a part of her growing up and how I might not be able to prevent them,” she was devastated. Motherhood would, in many ways, be “painful,” she concluded at the hospital, realizing that “mothers are very vulnerable people.” But all the same, she marveled at the “great bond” she felt “to all women,” especially her own mother. “How many of my tears caused hers?” she wondered in a letter to Sylvia.

  Alexandra, with her dark hair and complexion, took after her father. “I think George enjoys everyone saying how much she looks like him,” my mother reported. He was always “playing with her, watching her, coaxing smiles from her, changing her messy, messy diapers. It’s true, she really is daddy’s little girl.”

  When Alexandra was six weeks old, my father had to go to Asia for three weeks, and my mother teased he’d be gone for half their daughter’s life. “I hope this won’t happen too often,” she wrote Sylvia, “as babies need both parents.”

  In addition to worrying about the frequency of my father’s work trips, there was tension around Alexandra’s baptism. My father wanted her to be baptized in a Ukrainian church, while my mother didn’t want her to be baptized at all. “How can I teach her things I really don’t believe in?” she asked. “How can I encourage her to go to church when I don’t?” She thought my father saw baptism as “a ritual, a national symbol, a kind of ‘Ukrainianization’ of his daughter,” but said he was a hypocrite because he wasn’t religious either. “The ceremony itself rather repulses me,” she continued. “It’s a lot of exorcism. How can a child be possessed by the devil?” Alexandra did get baptized, but not for years. We were baptized at the same time, when I was three and she was seven. In the one picture I have of the ceremony, we are sprawled out in our godfathers’ arms as they struggle to hold us.

  When Alexandra was two months old, my mother told Sylvia, “I feel as if she is a wonderful present, which someone may yet take away. She is a pure delight. I truly adore her, am incredulous that ‘she came from me.’…What was life like before?…I am shamefully happy.”

  I’d always thought my mother didn’t really want to be a mother. I knew she loved us, but she seemed to find the work of being a mother a drag—the cooking, the cleaning, refereeing fights over what TV show to watch or what cereal to buy. I wasn’t able to sense the love running under her annoyance with the drudgery. Reading her descriptions of her initial joy forced me to reconsider my previous ideas. Having children brought a deep richness to her life—at least at first.

  While she was pregnant, my mother took a Lamaze class and became good friends with another young mother-to-be, an Englishwoman named Sue, whom I would come to know well. My mother often told me about how much she relied on Sue as a young mom. In addition to having the emotional support of someone who was also bouncing between the extremes of new motherhood, its joys, loneliness, and uncertainty, she had a Sherpa. Sue would accompany her to the chemist and remind her that diapers were “nappies,” pacifiers were “dummies,” and to ask clerks not if they “had” an item but if they “did” them. Every time she spoke to Sue, saw Sue and her family, or someone mentioned England, my mother launched into an impression of herself fumbling at a shop after Alexandra was born.

  As herself, she’d say, “Do you do dummies?” Switching into an outrageously bad English accent, she then gave the reply. “Hmmm, we did do dummies, but I don’t know if we still do dummies. Let me ask Nigel. Nigel, do we do dummies?”

  After my mother died, I went to London to visit Sue, who I hadn’t seen in over a decade. As we reclined in her backyard or wandered through her community garden, whose paths were lined with bright peonies and clusters of lavender, she told me about the beginning of their friendship. She told me that they talked on the phone constantly while they were pregnant and got together often after they’d given birth to their daughters. “When a child is little, they’re easily transportable, so we’d meet in the park or go to a museum or spend the evening together. If we had sitters, we’d see a film. When we saw each other, we’d of course talk about how the girls were getting on, but not for very long. Most of the time, we’d talk about the political things I was involved in or the work she’d been doing before and wanted to do again.”

  She and my mother were frustrated to discover that, since having children, people only wanted to talk to them about their babies and seemed to believe that their children were the only things they thought about. “If you’re a woman who has always worked, and I had always worked, it’s a shock. Your opinions don’t seem to matter to anybody; you’re just somebody who looks after children. But your mom and I shared a tremendous amount ideologically, and we needed to be able to talk about those things.”

  What Sue said helped me understand something I hadn’t been able to as a child, and echoed things I’d heard from my friends who’d become parents: You can adore your children and your time with them but still resist the expectation that you’ve been changed so dramatically by motherhood that you no longer care about the things you once did, or that your previous life should be over. My mother didn’t want her identity to be “mom.” She didn’t get satisfaction from doting on her kids or cooking or even playing much with them. She was far more interested in the world out
side of her home than inside of it. Alexandra is the same. Her children are a big part of her life, but they are not all of it. She’s a mom and, determinedly, many other things as well. Like my mother, she has refused to be reduced.

  I asked Sue if she’d met other wives of my father’s coworkers. Sue had, and she didn’t like them. “Your mum could not have been more different from them,” she said. “She looked more student-y; we wouldn’t spend much money on clothing.” The other American women were extremely wealthy and well dressed. “Their husbands worked for banks, and they were all massive. Your mum looked like a creature from a different planet, and so did your dad. These people were so vulgar. They would be saying this awful right-wing crap, and your mum would contest it all the time. They thought we were both flaky as a consequence.” These women treated my mother and Sue as if they were ditzy teenagers even though, Sue explained, “She’d already done a huge amount of things. Your mom was much, much more traveled than they were.”

  My mother and Sue took to each other instantly, but Sue worried that she might not like my father because he was “a part of this international banker world,” and thought he might not like her, or her husband, Martin, who was a painter. But they all got on “very well. I think he was quite surprised that he liked being with us. He and I had a good relationship as well, as Martin and George had a good relationship. They shared a lot of similar interests. We had a tremendous time together; your father had a terrific sense of humor. Your mother was a good foil for him.”

  One of the many things Sue appreciated about my father was his tactful generosity. He was aware of the fact that she and Martin didn’t have as much money as he and my mother did, and he often offered to pay for dinner or movie tickets, and when they didn’t let him, which was most of the time, he made sure they went to restaurants they could all comfortably afford, or my parents would just have them over. “He was extremely generous and understanding; it was a relief not to have to worry about spending too much when we were all hanging out, because we had other friends who weren’t as conscious of the issue.”

  I asked her how my parents got along. “Did my father respect my mother?”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “He respected her intelligence, he valued her opinion, and he knew that the work that she was doing was significant.” Like his friends in grad school, she thought their relationship was equal and balanced. The dynamic I saw later hadn’t been established yet.

  My mother returned to the Sierra Club part-time to draft two treatises—one on air pollution, and one on noxious substances other than those causing air pollution—and to represent it at the IMCO’s monthlong International Conference on Marine Pollution. She was happy to be working on something “constructive,” but found it hard to be away from Alexandra. She told Sylvia: “On a few occasions she has been weeping and clinging to my legs as I attempt to go out the door. It can be heart-wrenching.”

  My mother went to Geneva for more environmental conferences with a female coworker, who told me the meetings were interesting and fun, and they’d had a great time together. They encountered plenty of sexism, mostly from diplomats or other government representatives. The field of environmentalism was less sexist than many others, she explained, and she and my mother came with the inarguable credibility of the Sierra Club. During that trip, and the others that followed, she and my mother hung out together in the lobby of the Hilton Intercontinental when they weren’t in meetings to network and promote their agendas. They called it “lobbying in the lobby.” It was effective, in part, because they were “young, attractive, and smart,” so people wanted to talk with them.

  My mother discovered she was pregnant again in 1973. She told Sylvia, “I’m not exactly pleased, as I can’t imagine someone else to distract me from precious Alexandra, whom I enjoy so much. But,” she conceded, “with this attitude I may have delayed indefinitely, never feeling the time was right.”

  I was terrified to reach this part of my parents’ story because I knew how tragically it ended. Everything I learned about their early marrige and parenthood, even its happy moments, sounded like terrible foreshadowing. Each turn of the story was expected, and each made me cringe.

  My mother’s ambivalence about having a second child continued after Yuri’s birth. She told Sylvia that she

  missed Alexandra so much while I was in the hospital and felt I was thinking more about her than Yuri. I was away from her for six full days, coming home the morning of the seventh and so excited to hold her again.

  A few months later, she wrote

  You asked about my feelings and if they were the same this time, and again I will say honestly but with guilt (I have decided parents are always guilt ridden about something) no, frankly. This is not to be measured in love but rather excitement and the awe that I remember describing to you after Alexandra’s birth. I suppose one can never relive the super high of a first thrilling experience although childbirth and the delivery was certainly again enthralling.

  Yuri was

  more complicated than Alexandra was as an infant, cries a lot more and is just more intense. They tell you second babies are easier—don’t believe it. He is rather funny looking frankly and I add with some feelings of guilt, not as pretty a baby as Alexandra, who was chubby, round, and not bald!

  Yuri and Alexandra didn’t look related. Yuri had my mother’s fair complexion, which made Alexandra’s seem even darker. Her mess of deep brown hair made his bald head look blue. Alexandra was also much more robust, with a huge belly and arms ringed with deep creases, while Yuri was slight, almost skinny.

  When he was ten months old, he developed a cough that turned into pneumonia. Yuri was admitted to the hospital, but he didn’t respond to medication, and it soon became clear that something bigger was wrong.

  When I was cleaning out my mom’s house, I found a slim, brown notebook that she kept during this chaotic time. She’d recorded each horrid development in spare language and short sentences, and used only six of its pages. Her entries brought me as close as I’d ever been to such an enormous loss; it told me what my parents didn’t and couldn’t. I was haunted by the enormity of their pain, and it consumed me. The notebook was the most revealing item I had found; I never read it without crying and wishing it hadn’t needed to be written.

  Feb 17—Rapid shallow breathing; doctor Yuri taken into hospital

  18, am—oxygen tent set up

  pm—tube feeding

  19th general anesthetics—“desperate for diagnosis”

  blood tests continue

  20th—no change; outside consultation

  21st—Dr. comes; I am told to live from day to day. Heart enlarged—low antibodies

  As doctors performed test after test and tried different medications, Yuri’s body slowly shut down. Finally, they discovered he’d been born with an immune deficiency. He’d looked “funny” because he’d never really been healthy. Pneumonia wasn’t the problem; the problem was that his body couldn’t fight serious infections.

  My parents were at the hospital together as frequently as they could be. Alexandra visited Yuri a few times at the beginning of his stay, but was mostly at home with a nanny. One of my parents returned home every evening to give her updates and explain again that Yuri was sick and that they needed to be with him.

  22nd—@ 11:00 am. Yuri stops breathing; resuscitation, yields his spirit and dies.

  24th—second death; make arrangements

  Yuri is dead by the end of the notebook’s first page. I don’t know what happened between the above two entries, but it seems he came close to dying on February 22. Perhaps doctors kept him on life support for those last two days.

  My mother did not record her reaction, or my father’s. When she’d told me about Yuri’s death when I was ten, she’d said my father had cradled their son’s body and whispered “My son, my son, my son” as he cried, but that wasn’t in her note
s.

  When I spoke with people who knew about Yuri’s death, they told me the story my mother told them; their versions were violent and vivid, so bright they were blown out. One person said my father lurched through the hospital wailing and throwing himself against walls. He’d screamed “My son,” not whispered it. Another person said he’d screamed those words in Ukrainian: “Miy syn, miy syn, miy syn.”

  25th—post mortem—lungs infected

  27th—cremation

  March 2, Sunday—ashes scattered in Cader Idris

  My mother told me that when they returned from the hospital, they had their nanny take Alexandra for a few days. I imagine them wandering the apartment raw with sorrow, falling into furniture and onto the floor, pushing each other away when their rage surpassed their sadness.

  My mother wrote

  When will the tears stop burning? The immediate tension of the first three days has passed. The horror and absolute shock has gone somewhat and by Wednesday, March 5th, my arms ache to hold a son who was once mine. I would sell my soul to the devil to hold and cuddle him again. I don’t know if I have accepted his death yet as each nite I dream we are at the hospital again and if he is dying, I can caress him back to life. But most of the time he is still alive.”

  When Alexandra returned home, she was confused. She made statements about Yuri and asked questions, experimenting with words and truths so she could figure out the change that had occurred. These were small punishments for my mother, who had to help Alexandra understand what happened to her little brother, to understand death.