This Is Not My Life

by Diane Schoemperlen

  “Not on your life!” I cried and fled.

  I forced myself to leave the house several times a week. I went back to Vinnie’s a few times, not to volunteer but just to visit, hoping that it would do for me again what it had before: lift me out of my misery, help me to heal and regain my strength. But this time it didn’t work. This time it made me feel worse. There were too many questions about what had happened, too many rumours to be dispelled, too many other people’s opinions to be deflected, and I didn’t know how to be there without him.

  Dreading the prospect of running into anyone I knew, I took to wearing my sunglasses wherever I went, sunny or not, inside or out, like some melodramatic movie star trying to avoid the paparazzi.

  One afternoon, in the produce department at Loblaws, another woman in sunglasses pulled her cart up next to mine and said, “I really loved your new book.” In itself, this was not an unusual encounter. Kingston is a small city, and I’ve lived here for decades, made many public appearances, frequently had my picture in the local paper. I get recognized fairly often, a phenomenon Alex and I refer to as me “being famous” at the drugstore, The Bay, or Canadian Tire. Once I was almost famous at the bank—a woman in line behind me tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I was “that writer Diane Schoemperlen,” but when I said yes, I was, the woman said no, I wasn’t, that writer was much younger.

  That day I was famous at Loblaws. The voice of the woman also wearing sunglasses was familiar, but I didn’t recognize her until she lowered them and said, “It’s me, Marsha.” I hadn’t seen or heard from her since Vera’s funeral almost a year ago. I resisted the urge to scream for help. Leaning on her cart, she said pleasant things about my new book and my writing in general, said nothing about Shane or Darlene or that day. Then she put her sunglasses back on, tapped them and said, “Hiding,” as she pushed her cart towards the next aisle. I had only half the things I’d intended to buy, but I went directly to the cash and got the hell out of there. I drove around for an hour, afraid to go home in case she followed me, afraid that when I did get home, she would be there waiting for me. She wasn’t.

  Even doing basic chores and errands left me exhausted and whimpering, so I set myself a single goal for each day, one simple task I could do without thinking, then check off my list with some sense of accomplishment. Laundry, groceries, garbage, dust, vacuum, clean the bathroom, change the kitty litter box. At one chore per day, it took me all week. I made an occasional half-hearted attempt to do some creative work, but my thinking was so disordered, I’d lost the ability to string words together to form even the simplest coherent sentence. I had no inclination to take a drink, and I hadn’t returned to AA, but I silently chanted their “One day at a time” mantra constantly. I found it much too vast in its ambition, so I began to break it down into smaller, more manageable increments as necessary: one hour at a time, half an hour, fifteen minutes, five minutes. One minute at a time.

  Much as my friends tried to suppress their jubilance, I could see they were ecstatic with relief at our breakup and Shane’s return to prison. Some were blatant in their “good riddance to bad rubbish” reaction. Walter, who had told me I was stupid, now said I was lucky. Utterly without irony, he said, “You really dodged a bullet this time.” I resisted pointing out that Shane was under a lifetime weapons ban and that, as far as I knew, he had never shot anyone.

  Others were more diplomatic, but still their sense of relief was palpable. I could hear them thinking, Thank God, now we can forget all about that spell of temporary insanity and get on with our lives.

  If only it were that simple.

  They tried to be patient with me, but I knew they didn’t understand what I was going through. I didn’t understand it myself, so how could I possibly explain it to them? They offered advice. Just give it time, they said. I kept counting the number of weeks since we broke up, the number of days since he was sent back. What was the magic number? You have to be strong, they said. Then I berated myself for being weak. Keep busy, they said. Clean out the kitchen cupboards, reorganize your books, get an early start on your spring cleaning. Get back to writing. Then I berated myself for not being able to keep up with the housework, let alone pile up the pages too.

  Their patience soon began to wear thin. You’re better off without him; you should be happy to be rid of him, they said. Chalk it up to experience and move on, they said. They seemed to be implying that I was wallowing in my misery. Maybe I was. Snap out of it, they said. I would have if I could have, and then I berated myself because I couldn’t.

  When I was still barely functioning by early March, I knew I had to find help. There had been other rough times in my life when I should have sought professional help but didn’t, not because I was ashamed or embarrassed but because I was arrogant. I am an intelligent, educated woman: what could a therapist possibly tell me that I didn’t already know? But this time I was on my knees, and I knew I couldn’t get through it alone.

  I called both Jerry Anderson and Dr. Quinn, but neither of them were willing or able to offer me any help. I couldn’t really blame them: Shane was their responsibility, not me. The only other person I could think to call was Valerie, the community chaplain. The timing was fortuitous—the very next afternoon, she said, would be the second session of a new program being run for women whose partners were in prison. I was more than welcome to attend, she said, and she’d be happy to speak with me privately afterwards about Shane.

  The program was held in the same building as her office, a three-storey ivy-covered red-brick Victorian house, where, for almost thirty years, dozens of community groups have been holding meetings, workshops, and seminars. Officially called the Kingston Community House for Self-Reliance, it is more commonly known by its street address: 99 York. When I arrived that first afternoon, the other women had already gathered in the parlour, a large homey room with a fireplace and a cluster of comfortably used couches and chairs. On the round table in the centre was a box of doughnuts and a plate of cookies. I could smell coffee brewing in the kitchen. I took off my boots and helped myself to a pair of hand-knit slippers in the basket by the door. Valerie introduced me to the six or seven other women in the room including Rosemary, the facilitator.

  Rosemary was with an organization called the Canadian Families and Corrections Network (CFCN), headquartered in Kingston but operating on a national level to help the families of federal prisoners with both incarceration and reintegration after release. She said she recognized me from Frontenac, where she’d had an office during the months I was visiting Shane. She said she’d often wanted to come over to our table and introduce herself, but since he’d never requested her assistance, she didn’t know whether she should. I didn’t understand why Shane had never once mentioned either CFCN or Rosemary, even though he knew I was sometimes struggling and would have jumped at the chance to have some support along the way. Nor did I understand why neither of the parole officers we were working with at the time had ever mentioned CFCN as an organization from whose help we might benefit.

  Rosemary said they would be meeting every Thursday afternoon for another eight weeks and gave me a copy of the textbook for the program, Be Your Best: Personal Effectiveness in Your Life and Your Relationships by Linda Adams and Elinor Lenz.

  I felt too shy and shaky to say much that first day, but those Thursday afternoons soon became the focal point of my week. No matter how difficult the other days might be, I could set my sights on Thursday as the beacon towards which I was navigating, those two or three hours during which I felt steadily stronger, saner, more like myself.

  We made our way through the book week by week, covering topics like “Who Controls Your Life?,” “What It Means to Be Assertive,” “Learning to Say No,” “Dealing with Anxiety,” and “Who Owns the Problem?” Much as all of this was interesting and useful, it was being with the other women that mattered the most to me. However different we might be in some ways, the one thing we shared was prison. There I never had to justi
fy having fallen in love with a murderer. There I never had to spell out the acronyms, describe the procedures, or explain the ever-changing rules. There I could rant and rave about the endless frustrations of dealing with the Monty Pythonesque logic of the Correctional Service of Canada. There I could laugh until my stomach hurt.

  SHANE HAD ONCE JOKED that there were only two kinds of convict thinking: “It wasn’t me,” or “It was me, but I couldn’t help it.” This put me in mind of my son, these being two things I heard from him far too often in his teenage years. Even into his twenties, whenever I was angry with him, these were his default defence positions.

  Rosemary and Valerie helped me understand that prison is not a good place to grow up and mature, that long-term prisoners like Shane get stuck emotionally and psychologically at the age they were when they went in. They do not experience the same life events and challenges that help the rest of us grow and develop into mature adults. The challenges of prolonged incarceration are entirely different but no less transformative. These challenges are commonly referred to as “the pains of imprisonment,” a phrase originally used by the American sociologist and criminologist Gresham M. Sykes in his 1958 book The Society of Captives, a pioneering and now classic study of maximum-security New Jersey State Prison. Sykes catalogued the primary pains of imprisonment as being the deprivation of liberty, goods and services, heterosexual relationships, autonomy, and security. Adapting over time to these pains of imprisonment, the prisoner develops habits of thought and behaviour that become chronic and deeply internalized. While these defensive techniques may ensure his survival inside, they are entirely dysfunctional out here in the free world.

  I finally began to understand what institutionalization really meant and that much of what had gone wrong in our relationship was the consequence of this pernicious process.

  Much as the prisoner rebels at first against the structured carceral environment with all its rules and regulations and rigid routines, over time he becomes ever more dependent on it. In every aspect of his daily life, he is relegated to the powerless status of a child. Deprived of privacy, he is told when to go to bed and when to get up, when and what to eat, when he can move from one part of the prison to another, when he can go outside, when he can see or speak to his loved ones, and so on. In this extremely controlled environment, the prisoner becomes infantilized, losing both his autonomy and his sense of self-worth as a valuable functioning adult.

  At the same time, the prison environment is also extremely hostile and dangerous. The prisoner must be hypervigilant around the other inmates, adopting a “tough guy” persona to protect himself. Deprived of security, his daily life in this dystopia is shaped by fear, distrust, suspicion, and paranoia. Not only must he abide by the rules of the institution that govern all aspects of his behaviour, but also he must constantly navigate the perilous twists and turns of the convict code of behaviour as well. Adding to this toxic and chaotic stew of power, control, and manipulation is the fact that those who are institutionalized have little or no insight into what imprisonment has actually done to them psychologically and even less idea of how to cope with or begin to reverse this damage after they are released.

  I realized that if I had understood more of this when Shane and I were together, I would have been better equipped to deal with him. But the relationship had already felt like a full-time job, and I hadn’t had time to include a research component too.

  One day in one of our private conversations after the group, I admitted to Valerie, the chaplain, that I missed him, that I wished I could go and see him. She asked me what I really wanted from having contact with him. It took me some time to figure this out.

  From the time we first met, I could always see the good in him. As time went on, I came to see his dark side too, what I thought of as “the other Shane.” But still I believed that the good Shane was the real Shane and would become the only Shane once he came home to stay. Instead, the other Shane had taken over, and the good Shane had disappeared altogether. What I wanted from having contact with him now was to see the good Shane again. I wanted to forgive him. I wanted him to forgive me.

  AFTER I WAS OFFICIALLY REGISTERED with CSC Victim Services, I began to receive notifications by mail every time Shane was granted a pass to leave the institution. Because he was now in a medium-security prison, he would be escorted by two correctional officers and he would be “in restraints,” meaning leg irons or handcuffs, or both. I did not let myself picture this. All the notifications I received were for medical appointments. The nature and exact location of these were not given, just the date and time of day, morning or afternoon.

  After receiving three such notifications in one week, I called Jerry Anderson and asked him if Shane was sick. Was he seriously ill? Was he dying? Jerry assured me that no, he was not. I told him that if he was dying, I wanted to be there. Jerry said he could understand that, and he could make it happen. The being there, that is, not the dying. I began then to perfect what I thought of as my “deathbed fantasy”—his deathbed, that is, not mine.

  There he was in the hospital bed hooked up to machines, and there I was in a chair beside him, as close to the bed as I could get, holding his hand, maybe both hands. There was his dark hair against the pillow, his tattoos stark against the white sheets. There was me in the beautiful jacket, having a good hair day, and, for once in my life, crying with just pretty tears sliding slowly down my cheeks. Except for the gentle humming of the machines, the room was utterly silent. I had said everything I needed to say. He was not talking either. His eyes were closed, and he was not snoring. He was quiet and peaceful, or at least as close to quiet and peaceful as he was ever going to get. Perhaps he was in a coma.

  He’d told me often enough that one of his biggest fears was dying in prison, dying alone. He’d expressed this once in a program he was taking, and in the final report, the facilitator had noted this as an area of concern, an issue that Shane must find ways to deal with lest it prevent him from being able to live as a law-abiding citizen in the future. But wouldn’t anybody be afraid of dying in prison, and aren’t most people afraid of dying alone? Wasn’t the fact that he shared this common fear proof of his humanity, rather than evidence of some insidious pathology that would eventually rear its ugly head in the form of some future violent criminal act? I would not let him die alone and afraid. I would be there beside him for as long as it took—until he stopped breathing, and the whole room went black. Perhaps then we would both be at peace—for once and for all.

  THE WOMEN’S GROUP WOULD BE ENDING the first week of May. I was definitely in much better shape than I’d been when I began attending. I could now get through whole days without falling into despair, sometimes two or three days in a row. I could now, on a good day, be awake in the morning for an hour or more before I even thought about Shane.

  Most important, I was working. I was not actually writing, was still not piling up the pages, but yes, I was working. Well known for my love of lists, I’d been invited to be Guest Editor of a special Lists issue of The New Quarterly, a respected literary journal published at the University of Waterloo. Sitting down each morning to the growing stack of manuscripts we had received in response to our call for submissions, I was in my glory. I was also nudging ever closer to writing a list story of my own for the issue.

  But I was still prone to unexpected eruptions of anger, anxiety, grief; could still find myself paralyzed on the couch for hours, either obsessively replaying one unpleasant incident after another or trying to understand why, after everything that had happened, I missed him. I was, to say the very least, conflicted. Regardless of what anyone else thought of him or me or our relationship, I loved him—in my way—and he loved me—in his. We didn’t either one of us know how to do it any differently than we had. We didn’t either one of us know how to have a healthy relationship. I was still talking to him in my head, sometimes out loud too. When I noticed people giving me a wide berth as they passed me on the sidewalk, I realiz
ed I was muttering to him as I walked down the street.

  With the women’s group winding down, there was some talk of continuing to meet informally for coffee every couple of weeks. I didn’t think that would work for me. I knew I still needed help but felt it should be of a more structured and therapeutic variety. Besides, I was beginning to feel that being part of a group of women dedicated to making their marriages to inmates work, while I was trying to get over my relationship with Shane, had become counterproductive, keeping me engaged with the carceral life rather than helping me put my prison years behind me.

  So once again I was left wondering where to turn. One evening while flipping through the weekly newspaper, I spotted a small ad for a therapy centre specializing in issues of trauma and abuse. It was the word trauma that caught my attention. My friend Evelyn, a retired nurse, had suggested several times that I might be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. All I knew of PTSD had to do with soldiers returning from horrific war zones like Afghanistan and Iraq. I thought Evelyn was exaggerating—surely my struggles with Shane weren’t on the same level as what soldiers had experienced in these deadly conflicts. But I knew there were other kinds of trauma too, so I cut out the ad and stuck it on the side of the fridge. It included a phone number and an email address. At the bottom it said, New clients welcome. I studied the ad every day for two weeks, and then I sent an email.

  I received a prompt reply from a woman named Louise, who suggested we set up an intake appointment. The address she gave, just a few blocks from my house, was familiar, but I couldn’t place it. When I got there a week later, I found that her office was on the second floor of the same building as the Parole Office. Thankfully my appointment was at five o’clock, when the Parole Office was already closed for the day. Just walking past it was hard enough, never mind having to worry that I might run into someone I knew.