Stolen Child

by Laurie Gough

  Praise for Stolen Child

  This book is an outstretched hand. A gift to anyone who has sought to understand the mysterious nature of OCD and its isolating, bewildering consequences. This is a tale of tenderness and devotion, a portrait of the importance of community, and a story of surprising, unexpected light.

  — Alison Wearing, author of Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter and Honeymoon in Purdah

  Gough’s straight ahead style is seductive. She draws you in. You stay in.

  — Brian Doyle, author of Angel Square and Up to Low

  What do you do when your child is stricken with a disorder whose cure is not at all certain? If you are a rational skeptic like Laurie Gough you research everything ever written on the disorder and apply the methods of science and reason to solve the problem, without resorting to superstition or the supernatural. Stolen Child is beautifully written and emotionally evocative, but it is not just about OCD. It is about the power of reason … and love … to overcome adversity, a book that belongs among the classics of parenting.

  — Michael Shermer, author of Why People Believe Weird Things,

  The Believing Brain, and The Moral Arc

  People use the term “OCD” casually, often with a snicker. But Stolen Child demonstrates beautifully the devastation that the disease can bring, and the love that a family brings to fight it. It’s a heartfelt story of a family transformed by OCD, told with compassion and honesty.

  — Jim Davies, cognitive scientist and author of Riveted

  Praise for Laurie Gough’s Writing

  Gough has the ability to situate a reader in a foreign landscape with the kind of vivid description that makes it possible to feel the land under her feet and to smell the air she is breathing.

  — Globe and Mail

  (Gough) manages the perfect mixture of humour and poignancy with the frightening and bizarre, all lyrically told and, at times, poetic.

  A gifted storyteller.

  — National Post

  Her vivid descriptions of the highs and lows, the people she meets and the real lives she steps into, are at turns, gripping, witty, profound and inspiring.

  — Real Travel magazine (UK)

  Amid the hype that surrounds new books and writers, it’s rare to find one who lives up to the superlatives.… I’ll look forward to future reflections and stories from this talented and sensitive free spirit.

  — Quill & Quire

  An enchanting guide,… Gough is present, vulnerable, and delightful.

  — San Francisco Examiner

  Come away, O human child!

  To the waters and the wild

  With a faery, hand in hand.

  For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

  — William Butler Yeats, “The Stolen Child”

  To Rob and Quinn

  Table of Contents

  Epigraph

  Dedication

  Author's Note

  Pre-Prologue

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Post Script

  Final Word

  Acknowledgements

  About Author

  Author’s Note

  OCD can be a cruel illness. But it is also treatable. My son has been brave enough to let me tell this story openly, understanding that you wouldn’t shy away from telling people you had diabetes so why shy away from telling people you have or once had OCD? He also understands that this book might inspire and motivate others whose lives have been touched by OCD and give them the strength to fight for the lives they deserve.

  A ten-year-old auburn-haired boy gazes out at the choppy slate-blue waters of Lake Ontario. Down the shore he sees men repairing an old red ship in need of paint, a ship that doesn’t fit with the gleaming white sailboats and yachts in the harbour. Behind him, people amble along the boardwalk, some holding hands but mostly they’re too hot for holding hands. Some are lying flat on the grass where it’s cooler. Even though the sun is now slanted low in the sky, everyone is still heat-struck and limp from the day’s sweltering temperatures. Gulls squawk just above the boy’s head, and across the water he sees the chlorophyll green of the Toronto Islands. Suddenly, without warning, he flings a fistful of ashes toward the sky. He watches the ashes as they catch the wind, swirl into a cloud above his head and float out like a silent just-remembered song over the lake. At their highest point in the air, the boy shouts something. He shouts two words that the people on the grass and the people walking by that evening overhear, something that makes them wonder if the boy is all right.

  He shouts, “Fuck off!”

  It’s now 1936 and another ten-year-old auburn-haired boy is also in Toronto, but this boy is walking home from school. The boy is wearing a faded Chicago Cubs baseball cap and is craning his neck to look up into the trees for birds. He suddenly stops walking when a thought occurs to him. It’s a dark thought. It has never entered his mind until this moment. It creeps over him slowly, like fog, until he’s engulfed in an all-encompassing frozen fear. Anyone watching from a window might think the boy is trying to understand a timeless human riddle. They might wonder if the boy is all right. He’s not moving. He’s just standing there.

  Prologue

  People often ask me when I’ll write another travel memoir. I usually say I’m too busy trying to make a living as a writer to write another book, or that most of the stories I write end up online anyway. Mainly, the reason I haven’t written another book about my travels is that since becoming a mother, I don’t travel the way I used to. I haven’t taken off for any year-long escapades to wild out-of-the-way places for years. It’s too risky with a kid. Now I travel to safer, easier places.

  If only.

  My recent journey was to a land far more frightening than any I’d ever visited, a land so foreign and strange that I barely knew where to step, always searching for a map where no map had been made, frantically groping for the exit door, the border crossing back to familiar territory. I barely knew this land, had only heard vague rumours of its existence, smatterings of conversations, an off-hand remark about it once in a Bruce Springsteen interview.

  Really, it was a land I knew nothing about.

  CHAPTER 1

  EMAIL, OCTOBER 17, 2013

  Dear Dr. Jabour,

  My husband and I are desperate for help. Our ten-year-old son has developed severe obsessive compulsive disorder. It began mildly in the spring but in the past couple of months it has ramped up alarmingly. He can no longer function at school, or even get to school since he can no longer walk or ride his bike there without getting stuck on the way. He is continually falling into trances where we can’t reach him and is obsessed with the notion that his dead grandpa will come back t
o life. He performs ever-changing rituals that he believes will bring his grandpa back, despite how many times we’ve told him that nobody returns from the dead. A short time ago, he was a regular, bright, happy-go-lucky kid who climbed trees, rode a unicycle, played soccer, got A’s in school, and loved talking about cars. Now he wants to die. This is a child so wracked with anxiety and strange behaviour that we barely recognize him. We want our son back. Can you help us? We live in Quebec but are willing to come to Los Angeles for treatment.

  Eight months earlier, Wakefield, Quebec: Quinn and I were walking down the steep hill of our gravel road into the village, snow crunching beneath our feet. It was February, when the bleak lid of winter hides the sun, pale and heartless, behind a flat undistinguished grey. I looked at my son trudging behind me and sighed. “You don’t seem very happy these days, Quinn. I know the weather’s lousy but where’s my happy little boy?”

  Sudden tears pooled in his eyes, then spilled down his cheeks. He stopped walking and what he said tore a rip in my chest: “I’m not happy. I used to be. But I haven’t been happy since Grandpa died.”

  Six months had passed since my dad had died and still Quinn was crying himself to sleep at night. His sadness usually descended on him when he was tired, after I’d read him a story at night and he was fighting sleep. But lately, he seemed mournful at random times of the day. We tried everything we could think of to comfort him, told him that some kids, like myself and his dad, didn’t have grandparents we remembered and that Quinn was lucky to have been so close to his grandpa, that grief is the price you pay for loving someone. I told him that he’d always have the memory of his grandpa, even when he himself was old, that nothing you truly love is ever really lost. I told him that his grandpa lived much longer than anyone thought he would, and that he had led a long, happy life until the end. I told him that maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t entirely gone, that maybe he was somehow still around, in a different way, and who was I to say for sure? I would always cringe a little as I said this and didn’t say it often. I didn’t want to say things I wasn’t sure of myself. Saying that kind of thing felt like administering opium to ease his pain. It was easy to see how religions and gods and stories of an afterlife were invented. It seemed to me they must have come about exactly at times like these, to spare our children and ourselves from anguish.

  But none of what I said seemed to help much. What Quinn claimed he was most sad about was that he never got to say goodbye. “If only I’d known the last time we visited him that he was going to die in two weeks, I could have told him goodbye.” It was such a wrenching thought that he could hardly get the words out, his face crumpling as he cried inconsolably. All I could do was hug him and think back to our week-long visit last July. One night after dinner my dad had been sketching a baseball diamond at the kitchen table and — with this Jimmy Stewart drawl — he’d been teaching Quinn some baseball rules. On another day they’d actually played catch outside beside my mother’s rose bushes like they’d done when Quinn was younger, although by then my dad was eighty-six with a wonky heart and had to take things easy. Quinn said later it was like throwing and catching a ball in slow motion. It was also the visit when my dad had mentioned that Quinn’s side-swept bangs reminded him a little of Justin Bieber and we all busted out laughing at the revelation that my dad, never adept at recognizing faces or knowing pop culture, not only knew who Justin Bieber was but had taken in the rockstar’s hairstyle.

  On the morning we left, as we were packing for the seven-hour road trip back to our home in Wakefield, Quebec, my mother had called out from the kitchen, “Where’s Quinn?” and I replied that Quinn was out on the lawn playing croquet.

  “Quinn’s out on the lawn doing cocaine?” said my dad, chuckling from the living room where he was reading the Globe and Mail. My dad’s hearing was terrible. He was forever mishearing things and quoting them back to us. Quinn always thought this was a riot.

  Moments later we were all out in the driveway with the car packed, my husband Rob bungee-cording our bikes and Quinn’s unicycle to the bike rack. As I hugged and kissed my dad goodbye, did I imagine that he held me a moment longer than usual? I remember a moment of confusion in my dad’s watery-blue eyes, as if he wanted to say something but stopped himself. Did he know something? The thought crossed my mind at the time, as it often did, that this could be the last time I’d see him. In the previous year my dad had become alarmingly thin, a diminished frail twin of the strong, handsome, athletic man I’d known all my life. Of course I knew Quinn wouldn’t be thinking of death. Death had never touched him in the nine years of his life. He’d never even had a pet die because we’d never had one. Should I have mentioned something to Quinn that day? Told him to give his grandpa a second hug just in case?

  Two weeks later my mother called. We’d been sweating through a heat wave most of the summer and Quinn and I were about to bike down the hill to cannonball into the river off our neighbourhood dock when the phone rang. Her voice sounded small and faraway. “Your dad’s had a stroke. He’s in the hospital. When he woke up this morning he sat up and asked if he sounded funny. I told him he did.” As my mother spoke, my heart began beating so violently I could feel it in my throat. I’d been dreading this call for years, had always wondered how it would go, what the circumstances would be. “So I went to call an ambulance and while I was on the phone in the kitchen I heard a crash. He’d gotten up and fallen. They took him to the hospital. Laurie, they don’t think he’ll come back. They think he’s in a coma.”

  “I’m coming,” I tell her. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  For reasons that would seem strange to me later, instead of all three of us driving down to my hometown of Guelph, Ontario, where my parents lived, I decided I’d take a bus there by myself. I don’t know what my line of thinking was. Perhaps I was in denial, thinking my dad would get better and I needn’t bother Rob and Quinn with the long drive. Or perhaps I thought this was too private or intimate or sad to share. I felt as if I were free-falling. Seeing my fellow passengers on the bus and all the people out the window carrying on with normal life astounded me. How could they be so happy? How could they be so oblivious to death and despair?

  The next four days were a blur of hospital visits, sleepless nights, and trying to console my despondent, heartsick, nerve-wracked mother who hadn’t slept for more than a few hours since my father had had his stroke. I never saw my father conscious in those days and never would again, but somehow, holding his papery pale hand in the hospital room and talking to him calmed the rudderless tilt-a-whirl that was rampaging inside me. I was able to say goodbye to my lovely kind dad who had been such a colourful influence on my life. He was a geographer and a lover of maps and any road leading to some place new. In the 1940s when he was in his teens and early twenties, he’d hitchhiked around North America by himself, usually sitting on the outside rumble seat if there was one — better views that way, he always said. Then, in the 1950s, he’d spent years tramping around Europe — when a bottle of wine in Spain was a dime, a meal was a nickel — and canoe-tripping in Northern Ontario. Every summer when I was a kid, my parents would pack up our tent trailer and family car — a rusty Ford Falcon station wagon that they’d had for years — and we’d set off on a camping trip. We’d go to the Maritimes, the Canadian Prairies, New England, the Great Lakes, the Rockies, Quebec, the Appalachians. Every summer was different. My sister, who was older, hated that car and those camping trips — she always wanted to stay at the Holiday Inn — but I didn’t. Those camping trips, and my dad, cultivated my love of the open road.

  My dad had written a letter years earlier saying that under no circumstances did he want any life support machines keeping him alive if he were beyond the point of reasonable repair, so we honoured his wishes and let him die naturally. By the time I got back home, and Rob and Quinn were picking me up at the bus station in Ottawa, I knew he’d only have a couple more days left since his brain was so
damaged. On the car ride home, I turned to face Quinn and tell him his grandpa was gone.

  “I know,” he said, before his face crumpled into an anguish I’d never seen on him before. I crawled over the seat into the back to hold him and he sobbed the entire half-hour drive home to Wakefield, his small warm body juddering against mine the whole way. He didn’t stop crying that night until he was asleep.

  The death of his grandpa seemed to plunge Quinn into an existential crisis. His grief was heart-wrenching, intense, and alarming. Other than being shy, like my dad, and sensitive, Quinn had always been a fairly normal kid — I once even lamented jokingly to my friend Tina that Quinn was too normal, meaning he didn’t have much of a zany artistic bent, although he liked to draw, and could be truly funny in a dry-witted way. Mostly, he loved running and playing soccer; knew the make, model, and year of every vehicle that passed; had gobbled up all the Harry Potter books, and skied with his grade four friends after school at the local ski hill. He had been a regular happy kid. So who was this depressive child weeping into his pillow every night? Was it death itself that terrified him? The stark unimaginable realization that this is all going to end some day for all of us? Was he afraid of his own death? Of ours?

  “No,” he kept insisting, when I asked. “I’m sad about Grandpa.”

  Somewhere or somehow we’d missed something in helping Quinn deal with his grandpa’s death. Six months after my dad died, I realized that Quinn was doing his grieving all on his own. He was alone in his mourning. My mother was also deeply grief-stricken — she and my dad had been married for fifty-three years — but since she lived a day’s drive away, we only saw her every couple of months. As for myself, I’d been weirdly fine. Sometimes I thought that grief would sneak up on me once the shock wore off. But I came to realize that I wasn’t in shock. I seemed to have fully accepted my dad’s death.