by Laurie Gough
Our final stop that day was the Humber River Valley, at an old woods where my dad and Uncle Bill used to build forts and go bird-watching. My cousin Kathleen, along with my dad, had already scattered my uncle Bill’s ashes there a few years before. Now, escaping the heat of the city, we walked into a cool and deep-green grove of deciduous forest, the dirt trail swallowing the sound of our footsteps. Quinn was on his unicycle, which he hadn’t had a chance to ride since Wakefield. He zoomed ahead of us on the trail.
Immediately upon entering these woods I felt that here, more than the Blue Jays field or my dad’s high school track, was where my dad’s ashes should be. I think my dad felt most himself when he was outside and he had instilled in me a love of the natural world. I’d always felt at home in the woods, had grown up a stone’s throw from a forest where we neighbourhood kids would spend full days playing manhunt, climbing trees, building forts, and searching for clues to solve some elaborate crime we pretended had taken place decades earlier, a secret game of ours that went on for years. On fall weekends, my dad would sometimes take us hiking to different parts of the Bruce Trail, Canada’s oldest hiking trail, and when I got older I started backpacking and camping on my own. And now in Wakefield, I actually lived in the woods.
“I found a good place!” said Quinn, his face glowing. He had ridden back to tell us about a steep hill just ahead.
“You mean a good place for Grandpa’s ashes or for you to ride down a hill?”
“Both!” he shouted back.
We followed Quinn down the trail until we came to a place where the trees were bigger, their solid trunks like an army, the branches like hands holding up the blue city sky. Warblers sang from above and I wondered if they might be descended from the same warblers that darted around here in the thirties, when my dad and uncle regularly tramped through these woods as kids with binoculars. They’d been bird-watchers — something some kids used to be back then — knowing almost as much about birds as they did about baseball, kind of like Quinn knowing the make and model of every car. I fished out containers of ashes and started passing them around. Kathleen found the exact old tree where she’d thrown her dad’s ashes and we scattered some of my dad’s there, too. I gazed down to where my dad’s ashes were now smudging the black earth grey. Never in my life had I considered what scattering someone’s ashes could actually feel like in a bone-deep way. The idea of the two brothers reuniting eight decades later in the woods of their childhood gave me a hushed feeling of joy I could store in my chest. I stood there a long time, in front of that tree, thinking about them as boys and the men they became — my genius manic-depressive uncle, the swaggering athletic historian who could hold any audience rapt by talking intelligently for hours about any decade of the past five hundred years and end by saying, To hell with it all, I think I’ll read some Yeats and then kill myself. Anyone want a Valium? And my dad, less hip, less Kerouac-blue, but always caring toward his kid brother and always, always kinder.
When I offered Quinn a container of ashes, he shook his head no again, but didn’t take off on his unicycle, either. Instead, he watched carefully as I tossed some ashes at the foot of an old wrinkled maple, a maple so sturdy and warm to the touch I imagined it had a heartbeat. I also threw some ashes around the base of a sapling nearby. “These ashes will sink into the dirt and become part of the trees. It’s the cycle of life, Quinn. Grandpa will live on in this little tree, and in this old one. So a part of him will never really die.”
“Really, that’s true?” I turned and saw that Quinn was looking directly at me. I nodded. He held out his hand. “Can I have a container?”
Along with the container of ashes, he also took a camera and went off alone down the trail. Later that night, I saw on the camera that he’d thrown ashes around five different trees and had taken photos of each. My favourite was the photo of a tree he’d found with an ancient heart carved into it. He’d smeared ashes over the heart.
I was hoping that something had clicked in Quinn’s brain that day, that an understanding about the circle of life and death on Earth had penetrated his heart, that perhaps he was finally making peace with his grandpa’s death. I was crossing my fingers.
The next day we all went to Red Lobster for lunch. Along with having facial recognition disorder, my dad’s taste buds also seemed to have a recognition disorder. They didn’t recognize good food. Or rather, all food, even overly salty, sickly sweet, and processed food was equally delicious to my dad. A meal at Red Lobster was a big treat for him so it had to be part of the Grandpa Tour. After we consumed the chain restaurant’s abundant offerings (not easy for me because I’m vegan) we snuck some of my dad’s ashes into a planter on the way out. Later, I realized that although the plant looked real, it was probably plastic, which meant the dirt was also fake, which meant those ashes are still there now, and for eternity. I think my dad would find that hilarious.
The heat that day wasn’t bearable for my mother and sister so they stayed at the hotel while Rob, Quinn, and I explored an exhibit of the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei at Toronto City Hall. I kept noticing that Quinn was still hopping and skipping and jumping his way around the city; he was still doing the twisty thing with his neck but now he looked like he had ADHD, too. It wasn’t normal for him to be so physically agitated. He was the opposite of an ADHD kid. My friend had once called him the calmest, most chilled-out, easy-going kid she’d ever met. And it had been true. As a little kid he would sit for hours playing Lego or trains by himself, wholly absorbed. But now in Toronto he was jerking his body around and throwing his limbs in every direction like a street theatre performer on speed. It was unnerving.
At Harbourfront we stood on the boardwalk overlooking Lake Ontario and saw that the setting sun was doing something orange and violet and spectacular with the air pollution. We watched the bobbing sailboats looking like toys, the lush green maples of the Toronto Islands, and the faces of the heat-bedraggled people who strolled by us or lay sprawled on the lawn.
“Are we really doing this?” whispered Quinn, eyeing the grassy slope behind us. “There’s a lot of people. What will they think?”
“Who cares?” I said, looking around, secretly a little gun-shy now that the moment was here. I dug into my bag for more ashes. When we each had our handful, we hesitated, getting up our nerve.
“On three,” said Rob. We counted, slowly. Finally, we threw our arms up in the air, letting loose the thousands of tiny grey-white pebbles that were my dad. They soared skyward, arced over the lake, and got caught in the breeze as we shouted, “Fuck off!” louder and with more gusto than we’d ever shouted it.
Returning the phrase back to its birthplace.
People gaped. We started laughing, even a little hysterically. Quinn was laughing the hardest. That’s when he asked for more ashes. So he could throw them on his own.
CHAPTER 4
Shortly after returning to Wakefield, I got an email from a photographer who happened to take Quinn’s picture while we were in Guelph after the Grandpa Tour. He’d been hired as the official photographer for a downtown event involving modern dancers performing in Guelph’s fountain splash pad, followed by a concert where the audience had danced in the water too. This photographer had happened to see a kid riding a unicycle that night and thought it would make a good shot. When I looked at the picture in my email, I couldn’t help noticing Quinn touching his watch even though he was riding his unicycle. I knew he’d been doing this since Rob’s mother’s burial, but I’d tried to dismiss it, telling myself it wasn’t a big deal. But now it had even been captured digitally and I couldn’t ignore it any more. What was going on with all his strange new behaviours and the evening-off?
Lying in bed with my tablet that warm summer night, I decided to Google, “kids making things even” to see what came up. I doubted I’d get anything since those words together seemed so arbitrary, so unusual. But I was shocked to find link after link with tha
t very phrase, including a link that led to something called “symmetry rituals.” A crack in my brain started to form. Symmetry rituals. That’s exactly what Quinn was doing, performing rituals so everything was symmetrical on both sides of his body. Like my stepping on the sidewalk cracks. I found a forum where a teenage girl was describing how if she tapped her left forearm, she’d have to tap her right forearm. It was getting too complicated and distracting, she said, and her friends at school were starting to think it was weird. I couldn’t believe the words I was reading. This was just like Quinn. How could something so seemingly random and bizarre be so ubiquitous? People’s brains were forcing them to do this curious thing they felt they simply had to do. It wasn’t just my own kid making everything “even” but enough people that there were entire websites about it. I looked up at the url of one of the websites and inhaled a deep startled breath. It was a website for obsessive compulsive disorder.
Next I came across a test from the OCD Center of Los Angeles, which had a checklist to ascertain whether or not your child might have obsessive compulsive disorder. I scanned the list. The first five traits dealt with cleanliness, hand washing, and compulsive tidying of bedrooms. Quinn’s hands were almost always dirty. I was forever reminding him to wash them before eating. As for his bedroom, the floor was a landmine of Legos, toy cars, and Archie comics. But the sixth trait jumped off the page at me: “If my child does things on one side of his/her body, he/she often needs to do a similar action on the other side in order to make things “equal,” or “even,” or “symmetrical.”
Could Quinn have OCD? I barely knew what OCD was but I knew I’d be spending the rest of the day and many days to come finding out. Within that very hour I learned that OCD is anxiety-related, often genetic, and, in children, can be triggered by trauma: parental divorce, bullying, the death of a loved one. My heart lurched. Death of a loved one. I went on to read that many kids can have mild OCD tendencies, as perhaps I’d had with the sidewalks and Quinn had had in Mexico. But with me it had withered and disappeared, as I thought it had with Quinn, back in Mexico, though I didn’t know then that it was OCD. But all along it had been there inside him, waiting to uncoil and rear its serpent head if it got the chance.
And to think I’d been relieved lately that Quinn’s nightly crying into his pillow had subsided. It had reminded me of when he was an infant and I noticed one day his incessant crying from colic had miraculously stopped. Suddenly I had a smiling quiet baby instead of one we had to wrap in a towel and duct-tape to the top of the warm, rumbling dryer to get him to stop crying and sleep. And now, years later, I had made myself believe that the Grandpa Tour had eased something in his troubled mind. At what point, I wondered, did his mournful crying morph into OCD? Was it a single indecipherable instant or was it more gradual, like the day you realize that one season has finally surrendered to another and you didn’t see it happen? Somehow his winter of sorrow had silently slipped into his spring of OCD. Why had he stopped crying for his grandpa and started instead to want everything to be balanced, even, to feel just right? Lately, he’d started a new behaviour in which every time he entered a room, he’d knock his elbow against each of the four walls, to make things even. Was it a chemical change in his brain, searching to control the uncontrollable? Perhaps death had simply been too overwhelming for his young mind to contemplate and his brain had found these behaviours the best available coping mechanism for unfathomable loss, loss that triggered fears about future losses and his inability to prevent them. Was he physically saving himself from drowning in his own grief?
A thousand thoughts tumbled around in my skull.
CHAPTER 5
Everyone was lined along the riverbank waiting for it to appear. Since it was July 1, the sun was blinding as we gazed over the shimmering water, and making out a ramshackle pirate ship in the distance wasn’t easy. But then some kid shouted, “There it is!” and everyone squinted harder. The kid was right. The Wakefield Raft, constructed new and more creatively every year by the village teens, was sailing down the Gatineau River toward us, just as the Canada Day Parade was starting behind us. Already we heard drumming and singing from the floats, and, as always, leading the parade on his upright red bicycle was the lovely older man known to all in Wakefield as the Village Poet. As every year, a chicken tea cozy adorned the Village Poet’s head. The Wakefield Granny float was next, filled with a dozen laughing grandmothers who had started an international movement to support grandmothers taking care of AIDS orphans in Africa. Next came the SOS float where they were shouting, “Save our Spring!” As a member myself, we’d been trying to protect the town’s source of spring water, and our mock funerals, marches, and benefits were popular, almost as much as the Save Our River rallies to stop a septic sludge plant from polluting the river. Wakefielders had won that fight and the Gatineau River had been saved, and now the teenagers on the pirate ship were plunging from the top deck straight into the river’s chilly blue depths. We all cheered for the kids, for the river, for Wakefield.
“There’s Quinn!” I called to Rob a few minutes later. Quinn was riding his unicycle in the parade, weaving in and around the floats. I barely had time to look up to wave at him because I’d set up an iced cappuccino stand on the sidewalk. Just when Quinn passed, I was inundated with thirsty parade goers.
Quinn was still wearing, and habitually touching, my dad’s watch, and still evening-off, but other than that, it seemed his OCD was waning. I was thinking that if he did have OCD, it was mild.
A week or so after Canada Day, we visited my friends Kevin and Jack in Northumberland County to help them add a wing to their straw bale home. Quinn had so much fun threading the long needles with twine and then through the haystacks, and riding on tractors, that his OCD was virtually nonexistent that weekend. I wondered if it would soon disappear entirely.
“Look, Mummy, I stopped!” It was August and Quinn had just returned from two weeks of summer camp. Standing in our open doorway, the pine-scented air of the sultry summer night rushing in with him, he reached up to touch his left cheek. “See?”
He didn’t reach for the other cheek.
“Did you notice? I’m over it. I don’t need to even-off any more!” He threw himself at me for a long hug and I breathed in deeply the campfire smell of his hair.
“That’s fantastic, Quinn! I’m so happy for you! I missed you!”
Rob had been right. I’d been worrying too much. I could put away all those books about OCD that I’d been reading. Somehow, he’d gotten over OCD on his own, at camp. Relief flowed through my every vein.
Until the next morning, when I tried lifting his backpack off the floor. “Quinn, this backpack weighs more than you do. What’s in here, rocks?”
“Yeah, maybe a few,” said Quinn, distractedly, as he tied his shoelaces to go out and ride his bike.
“I was kidding. You actually have rocks in here?” When I looked inside, I felt a catch in my chest. Rocks of all sizes filled the pack to the brim. “I don’t get it. These aren’t colourful or interesting shapes. They’re just boring grey rocks. Can we throw them outside?”
“No!” Quinn launched himself protectively on top of the pack. “I collected them all at camp. I’m never letting them go! I can’t!” He gave me a fierce pleading look, one I didn’t recognize on him at all. I stared back at him. A different sort of rock had just lodged itself in my stomach.
I tried to let it drop, but it seemed too much like hoarding, afraid of letting things go. Wasn’t that another OCD tendency? Also, he was wearing my dad’s watch again. He hadn’t taken it to camp, preferring to keep it safe in a box somewhere only he knew about in his bedroom. At breakfast he’d told me that when he’d been lonely at camp, he’d think of the hidden watch in its special box and it had made him feel less lonely. It reminded me of an autobiography I’d read years earlier called Memories, Dreams, Reflections by the psychiatrist Carl Jung. When Jung was about Quinn’s age he’d ca
rved a little man out of a wooden ruler. He gave this little “manikin” a bed, a coat, and a special painted stone, and placed the manikin in a pencil case. Jung wrote:
Secretly I took the case to the forbidden attic at the top of the house (forbidden because the floorboards were worm-eaten and rotten) and hid it with great satisfaction on one of the beams under the roof — for no one must ever see it! I knew that not a soul would ever find it there. No one could discover my secret and destroy it. I felt safe, and the tormenting sense of being at odds with myself was gone. In all difficult situations, whenever I had done something wrong or my feelings had been hurt, or when my father’s irritability or my mother’s invalidism oppressed me, I thought of my carefully bedded-down and wrapped-up manikin and his smooth, prettily colored stone.
It made sense that there was something comforting in secreting away a treasure in a box, and that in thinking of the hidden watch when he was lonely, Quinn was keeping safe his connection to his grandpa. Yet, when he wore the watch now, I kept seeing glimpses of him whispering to it. I just couldn’t catch what he was saying.
A couple of days later I went to see a concert at the Black Sheep Inn in Wakefield, a popular bar where well-known Canadian musicians play. I happened to be standing near the back when a woman I recognized asked me how I was. Sometimes it’s comforting to pour your heart out to a stranger, so over the blaring of the singing and drums I ended up telling her my worries, explaining that my son was having trouble letting go of his grandpa. She asked his name, then the name of my dad. It seemed an odd line of questioning. When I told her their names, she touched my arm, looked meaningfully into my eyes, and said, “I’m picking up something here. Spirit is telling me something about them.”