Finding Susan was cathartic. All the tense excitement and bravado of my illicit quest dissolved into a surge of grief and sorrow for her, for my parents, for what could not be spoken and for my own loss of a sister I should have known. I left flowers on the spot and returned only once in a spirit of botanical sabotage to plant miniature bulbs furtively over her grave. I’ve not seen the result, but I imagine the snowdrops and crocus breaking through in her initials, the scylla multiplying and spreading into a blue pond.
What I learned from this experience went far beyond my own response. It incurred absolute fury from some family members and open thanks from others. I did not dare to tell my father, and when I tried to talk with my mother she stopped me, said she did not want to know. I discovered that just as there is no certain recipe for love, there is no single remedy for grief. My parents did not do the wrong thing by letting Susie go, they simply did what they were able to do, perhaps what they were counselled to do at the time.
Janice Kulyk Keefer writes: “You’re born with family like a chain around your neck: metal rings, each one kissing, biting into the next. And even if you break a link, the chain doesn’t dissolve. It just sinks under your skin, you wear it without knowing.” Susie was the broken link in my ancestral necklace and finding her let it rise to the surface, catch the light and shine.
What I am learning not only involves my mother, my father, my sister, but also affects my relationship with my children. I am not my mother. My search for Susie disclosed my very different needs and ways. I could not respond to Susie’s absence in my mother’s manner, and I see now that I cannot expect my own children to respond in mine. It has nothing to do with right or wrong; it’s about difference.
As adolescents, my daughter and son had far more than their share of grief from a rash of untimely deaths at their school, from all manner of causes. They manage the pain of their losses individually, discussing it, or not. What they feel is personal and legitimate, and I must listen when they want to talk, and be still when they don’t. I offer the things that help me, like poetry and music, and try to recognize and accept their personal elixirs of physical exertion, creativity and risk. I know that we react uniquely and not necessarily as we are taught.
From my sister’s ashes rose not a single phoenix but a multiplicity of fledgling possibilities. Finding her fragile remains healed a painful wound, sealed a mysterious hole and exposed a missing link in my lineage. I have learned that my quest provided not what I once believed my parents wilfully withheld, but rather what I now realize they were absolutely unable to give.
It took me some effort to find Susan. Now that my parents are dead and the chance to hear their narratives is gone forever, I realize it was the actual search for my sister that settled me. The story never would have satisfied me coming from reluctant tellers. I know I had to do that work alone.
note
Janice Kulyk Keefer, The Green Library. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1996.
I was a feckless young woman and people did not expect much of me. I knew this. I had seen surprise and immense relief in my father’s eyes when he realized I was marrying the loving, steady young man I began dating at seventeen. On the faces of my kindly in-laws I recognized unvoiced incredulity: “Can our intelligent son really want to marry this callow girl?” When I became pregnant, I sensed that my doctor had similar reservations regarding my maturity. He agreed to replace a general anaesthetic with something new called a saddle block, but gently cautioned me that childbirth might not be as simple as I expected from my reading of the book Childbirth Without Pain.
As it happened my son’s birth was very near painless. Healthy, crying and covered in white mucus he was whisked out of the delivery room before I could hold him or even really look at him. Later, back in my hospital bed, rested, washed, creamed and bedecked in a white eyelet bed jacket made for the occasion, I felt exceedingly pleased with myself. Despite what others had expected of me, despite what I myself had feared, I had succeeded in giving birth to a baby! Moreover, I had accomplished this amazing feat without making a fool of myself in some stupid, altogether childish way. If I could do that I could do anything! On that bright morning I existed inside a bubble of elation, my whole being filled with a sense of success, of power and certainty that I had never felt before—and would never feel again.
When the nurse brought my baby, rolled tightly in yellow flannel, it was clear he did not share my exuberance. He looked exhausted, his face vexed with worry. In my arms he felt weightless yet stiff and unyielding, not settling against my body as babies are supposed to. As soon as I unfolded the blanket my son began to whimper, his long-fingered hands flailing the air. Loose skin hung from the pencil-thin bones of his arms and legs, as if he had recently lost weight. I covered him and under directions from the nurse tried to get him to take my breast. While we struggled I studied his small worried face, looked into his milky unfocused eyes and touched the soft pulsing spot where his skull had not yet fused. Terrified by his fragility, I felt my euphoria vanish as if it had never been.
Despite our best efforts over the next two days, my baby and I did not seem able to get the hang of breast-feeding. He lost weight and I was frantic with worry. One of the nurses told me I was trying too hard. Later, as we were leaving, she passed me a book called Canadian Mother and Child and assured me everything would work out when we got home. Her voice was so kind that I knew she really did not believe what she was saying.
Back home my husband and I could not bring ourselves to put this tiny creature into the big second-hand crib I had painted pink and blue. Instead, we took a drawer from our bureau and, padding it with blankets, made a bassinet. We moved this improvised crib from room to room so that our baby would never be out of our sight. He occupied every moment of that day and most of the night. Whenever he cried I tried to feed him and when he would neither suck nor settle down one of us walked the floor with him. We began a record of how much milk he took (wild guesses), how much time he spent sleeping (accurate to the second), how many diapers we changed, the condition and colour of same. Our house became warm, and except for his crying, very quiet. The air thickened, rooms took on the smell of milk and baby powder, the antiseptic smell of the diaper pail, the fluffy smell of new flannelette. I, who had no memory of the babies I had observed taking up all this time and space, was stunned.
That winter, in 1959, was a season of blizzards and bitter cold. The baby and I hardly left the house. He took all my time, all day, every day. In a pattern that would continue for six weeks, he began crying piteously around four every afternoon, a thin mewing sound that would go on until ten or eleven at night. When his father came home he would rock our son or walk the floor with him while I took a shower. When the baby finally slept we still hovered, holding our palms to his mouth, reassured by the soft puff of his breath.
I think I am writing about the arrival of love and fear—and the terrible knowledge that both would last as long as I lived. But in that blurred, sleep-deprived winter I did not know that—could no more analyze what I was experiencing than a drowning woman might analyze the sea sweeping her under. Never had I focused so intensely on anything as I did on that tiny scrap of life. Never had I felt so responsible for, so linked to, yet so sadly, hopelessly, out of tune with another living creature.
One of my neighbours had a baby three months before I did. I remember watching her bring her son outside, marvelling at how sturdy he looked, how comfortable she seemed holding him, the assurance with which she plopped him down in a carriage while she hung clothes on the line. I told myself that if my baby lived to be three months old he would be safe and I would be like the woman across the way.
I gave up on Canadian Mother and Child and bought Dr. Spock’s book. I gave up on breast-feeding too, and changed to formula, boiling bottles until the house filled with steam, walls dripped and one night two pictures crashed to the floor. Days passed, weeks passed, our baby gained weight, was christened, became Greg, became cheerful and be
autiful.
A year after our son was born George and I had our second child, a daughter. By then I could bathe and dress two babies in twenty minutes. I could rock one baby in the carriage, feed one baby in my lap, drink tea and read a book—all at the same time. Childcare still took every minute of my day but I’d mastered the appearance of competence. Inwardly I was sick with fear, seeing danger in things I had never before given a thought to: poison plants and sharp knives, red food colouring, dangling wires, bug spray, careless drivers, ropes and broken glass and deep water.
This was in the early sixties and much of the anxiety I felt for my children was rooted in the pernicious mindset of the times: talk of our government accepting American nuclear warheads for Canadian-based missiles, school children being taught a duck-and-cover manoeuvre that was supposed to protect them in case bombs fell, talk of evil madmen (theirs and ours) pushing the button, a doomsday clock that kept ticking toward midnight—zero hour—that yellow sign with its ominous black logo and the words “Nuclear Free Zone” posted in public places. Overriding all these harbingers of doom was a male voice that spoke to me several times each day on CBC Radio—between programs designed for “easy daytime listening.”
“Radiation doesn’t seep. It settles,” the voice said—words that still give me the shivers. After this reassuring tag line the voice would continue with tips on “how to protect your family against the potential danger of nuclear war.” I must store tinned food, fresh water and first aid supplies in a windowless room. I would also need a battery-operated radio and containers for waste. The voice was male, calm, sure. A reasonable voice from which reasonable women in kitchens all across Canada were, I supposed, expected to accept direction.
I did. I made lists and without saying a word to anyone began storing things—powdered milk, candles, matches, a flashlight. I bought two large plastic garbage cans with lids—but when the alarm went off would there be time to fill them with water? And once filled how would I get them down to the windowless room in our basement? The man did not say how much time I would have to get my babies and our supplies to the room. And what about my husband at work downtown?
I read everything I could find about nuclear war, including We of Nagasaki, a collection of eyewitness accounts of what happened when the second atom bomb was dropped on houses and people. From that book I discovered that radiation does indeed seep—into earth and water, into human flesh, into blood and bone. Although the CBC voice was not telling me the truth about radiation I had no doubt he was speaking the truth about the possibility that nuclear bombs would fall on Canadian cities.
Nagasaki was in Japan, on an island. It would make sense to madmen to bomb an island, because the radiation was contained, the population contained. Island water and soil are separated from mainland water and soil. Newfoundland is an island—an island no one but us cares much about. Russia could scare the hell out of all of North America, could bring the president of the United States to any bargaining table just by dropping one nuclear bomb on Newfoundland. I thought about these things before I went to sleep and when I woke up, I thought about them whenever I heard the CBC man and while I was getting meals, ironing my husband’s shirts, folding diapers. I thought about these things when I spooned food into the mouths of my babies and when I watched them sleep.
In the spring of 1961, about six months before my third child was born, a group of CIA-trained exiles stormed the Bay of Pigs, a beach in Cuba—and the hands of the doomsday clock showed three minutes to midnight. Days later a yellow booklet was distributed to eleven cities in Canada deemed to be likely targets for nuclear attack. One was dropped in our mailbox: 11 Steps to Survival was printed on the cover.
Each of the eleven steps had lists: there was a list of various sounds sirens would make to alert us, a list of ways to improvise a blast shelter in your basement, how to build a fallout shelter (Home Improvement Loans were available) places to hide if you were outdoors (culverts and cars were suggested as I recall), ways to get rid of radioactive dust and much more. Each facing page had black and red illustrations. People and houses were black, the mushroom-shaped explosion, the radioactive fallout and the firestorm that swept over the people and houses were red. There was page after page of things that must be stored in the shelter. Not just food and water, things I had never considered: shovels, an axe, road maps, a fire extinguisher, a kerosene cooker, bedding and diapers, legal papers, medicine, first aid supplies. That list went on and on for pages. There was a drawing of a family, a mother, a father, and a boy and girl, in what seemed to be their kitchen. Father was sitting at the table checking things on a list, mother was packing things into a box, sister was holding a first aid kit, brother seemed to be testing a flashlight. There was no sight of the red mushroom-shaped cloud shown on other pages, but father had a red shirt and mother a red dress with red high-heeled shoes.
I remember staring at the family for a long time. They did not seem upset or even worried. The artist had given each face a look of calm assurance, almost pleasure—they might have been packing for a picnic. I remember crying a little before I dropped the booklet into the garbage. I pushed it well down so I couldn’t see it. After that I stopped storing food and used the plastic cans for garbage. Unlike the placid-faced mother in the drawing, I did not want my darlings to come up from that windowless room into a post-nuclear world. I began to think about how I could kill all of us when the time came.
I never spoke of this to anyone, not even to my husband. No one knew I was out of my mind—maybe every mother in Canada was. Maybe we should consider a class action suit against the Canadian government, for deliberately induced insanity.
That time has passed. When you love, it is hard not to hope, and little by little my hope overcame my fear.
The media image that haunted me in the sixties was that mushroom cloud; today I am haunted by long lines of dispossessed women and their starving children. What I feared, they are living through. I cannot see these women without feeling ashamed, without marvelling at their power to love and to hope—look how they keep walking through that vast desolation, holding on to their lives and the lives of their children!
Through an accident of geography I have been spared their fate—spared to see my babies grow into healthy adults, spared to become a grandmother. Yet I still have regrets, still feel guilt about any shadows my fear may have cast on the childhoods of my children. I wish now that I could have rejoiced more back then “in the beauty of the earth and the beauty of the skies, in the love that from our birth over and about us lies,” as the old hymn says.
Such regret is, I suspect, the common fate of all who live into old age. Now I try to rejoice more—and try not to think too harshly of that feckless, fear-ridden young mother who didn’t have the sense to turn off the radio and go out to play.
On December 9, 1980, my boyfriend and I woke to the news on the radio that John Lennon had been shot to death the night before by a deranged fan. And my first thought, unbidden, was this: Somehow, some way, by the end of the day John Lennon’s death is going to be my fault.
And so it turned out to be. Despite my efforts, I can no longer recall my boyfriend’s mad skein of logic: Lennon was murdered in spirit by stupid people like me who didn’t appreciate his music, couldn’t grasp the beauty of “the man, this great man, this fine man” (he often burbled on about males he worshipped—a bad sign) who had done so much for contemptible fools like me. Or maybe I had bought Mark Chapman the bullets. Who knows?
I was used to being belittled by my boyfriend. What was unique on this occasion was that I predicted the attack. It was my first unconscious rebellion at the abuse I’d had hurled at me for the four years since I was seventeen and fell hard for this glamorous older man with long blond hair (he was twenty-six, a drummer in a band and had read Thomas Mann). With a hideous recognition, I watched my prediction come true.
Chapters in the Dick Tracy adventure stories for British boys in the 1940s were apt to end with Dick trussed
in a cave as the pirates ill-got their booty. The next chapter always began, “With one bound Dick was free,” kind of like Jack Bauer in 24 after a commercial.
This was my chapter, on another continent and a later era, with dangers domestic and personal that Dick hadn’t yet sussed out. “With one insult too many, Heather was free.” Every woman glued to an abusive man has that sick-making epiphany, that moment when she realizes she must escape the monster.
I call him Fuckface because I cannot bear to say his name aloud. Okay, it was Giuliano. At least that’s what he told me. His real name was Jim, but he felt he was more of a Giuliano. Here’s a tip. Avoid men who rococo up their names.
I tread carefully for, sadly, he is probably still alive. I always imagine him winning a Darwin Award for boiling himself to death in a giant shrimp pot or climbing into a wood chipper on idle. No such luck. I think he lives on the West Coast now, piddling out a living on something for which he has no talent. He was entirely untalented, with one exception. He was skilled at seeking out naive, middle-class young women who had been raised to be sweet, and patiently nibbling away at their self-esteem until it resembled a flatfish. He wasn’t louche so much as seedy. That’s how a woman knows she’s found a FF. She sees “louche” as glam; everyone else just calls it grotty.
I was a kid. I was dumb. I didn’t get smart until much later, when I was about twenty-four and even then it was a near thing. When I met FF, I was in my last year of high school and Steve Tyler, Peter Frampton and the appalling Leo Sayer were my soundtrack. Underage, I met this guy in a bar, liked his long hair and the cut of his jeans, and in an act of rebellion that turned my parents into emotional auto parts—they self-dismantled—ran away to a cheap motel with a nudie bar called something like Used Tits or Strip Mall in Scarborough’s scabby outer reaches, and lost my virginity to his, I now realize, tiny willy.
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