CHAPTER 21
always there
The real religion of the world comes from women much more than from men — from mothers most of all, who carry the key of our souls in their bosoms.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Professor at the Breakfast-Table”
After I read Our Bodies, Ourselves, I called my mother, who had had a bladder infection called chronic cystitis almost all of her adult life. She had been on antibiotics for decades. I called her and said that women talked about the illness and together they had found a way to prevent its recurrence. I said drink cranberry juice, wear cotton underwear and when home wear no underwear with a skirt. That way no germs build up in a moist area. Never take a bath, only shower. I said, “If you are having sex, get out of bed the second you finish and empty your bladder.”
She said, “Sex? Are you kidding? I’m Catholic.”
She took these suggestions and within two weeks her cystitis was gone and never returned.
Since her doctor never once told her any of these tips over a thirty-year period, I decided to call him and tell him so he could pass on the information to his other patients. Isn’t it our job to spread the word, especially to those who can actually help others? I doubted he was reading Our Bodies, Ourselves on the weekend. Not many seventy-year-old men pick up books whose covers have women holding up a huge Women Unite banner.
Over the phone, I gave him the information about preventing cystitis recurrence. When I was finished, he said, “Cathy, I took this call because I thought this was an emergency. Everyone has his own folklore. You needn’t have spread it long distance during work hours.”
I said, “You know, I hoped you might be grateful. Clearly you have never had cystitis or vaginitis and have no idea what pain it can cause. I guess it’s doctors like you who inspired a group of women to write a book called Our Bodies, Ourselves. Note they didn’t call it Our Bodies, Our Doctor.”
“I don’t think we have to worry about your mother’s cystitis when she has leukemia. Or have you called me with a cure for that too?” After a long silence on my end, he said, “Now, if you don’t mind, I’ll get back to my patients, who, however prosaic this may sound to you, need me.”
“Wait a minute. Leukemia? I had no idea she was even sick.”
He hesitated for a few seconds. “I assumed she’d told you — especially since your dad is gone and you are all she has.”
After a few seconds, I asked, “How long does she have?”
“That depends, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t know. You’re the doctor.”
“She has turned down platelets, saying she’s lived long enough. It is a form of chronic leukemia, not acute. So she may have years ahead of her, or she could go soon.”
“Why didn’t she tell me?”
“That is between you and your mother. I assumed you knew.”
“Thank you for the information. I’ll contact her right away,” I said with a formality that masked my shock and pain.
I was about to hang up when he said, “She is not in immediate danger.” Then he added what must have passed for comforting words to him, but to me were a non sequitur, “Cathy, she is still one of Buffalo’s greatest bridge players.”
I sat in the hallway, looking blankly at the black phone. The first thing I thought of was how short her life had been and how little she had participated in it. Yet, I told myself, she never expressed unhappiness. I had always felt it was my job to make her happy, to draw her into life at home and tell her of the fun and adventures we’d had at the store. I had always taken care of her, and now I could not protect her any longer, no matter how hard I tried.
>> <<
I borrowed a car and returned to Buffalo immediately. While waiting at the border, I thought about how little I’d seen my mother since I’d met Michael. I had hardly been home at all and I was only ninety miles away.
When I entered the house, she was, as usual, lying on the couch. She was reading her bible, Championship Bridge with Charles Goren. On the coffee table lay a library copy of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré.
“How are you doing?” I asked.
“Fine. Why are you here?”
“I came to visit. You’re lying down. Are you feeling well?”
“I always lie down.”
“Feeling all right?”
“Sure. Why, don’t I look all right?”
“I spoke to Dr. Clark.” Hearing those words, she closed her book and sat up. “He told me you have leukemia.”
“What a blabberpuss,” she said.
“I’ve never liked that guy. Anyway why didn’t you tell me?”
“What’s the point? It’s not like you can do anything about it.”
“I am your daughter and only living relative.”
“Gee, that’s scary,” she said with her usual dry wit. Then she looked blasé and said, “Why cry over spilt milk? So I have leukemia. There is nothing to be done about it.”
“Leukemia isn’t the common cold, you know,” I said, attempting to insert some perspective into the conversation.
“Well, everything has an up side. Now when I get up at noon, no one will think I’m being lazy. I don’t have to do volunteer work. No one will ever expect a meal.” She smiled the conspiratorial smile we shared when we were being sarcastic. When I was a little girl, we used to watch Queen for a Day together. Whenever bad things happened to someone on the show, I would imitate Mother Agnese, the long-suffering nun who taught me for eight long years, and said things like “God gives those with strong backs the heaviest crosses.” When a contestant would lose her home to creditors, I would say, “No more to clean” and my mother would say, “No beds to make.“ I would add, “No guests to entertain,” and on we would go, jauntily mocking blind stoicism.
I wasn’t willing to go that route with my mother, although she’d started it and clearly wanted to handle it that way. I said, “Dr. Clark told me you didn’t want any platelets.”
“Have you seen those homes for the aged and infirm? I’d rather die right here, thank you very much.”
“Most people want to live.”
“Well, they haven’t seen the table manners of the people in those places.”
“Mom, did you hear me? Most people want to live.”
“I have lived.”
“I could take care of you,” I said as my eyes filled with tears.
“Don’t be ridiculous. I would absolutely hate that. This could go on for ages. So far I’m fine. I want you to do your psychology graduate degree. Then you can psychoanalyze me on my deathbed. Oh, speaking of deathbeds,” she said, almost leaping off the couch, “come in and see the outfits I’ve chosen for my open casket. I like to refer to the collection as my shrouds for all seasons.”
She proceeded to show me four garment bags labelled summer, fall, winter and spring. Each one contained a seasonally appropriate outfit, complete with gloves, matching shoes and purse.
I said, “Purse? Where are you going?”
“You should never travel without a compact.”
I couldn’t help but laugh.
She looked relieved and said, “Glad you are home. Let’s go and get a beef on weck. Wait, I just remembered it’s Friday! We’ll have to have fish.”
“The Catholic Church rescinded that rule years ago.”
“I never have followed anything post Vatican II and I hope you don’t either. I never believed that Pope Paul XXIII had the ear of Our Lord.”
“Why not go pre–Martin Luther?” I picked up the car keys. “Let’s go.”
>> <<
That night I stayed at my mother’s house. At three in the morning, I awoke with a start. I remembered the chemicals that Hooker Chemical dumped into the water. We all knew it was there because the water smelled exactly like the plan
t and made our eyes run. It took another decade for it to come to light that Hooker had dumped 950 pounds of toxic chemicals in the river every day.
I am a researcher at heart, and when I feel overwhelmed I dig for information like a ferret down a rat hole. I got up, got dressed and was ready to go at dawn. I went to every library and every archive in the city to research the chemical dumping in the area. I searched for days but found inconclusive evidence.
On the last day of my visit, while we were eating wings at the Anchor Bar, I told my mother that I believed there was a connection between her illness and the chemicals that festered in the Niagara River. I said eventually the truth, just like the toxic chemicals, would bubble to the surface.
“Oh, you’re always railing about something,” she replied, dipping her wing into her spicy blue cheese sauce. “People have to die of something, you know.”
I couldn’t get over the fact that she was so blasé about the Hookers, who had been our neighbours in Lewiston, slowly poisoning us. “Mom, as you were playing bridge with the Hookers in their magnificent historic home, you were slowly being poisoned by waste their chemical company dumped in the area.”
“To say nothing of their stale bridge mix.”
A few years later, state officials discovered toxic chemicals had leaked from Hooker Chemical’s Love Canal dump site, and two decades later when the epidemiological studies were completed, I read that benzene, the most toxic chemical found in the dump site, was associated with several health hazards. In the New York State Department of Health Archives, I read in black and white, Benzene at Love Canal caused chronic lymphatic leukemia.
>> <<
When I got back to Toronto and told Michael of my mother’s illness, he commented that my matter-of-fact tone surprised him. I had to admit that, however strange, I wasn’t devastated by my mother’s leukemia and impending death. I suppose I’d internalized the Irish Catholic view of death, which is “well, you’ve had a good run at it,” or “it’s all in God’s hands now” or “she’ll meet her reward.” More importantly, my mother said she’d rather quit while she was ahead. She wanted to die in her own home with all of her marbles. Other than that, she was happy to go.
I felt sadness but also a kind of peace in knowing that I had had the best mother-daughter relationship possible. I had never once in my life been seriously angry with her and I had always been happy that she was my mother. I don’t think a lot of people can say that. On the other hand, when my father got his brain tumour when I was a teenager, we’d had a bad few years and he lost his mind before I could ever repair the damage I’d done. You can’t take back awful things you’ve said if someone has lost his mind.
I also knew that even if my mother wasn’t with me, I would always have her in my mind. When I was in grade school, I would run home from school and tell her an amusing story about something that had happened that day. I always gave it the slant that I knew she would enjoy. To this day, when something funny happens, I file it in my “mother file” and tell her about it when I am alone in my car. I can hear her laugh and imagine her wry comments. I think that’s one of the reasons I became a writer: to keep telling the stories I know she’d love. When I write, she, like Long John Silver’s parrot, is always sitting on my shoulder. You can’t feel the loss of someone who is with you.
CHAPTER 22
the catacombs
If you talk to God, you are praying.
If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.
— Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin
It was 1973, and I was about to embark on my second Master’s program, this time in psychology. I learned all the testing procedures and knew how to run statistically significant studies. I was heading into the life as a researcher and even had my own white lab coat with my initials in red to prove it.
Although I had a research stipend and a scholarship for my tuition, I needed money to live on while at school. Making a living can be distracting from a person’s life goals at the best of times, but it was especially vexing at this point in my life when I needed to devote nearly all my time to my research. I solved the problem by taking a job working the night shift at a psychiatric hospital. I also took day shifts when I didn’t have classes. When I look back on it now, I have no idea how I ever managed to work all night and go to school all day. Oddly enough I never felt tired.
When I went to the child and adolescent ward for the job interview with the chief of psychiatry, Dr. Dekker, an eastern European with a Bela Lugosi accent, asked for my qualifications. I said, “None really.” He asked if I had a degree in psychology and I said I’d just started grad school a week ago. He asked if I liked children and I said, “No, not at all.”
He said, “I think you will be perfect. Start immediately.”
Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital opened in 1889 on the rocky shores of Lake Ontario. The grounds and placement of the buildings were inspired by the work of Frederick Law Olmsted, the father of American landscape who built Central Park in New York City. It was structured according to the European model of making the “inmate” healthy and productive. The hospital was built like a small town on sixty of the most picturesque acres in Ontario. The grounds led down to the lake with tree-lined walkways, and there were vegetable gardens for the patients to till, a small farm for meat, a church and a town hall. There was a beautiful gazebo down by the crashing waves. Originally, the hospital had its own blacksmith shop, pumping station, fire brigade, cemetery and supply of natural gas. It was designed to offer the utmost in therapeutic landscaping, and maintenance of all of the facilities was to be done by the patients. There would be medical care available, but the idea was that the more people controlled their own lives and lands, the healthier and literally more grounded they became.
The tragedy, and there is always tragedy in the way the mentally ill have been treated, is that in the early 1970s, when I was there, the patients were so heavily drugged that they never wanted to go outside. Although the medication often prevented florid psychosis, it also prevented engaging with the world in any meaningful way. The patients preferred to sit and look out the window or to read donated Time magazines from 1958. Huge weeds had choked the vegetable gardens, the town hall was used for electric shock therapy, and the pigeons and seagulls used the gazebo as a dumping ground. The myriad of old red brick buildings making up the Lakeshore Asylum looked like an abandoned Hollywood set that had once been used for filming Bedlam.
Nowhere in the literature of the original plans does it mention that there is a whole city of underground tunnels that connects the buildings. These miles of subterranean passageways had not been repaired since the nineteenth century. There remained a decrepit underground metropolis, where there were no cars but rolling stretchers, and the pedestrians were little white moles scurrying around with hypodermics filled with cocktail sedatives.
The night shift ran on a skeleton staff. There were two workers in each of the nine ward buildings. I worked with only one other woman. Sandra, a trained childcare worker, was one of those people who was innately bright but didn’t care about continuing her education or what my mother called “bettering herself.” She read only Harlequin romances and refused to date or marry anyone who was not a card-carrying member of the working class. She said if a man didn’t have a hockey jacket or know how to play darts in a bar, then he was a pansy. She had no idea why I found anything said by the psychiatrists, whom she called “permanent fuck-ups,” of any interest. To a litany of her complaints, I read aloud all of Freud’s cases in the wee hours of the morning just so I could stay awake.
This hospital was a dumping ground for Canada’s Hannibal Lecters, the dangerous men who’d had lobotomies, electroshock, medication and still bayed at the moon on a good day. A number of men had been thrown in Lakeshore after the war, remained in locked wards and never saw the light of day. If they got out for even ten minutes, a SWAT team of pol
ice had to be called and every unit had to be on lockdown.
There is something bonding about working all night in a dank old bastion. We had to depend on each other. Usually our shift was uneventful and the patients slept, but occasionally, when we had a pyromaniac start a fire, or a suicide attempt that caused an hysterical outbreak, or a group contagion, all hell broke loose and we had to work together like a well-oiled machine. We could call the goons, as the strong-armed “medication squad” was named, but it took them ages to get to our building, which was at the end of a long row of old fortresses. If they were on another call elsewhere, we had to do everything on our own.
>> <<
One humid August night in 1974 when even the usually tumultuous Lake Ontario refused to stir, Sandra and I had done our suicide check on Eddie, a fourteen-year-old boy who had been with us since he was six. We’d checked on Brad, our nine-year-old feces smearer. When he lived at home, he used to put feces in his mother’s purse. Now that he was in the hospital, he smeared the walls with it. The psychiatrist thought this was progress, probably because he didn’t have to clean it up.
Having finished all our odious tasks, we took our first break of the day, putting our feet up on the coffee table to watch the 11:00 news and have a cigarette.
As I was rummaging in my purse for a cigarette, Sandra screamed, “Holy shit, look at this, Cath, Nixon is resigning!” There he was on television, reading from a trembling script. We watched mesmerized as he rambled on, his lower jowls quivering. Brad, or as Sandra called him “Master Shit Disturber,” crept out in his Batman pyjamas to watch the news with us. He was supposed to be in bed, but we let him watch. I told him not to say a word, emphasizing that this broadcast of President Nixon resigning to avoid impeachment was a historical moment. I still remember at the end of his speech, Nixon said he’d “felt a very personal sense of kinship with each and every American.”
Coming Ashore Page 28