Robin, Michael and I walked out of the meeting feeling good. We would have one more session together. The counsellor thought it important to see how Michael was managing with what she had explained to him. If she felt he was ready, I would call Kira, and arrange a meeting. We expected that to be the following week. Michael couldn’t wait.
Robin headed home with Michael after our session. I stayed in the city and was in a downtown art supply store when I realized my cell phone had been off for hours. I turned it on and saw messages and missed calls from Lynn. There were too many. I immediately wondered if something was wrong. I knew I should call her back immediately.
“What’s up?” I asked when Lynn answered. “I haven’t listened to your messages yet, but figure it’s important.”
“Kira died this morning,” Lynn said. “Her boyfriend Kenny found her body. Can’t say for sure, but it looks like an overdose, probably alcohol and Tylenol 3s.”
I could only think about Michael. He would never meet his birth mother. She could never reassure him of her love. Shit.
A few days later, as we were leaving the house for the funeral, I turned to Michael. “Kira’s body will be on display in an open casket, Michael. Some people find it helpful to look, some don’t. When we get there, you can decide what feels best for you.”
Once at the funeral home, I took Michael’s hand and walked with him into the room that held Kira’s coffin. We stopped about five feet away from it.
“Close enough, Michael?” I think he sensed that I would not be going any closer.
He stood for a few seconds, then walked up to the casket. Standing alone, he looked in, then back at me and said, “I just want to see what she looks like.”
Seconds later, he answered his own question. “A lot like me, Mom.”
It was the first and last day he would ever see Kira.
For months afterwards, the mood at home was sombre. Though Michael said nothing, we were all acutely aware of his loss. Also his anger. He and Andrew further bonded. They once again clung to each other, wanting nothing to do with the rest of us. Michael plastered more photos of Kira all over his bedroom wall. Andrew and Kenny mythologized Kira as if she were Mother Teresa. They decided that it was her sorrow about Andrew living mostly with Lynn and Don that had killed her. How could we counter? We couldn’t.
I kept thinking of the words written by American playwright Langston Hughes. “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up — like a raisin in the sun?”
It saddened Robin and me greatly that we didn’t know what words, if any, might bring comfort to Michael. We so badly wanted him to understand that with time and willpower, the human spirit often soars above its sorrows. So while respecting Michael’s pain, we carried on with our family life, slowly bringing Michael back into our folds. Kira couldn’t assure him of her love, but we could. I believed that had to count for something.
We were standing outside at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery, standing in the cool air, waiting for the ceremony to get underway. I leaned into Robin. “He looks so much older today,” I whispered, nodding towards Michael, dressed in the dark navy suit he first wore at the funeral six months before.
We shivered as drones of “Amazing Grace” reached a crescendo and echoed through the cemetery. A piper broke through the mist, dressed in tartan kilt, gillie brogues and white rabbit sporran. When the hymn was finished, he lowered his bagpipe and joined the twenty mourners circling Kira’s newly erected tombstone.
We had come to Holy Sepulchre to bury the ashes of Kira Obe-Hilton, dead at thirty-seven from an overdose. Her husband Kenny had selected the tombstone we stood beside. He had also chosen the Catholic priest who began a lengthy spiel about resurrection and Kira’s relation to it. Finally, he stopped and Kenny ceased the high-pitched wailing from his wheelchair.
Most of the small group that had assembled was now headed back to the parking lot. A handful remained. We were Kira’s family — of sorts. On one side there was Don (Kira’s father); Lynn (Don’s second wife and stepmother to Kira); and Andrew, twelve (Kira’s son). On the other side there were “us.” Robin; Michael, fifteen (Kira’s son); Sarah, thirteen; and me. We were the family “of sorts.’” Our lives were bound to her by blood.
While we stood by the monument, two women and a man walked towards us and introduced themselves as members of the Toronto Métis Association. Kira’s grandfather on Don’s side was Six Nations Mohawk.
“We are about to begin a ceremonial smudge,” one of them said. “We invite you to join us as we send Kira’s soul back to the Creator.”
I nodded, aware that our participation was as much for Michael as it was for Kira.
Bernard instructed us to form a circle around Kira’s tombstone. Then he walked into the centre. He pulled a wooden matchbox from his pocket, struck a match against its side, and lowered the flame onto tightly woven blades of dried sweetgrass in the palm of his left hand.
Everyone’s gaze moved upward with the smoke, everyone’s except mine. Mine remained riveted on Bernard. The man radiated both energy and calm. He was tall and remarkably handsome, with deeply carved, angular features. His long, shiny black hair was pulled back into a lush pony tail. He was dressed casually in chinos and plaid shirt. The multicoloured ceinture fléchée tied around his waist was, I presumed, a sartorial nod to his Métis forebears.
I’d seen him before, but I couldn’t think where. Eventually, it came to me. He was in a book of full-page sepia photographs by Edward Curtis that my sister Sharon gave me on my fifteenth birthday in 1963. Curtis, fearing that North American Indians were on the verge of extinction, set out in the early 1900s on an odyssey across the continent to document this.
Now there I was, more than thirty years later in Toronto, Canada, standing with a man who could have leapt from the pages of Curtis’s book. And he was asking me to participate in one of the fundamental rites of his people, Kira’s people, a thread of my son’s ancestral bloodline.
Bernard walked directly towards me, extending his right arm.
“Wave this eagle feather above your head, into the winds,” he directed. “It will help send Kira’s soul back home.”
I raised the feather and made figure eights as instructed, then quickly passed the feather to Michael, wondering if he’d do as Bernard said. The answer, as always, was a crapshoot. I sighed with relief when he raised the feather. He then passed it on to Robin who handed it to Sarah until everyone in our circle had completed the task. Andrew was the last to wave his mother’s soul into the sky.
Seeing Michael crying, I wanted to fold him in my arms, but I knew that at fifteen, he was too old to take comfort in that. He had lost his desire for physical affection from his parents. So I imagined the cemetery’s huge alabaster cherubs and archangels that hovered above us swooping down, clutching Michael upwards from the ground, gently folding him in their wings, making him feel protected, the way I felt as a child wrapped in my father’s tallit. When I would sit next to him at shule, he would extend his prayer shawl beyond his shoulders until it covered mine as well, engulfing me tenderly in his real and metaphorical warmth.
Catholic, Jewish, Mohawk, Scots. This ridiculous mélange of religious icons and cultural metaphors was stirring the simmering stew I was carrying inside. I wrestled with how Kira’s missteps had affected each member of our family. I still held so much anger towards her, for lying, for harming Michael, for seeming not to care, for dying before Michael could meet her, dying before he could ask what he needed to know — did she love him?
Yet, I looked toward the darkening sky with a grateful nod, asking Kira’s god to safeguard her soul. Robin, who clasped my hand in his, felt the same way. We loved our son, the son that Kira had given life, the son still grieving for the mother he never knew, the son who would never ask the question he had prepared for their first meeting, “Why couldn’t you raise me?”
I began sobbing. What if my tears never stopped? This is something that serious criers like me fear: that once
we let ourselves go, we may never come back. Shouldn’t we know by now that crying, like life and a good story, has a beginning, a middle and an end?
Yes, perhaps I should have known. But it’s hard when I never know where the story is taking me next. I kept crying.
In the months following Kira’s memorial, we could see that Michael was growing into a nice-looking young man. We were all happy that he had reached five-foot-two, the maximum height the endocrinologists predicted from bone scans taken when he was diagnosed at six with FAS. He remained wiry, had strong muscles and a nice lean look. His hair was still thick and blond, and in recent years, with the arrival of facial hair, he had grown a scraggly moustache and beard. Naturally, I preferred him clean-shaven. I was his mother. He was never without T-shirt and jeans. As we feared, Michael’s body had become badly scarred on his arms, shoulders and chest from his skin-picking. Miraculously, his face had been spared.
Michael always said he didn’t care how he looked, but Robin, Sarah and I would swear he was noticeably proud strutting around in the brown leather jacket we bought him for his sixteenth birthday. He topped it off with the best smile in the whole wide world, the one Robin described when he was born as able to launch a thousand camera clicks.
The relationship I had with my son was different than what I had with any other person. There were holes in it everywhere. I tried to patch them with both love and rachmones. The best definition I ever found for this Yiddish word was from American writer Burt Alpert in his book Rachmones: The Passion of Hebraic Empathy, A History:
Rachmones, I remember as having been the single word that probably carried the greatest import in my early life. While comparable in its sense to pity, sympathy, empathy, compassion, mercy, tenderness, fellow-feeling and caring, Hebraic rachmones embraces a wider perspective than any of these. One of my favorite song lines has the perfect explanation of rachmones when it assures the listener that, “When something’s wrong with my baby, something’s wrong with me.”
Michael never said hello when he came into the house unless I reminded him to, nor did he think of saying goodbye. I knew he was connected to me because he always appeared visibly upset if I hurt myself, stumbled or was sick; he sometimes let me hug him on request and laughed at my goofy jokes.
He had never wished me happy birthday, never gave me a Mother’s Day card, or asked me how I was. He didn’t know what I did for a living, the colour of my eyes or my favourite foods. Though he was of normal-range intelligence and had a good vocabulary, his memory was extremely poor, especially with anything sequential. He didn’t remember the names of his grandparents, was hard pressed to come up with the days of the week or know what year it was. Though I always tried to engage him, I never had a conversation with my son.
At sixteen, Michael had quit school, having completed only part of Grade Nine. Our fears had come true. Entering high school overwhelmed him, academically and socially. The classes were bigger. Teachers demanded more independence. Homeroom was gone. We hired tutors, dragged him to Homework Club, met continually with teachers and the principal. Nothing worked. Michael began refusing to go to school and eventually stopped altogether.
Basically, Michael had shut down. Though he talked about neither, leaving school and losing Kira had left their mark. He stayed in his room playing video games. He wandered around the house a lot, bored, looking for something to do, but never finding it. I found it painful to watch. He was able-bodied and ostensibly capable of doing physical and mental tasks required for many jobs, but we couldn’t convince him to work. He said he never would. He didn’t attend family events or join us at the dinner table. He still wouldn’t brush his teeth, wash his hair or change his clothes except under duress. People always told me this would change when he became interested in girls. That had already happened, and still, the hygiene didn’t come.
Sadly, many of the predictions made at SickKids at the time of his fetal alcohol diagnosis had come to be. We had entered the future, the one we were trying to nullify, the one projected by FAS experts. Michael had difficulty handling money and telling time. He didn’t think things through or reason well. Generally, he didn’t learn from past experiences or understand the consequences of his actions. He repeated mistakes — sometimes even though he knew what he had done was wrong. His impulses usually overshadowed reasoning, but he always regretted doing something “wrong.”
Michael couldn’t remember things like appointments. He didn’t interact with other people appropriately. He couldn’t read people’s faces, moods or subtleties. He wouldn’t take his medication on his own. He had trouble dealing with everyday tasks, buying food or filling out forms. He could read, though he seldom chose to. He could print, but not write.
He did, however, like to watch nature shows on the Discovery Channel, canoe and go on occasional hikes. During vacations with us, he had learned how to downhill ski and scuba dive, both real accomplishments. He proudly taught himself to skateboard, which he would do in nice weather. He was comfortable in the woods, perhaps more comfortable than anywhere else. He talked about having a cabin in the wilderness someday. The idea appealed to him because he wouldn’t need money and no one would ask him to do anything.
At sixteen, Michael was no longer aggressive as he was as a child. Though not particularly interested in or conscious of other people’s well-being, he had become a gentle soul. There was a sweetness about him. He never said a bad thing about anyone nor would he do anything mean-spirited. He and the family dog, Bear, shared lavish physical attention on one another. The dog meant the world to him.
Like Sarah, Michael was irreversibly lodged in my psyche. He was with me wherever I went, no matter what I was doing. I tried to keep some of my feelings about him below my emotional radar or my eyes would start to tear. I think my friends knew this and sometimes wondered whether or not to ask in any detail how Michael was doing. They were afraid of causing me anguish by talking about him. And I suppose they were right, because sometimes my first reaction was to say, “Don’t ask…” But I did want them to ask. He was my son. I was touched they were interested or cared. I didn’t want to be one of those mothers who pretended the wayward child didn’t exist. I was only sorry that I seldom had anything new or positive to report. I got tired of hearing myself talk about the same stuff over and over, time after time, year after year.
When people I wasn’t close to asked how Michael was, I usually said, “He’s fine, thanks for asking.” I relayed more detail with family and close friends. I would often break down if we talked for long or they asked probing questions about problems we still hadn’t found solutions for and wondered if we ever would. I wore Michael’s heart on my sleeve. It’s just the way I was.
It’s natural when mothers get together that the talk turns to their kids. I seldom joined in except to talk about Sarah, and I felt weird talking about Sarah and not Michael, though I often did. Sarah deserved it. But most people’s issues, concerns, worries and pleasures were completely different from mine. There was little I could add to a casual conversation about school, homework, curfews, part-time jobs, girlfriends or after-school activities. I didn’t want to hijack a conversation by introducing something weighty.
When Michael’s differences were beginning to surface in the early years, I shared some of my concerns. Most people automatically compared his issues to those of their own kids. They dismissed my worries, probably inadvertently. They said, “My kid’s like that, too,” or “He’s going through a stage.”
Yes, what he was doing was similar to their children, but there was a major difference. It was a question of degree, and Michael’s not-so-healthy behaviours were at the extreme end of the continuum. Their kids grew out of things. Michael didn’t. But perhaps those were points that only I could know.
At first I felt hurt, angry and lonely. Nobody’s listening! It was hard to open up and too often when I did, it was a mistake. I never wanted sympathy. If I ever said anything, it was because I felt the need to talk or to
seek advice. I never knew if people were trying to be comforting and helpful by always putting on positive spins, but I think a few people simply did lack empathy. I quickly learned to become careful about who it was I spoke to about Michael. I also learned to protect myself from judgment.
Barbara, Ellie, Sybil, my sisters and other close friends figured out early how to show interest, lend comfort, advice and concern. They also knew how to share the small, fleeting moments of nachas we had that so much needed to be celebrated. They also knew I loved hearing about their kids, and how truly happy I was when they were doing well.
I did, however, have limits as to how long I could hear other people, more distant from me, talk about their children’s accomplishments, especially if they didn’t know how lucky they were or took their blessings for granted. Nor could I listen too long to certain extended complaints, like when someone’s kid got into Princeton but not Harvard. I could muster only so much sympathy for what they felt were life’s cruelties.
Sometimes I had fantasy conversations with Michael in my head. In these delusionary moments, I came up with a question or a story that unlocked him from within and we began to talk. He told me what he was doing, how he was feeling, what he thought, what he hoped for, what made him happy and what made him sad. We laughed and joked and finished with a hug.
I kept trying to make that conversation really happen. I knew it was crazy. It meant I hadn’t completely accepted that I would never know more about what my son was thinking or feeling. It also meant that I hadn’t yet fully accepted him for who he truly was.
I believed there must be things that could hold Michael’s attention other than computer games. I also believed that there were people like him he could be friendly with. I believed there was someone out there besides Robin, Sarah or me who would love him and take care of him one day. I believed one day he would brush his teeth, wash his hands, change his clothes and possibly take out the garbage.
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