We went through life-threatening asthma attacks eight more times over the next few years, wearing a rut in the road back and forth to Children’s Hospital. Each time, Riley would be near death but would find something within herself that allowed her to fight back. On one of her hospital stays, I ran into an acquaintance whose young daughter, battling a rare respiratory illness, was a patient on the same floor as Riley. The two of us often took breaks together, talking about our girls and their fighting spirits. It was comforting to share my thoughts with someone going through the same kind of crisis. Late one night, when Riley was especially fussy, I went to the nurses’ station to get some advice. I noticed a commotion in a nearby room and realized that my friend’s daughter had died. She and her husband were just standing there holding each other, and it was so sad to witness their grief. I went back to be with Riley and sat there in the dark wondering how these things happen. I still had my daughter, and I was lucky, but I felt guilty, too. It didn’t seem right that my daughter was alive and theirs was not.
Riley’s health troubles didn’t end with asthma. She developed severe food allergies early on to such staples as fish and eggs and nuts. We had to watch every little thing she ate. Those first few years were hard on all of us, but especially on Kelty, who was increasingly conscious that we were spending a lot of our time with his sick sister. He got angry and jealous and would sometimes complain, but we knew it was because he didn’t understand. We did our best to make sure he knew how much we loved him.
And there was no question that the big brother loved his little sister. He was always kissing and hugging her. Once, when he and Riley were playing Sleeping Beauty in the yard, he gave her a big smooch on the lips. But he had just eaten a peanut butter sandwich, and within minutes we were again rushing Riley to the hospital. We could never have cakes at birthday parties because of the eggs, so we’d have Jell-O cakes instead. The kids eventually grew accustomed to the restrictions, but Kerry and I remained constantly vigilant.
Kelty was going to preschool by now, and when he was five, he began to play hockey at the Hollyburn Country Club. He not only loved the game but was a good player, earning a reputation as a gifted skater. Both kids were very active, always looking for that next adventure. When they weren’t outside careening down the driveway on trikes or bicycles, they were playing in the fort we’d built in the backyard beside the creek.
Although they were close, they developed that traditional love/hate relationship that siblings have. Kelty was madcap. Riley was a thinker, but she was more of a daredevil than her brother once she made up her mind to do something. They’d be fighting one second, and then a moment later they’d be screaming with laughter.
The two of them spent hours playing with Riley’s Fisher-Price kitchen, and Kelty would follow me all over the house with his toy vacuum cleaner when I was doing housework. When he wanted to be off on his own, it was all about his Transformers and his Super Mario game. For Riley, it was her trolls, those ugly dolls with the wild, brightly coloured hair. They were everywhere in her room and all over the house. She had a “trollie” blanket, and every time we took her to the hospital, we had to take her trollie blanket, too. She also loved Sally, a floppy baby doll. Riley was definitely a girlie-girl. I was in Las Vegas on business one year when Kerry called to say Riley was back in hospital with a bad bout of asthma. She was in the ICU and wasn’t doing well. I headed right for the airport and while waiting for my flight, went into a kiosk and bought her a doll. It wasn’t really a doll to play with, because it was porcelain and had a wind-up mechanism that played the Beatles song “Michelle,” but it was all I could find. Riley loved it, but after she recovered and we were back home, I wouldn’t let her play with it because it was too fragile. Every once in a while she would ask if she could hold the “beautiful baby,” and we’d sit together and talk about how lovely she was.
Riley’s hospital visits became routine. Sometimes she would be there a week at a time, and when that happened during the school year, we’d have to get her work brought into the hospital so she wouldn’t fall behind in class.
Jo had left us as nanny, and when we found Imelda, it was like we had struck gold. She was an open-hearted Filipina woman who loved the kids. She spoiled them terribly, and of course they loved her back. She was so helpful in keeping Kelty busy during those rough years of Riley’s sickness and frequent hospital stays. She became like a member of the family and would stay that way even after the kids were grown.
In 1987, Kerry left Earl’s to strike out on his own, starting a small food distribution company. It was a complicated business, and after two years he decided to try something else. He got his commercial real estate licence and went to work for Royal LePage in the downtown core.
The kids, meanwhile, were busy with karate, swimming, and skating lessons. Both of them were naturally athletic, and they were more involved with sports than with the arts, clearly the influence of their mom and dad. They were good at everything they tried. They were competitive, too, though Kelty wanted to be the centre of attention, whereas Riley was happy to hang back and let him hog the limelight. They were funny kids, imbued with a sense of humour that kept us laughing. They would leave little notes around the house, as well as drawings and poems. If we had a squabble with them over chores or something they should have known better than to do, they would write a letter apologizing and telling us they loved us.
They were, in every way, amazing.
One of our favourite annual events was Riley’s birthday. Because it was in July, we’d have outdoor parties with apple bobbing and spoon races and lots of kids running around the local park. Kelty was stuck with indoor celebrations for his birthday in November, but we tried to make them just as much fun.
Both kids had been on skis since the age of three, so we thought it made sense for us to get a place in Whistler, a ski resort a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Vancouver. We would go up every weekend and in summer spend hours hiking and golfing and riding our bikes along the trails. We loved the place, and in 1996 we decided to move there permanently.
It might have seemed odd to give up our life in West Vancouver when things were going so well. The kids were settled in school, had great friends, and were busy with all their activities. I was at a job I loved, working from home and travelling all over the western region with IBM. Kerry was busy with his real estate. But the truth was that, as the kids grew older, I was increasingly unsettled by the West Vancouver lifestyle, with its insular trappings of wealth. Once, when we were at a hockey wrap-up party in a beautiful house in the area with a swimming pool, Kelty said offhandedly, “Mom, we could never have a wrap-up party. We don’t have a nice enough house.” That set off my parental alarm bells. I worried that, no matter how we tried to counteract it, our kids were being unduly influenced by their surroundings. Kerry shared my concern.
One weekend, I was up at our Whistler place hosting a group of women friends from Winnipeg, when I drove by the Nicklaus North development. It was like a moonscape, no trees, just dirt, but there was something about the location that pulled me in. The beauty of the place, with the water and the distant mountains and the wild blue horizon, was magical. There was a construction trailer on the site, so I went and looked at the map of the planned community. The houses were modern, with an elegant, woodsy look, and meandered along the golf course adjacent to Green Lake. I knew it was for us.
Riley was always game for something new, and Kelty was thrilled. He was sad to leave his friends, but he couldn’t wait to live someplace he could ski all the time. We sold the house on Hadden Drive, put our stuff in storage, bought a lot on Nicklaus North Boulevard, and in September 1996 moved into our condo while our house was being built. The kids were enrolled in Myrtle Philip Community School—Kelty in Grade 7 and Riley in Grade 4. I needed an office, so I took over a corner of the kids’ bedroom, which had bunk beds. We always kept a spare bedroom for guests, and the kids didn’t seem to mind Mom sharing their space.
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nbsp; Whistler is a small town with a strong sense of community. There are only about ten thousand year-round residents. Riley found her new best friend, Britt Gibbons, within a nanosecond, and they were soul sisters from that moment on. Kelty found kindred spirits in new best buddies like Pat Sanderson and Trevor O’Reilly. Kerry took a job with Sussex Realty and got involved right away with the local hockey association, coaching and playing in the men’s hockey league. Both the kids learned to snowboard, and they played hockey, too. Riley even joined a boys’ team. Kelty and Kerry did the Whistler-to-Squamish mountain bike ride through the trails off the highway, and father and son spent a lot of time on the golf course. Kelty would get frustrated when his dad played a better round, but it was just part of his personality. Kerry and I skied and hiked, and Kerry often went off on canoeing trips with his friends. For outdoor enthusiasts like us, Whistler was paradise.
Sadly, Imelda hadn’t come with us to Whistler. By then, she had married her boyfriend from the Philippines, settled in Vancouver, and had three children of her own. But our connection was so strong that we continued to stay in touch. We certainly missed her—me especially—but our little family unit was tight and happy.
We still spent as much of July and August as we could at my family cabin outside Winnipeg and the Dennehy cottage at Victoria Beach. For the kids, it was the best of both worlds: swimming and driving the farm’s tractor with my dad or piling into his van, which they called the Yellow Bird, to head up the road for a lunch of foot-long hot dogs. The beach was just as much fun. There were no cars allowed in the Victoria Beach area, so everyone had to leave their vehicles in a big communal parking lot and take “taxis,” old panelled station wagons that transported vacationers and their stuff to the several hundred cottages on the lakefront. The only other mode of transport was bicycles, which everyone pedalled to pick up groceries and visit friends. There was even a little seasonal newspaper, the Victoria Herald, filled with local gossip.
Kerry and I had both been raised in households overflowing with kids and pets, so it seemed natural that our home would be the same. The kids had turtles and gerbils, and they were always catching spiders and other creatures and housing them in jars. We were dog people, and a favourite over the years was Kelly, a cairn/poodle cross. Kelly was queen of the house; she imagined herself a bull mastiff when she could better fit in a shoebox. She had hypoallergenic fur, which was important for Riley’s allergies. The kids called her Schmee, and she insisted on sleeping in their beds when she wasn’t following them everywhere or chasing her tail out on the fairway. We almost lost her once, when she ate a stash of chocolate, but she recovered and lived to charm us for many more years.
If life could ever be perfect, our lives together were surely close.
(3)
Kelty
KELTY HAD BEEN handsome from the moment he was born, sweet-faced with a touch of freckles across his nose, his soft blond baby hair turning into a thick shock of dark as he grew from toddler to teen. His bright blue eyes carried a perpetual twinkle, and he could make us laugh with a mere sideways glance. But it was in his teens that Kelty really bloomed. He loved being the centre of attention, and his big circle of friends would head out snowboarding or gather in our sports room, playing pool and eating pizza, the house full of the glorious din of the raucous young. Kelty was also a bit of a fashion plate, and he liked to wear the ball caps and tees, the jackets and sneakers that teen boys of the day favoured, all emblazoned with trendy logos and cheeky inscriptions. His ski and snowboard gear was the best, updated as often as we indulged him. Although he liked girls, and flirted with the notion of dating, he didn’t have a serious girlfriend so much as a wide circle of girlfriends, part of the crowd traipsing in and out of our house. If Kelty was attracted to some of Riley’s friends, the reverse was certainly true at times. The town was so small that everyone knew each other, and teenage romance was inevitable.
Our new house was spacious, 2,900 square feet, with an airy, vaulted main level that featured fir ceiling beams and polished maple floors. A grand stone gas fireplace dominated the great room. The kitchen had a granite island flanked by stools, and the adjoining dining room easily accommodated our overflowing get-togethers with family and friends. The cedar deck that stretched across the back of the house overlooked the fifteenth hole of the Nicklaus North Golf Course, picture-perfect Green Lake, and the mountains beyond. The house was multi-level, with a main floor master bedroom and bath, an open loft office for me, and another bathroom and small office on the landing.
The ground floor space belonged to Kelty and Riley. It was custom designed, with two bedrooms, each with window seats, and a shared bathroom in the hallway. The games room had shuffleboard, a pool table, and a dart board, and it opened onto the lower deck, where the steaming hot tub offered a spellbinding view over the lake. The mud room that led to the garage was always a tangled riot of jackets, boots, gym bags, ski equipment, and hastily shed shoes and socks. From the day we moved in, the house was full of noise and laughter, banging doors and kids hollering from floor to floor. The radio and CDs blared day and night, with a television in one of the rooms often on full volume. It was all music to my ears.
When Kelty decided in Grade 7 that he wanted to start a band because he’d been playing the drums in music class, we were surprised. Kerry and I went to his school concert, and we were astonished to see our son playing the drums with some skill. When people came up to us afterward and said they hadn’t known that Kelty played the drums, we had to admit that we hadn’t either. He tinkered with the band notion for a while but then decided the drums weren’t really his thing.
Riley had taken some dance classes while we were living in West Vancouver, and early on, she caught the acting bug that had bitten many of her cousins. She was in all the plays in her elementary school, acting as the Wicked Witch of the West in one production. She also taught herself to play a little guitar a few years later. But she was such a great athlete that most of her time was spent playing hockey, basketball, and volleyball. And, of course, snowboarding.
As with most busy families, the heart of our house was the kitchen. It was where everyone gathered, hopping up on the bar stools for breakfast or plopping down after school to bug me about what I was making for dinner. Kelty, especially, was a food hound. If something special like Thanksgiving dinner was on the menu, he was less concerned about the turkey than he was about what he called the details. “Mom,” he would say, “what are we having with that? What are the vegetables? Is there wild rice?” He had been the same with Imelda, always asking her to make special Filipino food, especially her noodle dishes.
Aside from the obligatory Disneyland visits, we mostly did short spur-of-the-moment excursions with the kids. Once, I took Riley and her friend Claire down to Seattle by train, and we had a wonderful time. Kerry and Kelty often headed off on weekend fishing and camping trips. I would occasionally fly one of the kids out to join me when I travelled for work. Kelty and I spent one weekend together in Toronto, a memorable mother-son experience. We visited the Hockey Hall of Fame, went to a Toronto Maple Leafs game, and talked about hockey and life over a big steak dinner. I remember looking across the table and thinking that my beautiful little boy was growing into a fine young man.
In September 1997, the newly built Whistler Secondary School opened its doors, and Kelty started Grade 8 there. It was the only high school in town, and for the community kids graduating from elementary to secondary, there was a new world around the corner. Kelty was excited about it, walking the wide dirt path that wound through the woods from our house to the school every day, laughing and chatting with best pals like Pat and Trevor, their whole lives unfolding before them, a future full of adventures.
By thirteen, Kelty had been playing hockey for half his life. He wasn’t a big kid, but he was fast on skates, with a lot of finesse, and he was known as a thinker on the ice, always ahead of the next move. He played forward, the number seventeen on his jersey flashing around t
he rink. (His hockey hero was Eric Lindros, and once when I ran into Lindros, I had him sign a personalized autograph that Kelty cherished.) He practised religiously several times a week with the Whistler Minor Hockey League, and he was always suited up and ready for the league’s weekly game.
Like most players his age who exhibited talent, Kelty fancied himself a hockey star. Bolstered by the blinkers of youth, he assumed that he would one day be discovered by an NHL scout and drafted to the big leagues. So it was no surprise to Kerry or me when Kelty started bugging us to let him get more serious about his hockey career.
One day, out it came: “Mom, I really want to go to Notre Dame.”
Athol Murray College of Notre Dame was in Wilcox, Saskatchewan—from our perspective, an awfully long way from home. But Kelty didn’t care. Not only was Notre Dame a renowned private preparatory institution, it was also famous for its athletic programs. It was known across the country as the home of the Hounds, its celebrated hockey team, and it boasted a winning legacy of national hockey championships and alumni that included NHL players Russ Courtnall and Gary Leeman.
Kelty wanted to be a Hound.
He knew that it wouldn’t be easy—on any front. Notre Dame had a reputation for strict adherence to its high standards, from religion to sports. In the early days, students had slept in bunkhouses without heat, a toughening-up exercise that later translated into an unwavering expectation that students adhere to the edicts of community involvement and leadership and to the values that are the hallmarks of good character.
Choosing Hope Page 4