Choosing Hope

by Ginny Dennehy

  I got her into Cedars, a rehab centre on Vancouver Island, where she stayed for a month. I went on weekends to visit her and once took Britt and Colleen. She was doing well and made some good friends. But, as before, the experts at the facility warned us not to expect miracles. Riley might well substitute one addiction for another.

  I’d been back at work since January 2002, slipping into my old job and grateful for the kindness of my IBM co-workers and customers after Kelty’s death. In the fall of 2008, I had just returned from a holiday in Mexico with some girlfriends when I got a call from my boss, asking me to meet him in the company’s Vancouver office. After twenty-eight years, at the age of fifty-six, I was getting downsized. I walked away with a severance check and a crushed ego. It wasn’t long before I realized it was a good thing, though. Now I was free to focus on Riley and on Kelty’s foundation, no longer tied to the travelling, early-morning phone calls, and late-night faxes that went with the job.

  Riley had finished her stint at Cedars and was back living with us and working at Earl’s. She had decided to get a tattoo in honour of her brother—his initials, KPD. Although I wasn’t keen on the idea, I understood why she wanted to memorialize her brother, to have him with her always. The tattoo was on her inner arm, and sometimes customers at the restaurant would comment on it. That made her uncomfortable, because she didn’t like talking about Kelty with strangers. Britt and Rye had also gotten matching tattoos on their backs: two parallel lines that signified they were on the same path together through life, side by side, and that their future together was eternal. She was still tight with Britt, who had been going through her own issues. Britt was gay, and although that was no secret, there was often drama involving her girlfriends. I once asked Riley if there was anything beyond friendship between them, and she was horrified. “Mom, no way. It’s not like that at all.” They both felt like outsiders in their own way, and theirs was one of those unbreakable bonds.

  Riley was also helping us with the foundation, going to dedications and participating in the annual fundraising golf tournaments we held in Whistler. We could see that she was working hard to turn her life around.

  Most importantly, she had discovered yoga. It gave her the discipline she craved, and it became her lifesaver. Soon she was immersed not just in yoga’s stoic athleticism and the community of its practitioners but in the tranquil spiritual fold of Buddhism. Britt’s aunt Dee Dee was a yoga teacher, and she had a great influence on Riley, becoming a friend and confidante.

  Before long, Riley was asking us if she could take a yoga training course in Whistler. It was a month-long, two-hundred-hour course designed to teach every aspect of the yoga lifestyle, from nutrition to the types of yoga practised around the world. We had put money aside for her post-secondary education, but film school and her other pursuits had caused it to dwindle. We told her yes, but said she needed to be sure about it because the money we had for that purpose was finite.

  She took the class and blossomed. Our daughter had found her calling.

  Riley began researching courses that would further her studies and help her achieve her goal of becoming a yoga teacher. One of the best, she told us, was a three-month master course on a little island off the coast of Thailand. I could tell she was serious about it. “Okay, Rye,” I said. “If you really want to do this, that’s fine. But you have to understand that you can’t come back from this yoga course and then say you want to go to university, because the money we saved for your education will be gone.”

  She didn’t hesitate. “No, Mom, I have never felt so good about myself, and this is what I want to do.”

  Riley had not travelled much, and when she did it was usually on family vacations. This time she would be going halfway around the world on her own. My worry meter was registering off the chart, but I knew I had to let my girl spread her wings.

  It was June 2008. My dad had been very sick with heart problems, and I ended up heading back to Winnipeg to see him on the same day that Riley was flying to Phuket. She had planned a stop on the Thai resort island for a few days to get acclimatized; she would be staying at a hotel owned by the brother of one of our neighbours, Peter Fu. We both had early-morning flights out of Vancouver, so Kerry came with us and the three of us stayed overnight at the airport hotel.

  The next morning, I offered to walk Riley to her gate. She looked at me and smiled. “Mom, it’s okay. I love you, but I’ve got to do this on my own.”

  She was telling me it was a step into her future that she needed to take without me. I gave her a big hug, squeezed her as tight as I could, and told her to call the minute she landed. I watched as she walked toward the gate, so beautiful, so full of life, her dad by her side.

  I had no way of knowing it was the last time I would see her.

  I was in Winnipeg the next day when I got a call from Peter Fu. He didn’t want me to worry, he said, but Riley had been playing in the waves in the ocean on Phuket and had separated her shoulder. I wasn’t too upset. She’d always had a wonky shoulder—it had separated before—and Peter assured me that his brother had made sure she’d gone to a doctor and the problem was fixed. The next day, Riley called to reassure me that all was well.

  She started the yoga program with her arm in a sling. But the centre wasn’t quite as advertised, it turned out, and Riley complained to me over the phone that the facilities weren’t up to snuff. I reminded her that she was in Thailand, not Paris, and that she needed to revel in the moment, concentrating on what she had gone there to do. She laughed and agreed.

  We emailed back and forth regularly over the next few months. Riley regaled me with all her adventures. She was having fun with the other students, amazing people from places like Berlin and Australia. On her time off she was seeing the sights on a scooter and getting to know the Thai people and their colourful culture.

  During one of my Skype chats with her in Chiang Mai, where she went after she finished the master course, Riley told me she was going to stay a bit longer to research courses in Thai massage. She felt she needed to expand her knowledge if she was going to open her own studio in Whistler, which had become her dream.

  We arranged to talk again a few days later to discuss which school she had chosen. I was happy for her. The day before she had sent me an email saying how content she was and how excited about the future. She’d ended by saying how much she loved me:

  pps—thank you so much for everything, you are an amazing mom/person! and that is an understatement, words don’t describe how incredible you are... This experience has really opened up my eyes to the way some people live. I feel very grateful to be who I am, and the people that I have been surrounded by my whole life. I wish that Kelty could have held on and experienced this too. But I guess everything happens for a reason. as you keep telling me!

  It was a wonderful gift.

  When she didn’t call on the scheduled night, I wasn’t too worried. The next evening at a dinner party, my friends and I talked about Kelty. Even though it was nearly nine years since he had died, I said, I was only just beginning to feel better and to move on. They agreed that I seemed to be more myself, and we had a wonderful conversation about our lives.

  When I got home at about 10, I decided to try Rye and dialled her cell phone. A man answered. When I said “Who’s this?” he replied: “Who’s this?”

  I felt a familiar prickle of fear.

  “This is Riley’s mother. Where’s Riley?”

  His English was broken. “Riley’s dead. Riley’s dead.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “What do you mean, Riley’s dead?”

  He just kept repeating it. “Riley’s dead. I’m Thai police. Riley’s dead. When are you coming for the body?”

  The panic rose in my throat. “No, no, what are you talking about?”

  Finally he said: “You call half an hour later. English-speaking man be on phone.”

  He hung up. For a few seconds, I sat there in our living room, paralyzed. I was
home alone; Kerry was in Vancouver, heading out the next morning for his annual Winnipeg duck hunt. When I reached him, I was hysterical, in tears, and could barely get the words out. He told me to hang on, that he was coming right home.

  Kerry phoned our neighbour Cheryl, who came straight over. I phoned Britt’s mom, Colleen. “Colleen, Riley’s dead. Riley died. I don’t know what to do.” Colleen came over, too. I was a complete mess, and the two of them got me into the car and drove me to the clinic. The doctors there gave me a sedative to calm me down.

  I don’t remember much else about that night or the days that followed. I was in a haze, the kind of numb you can’t even imagine until your child dies and your body shuts down. How could this be happening again? Was it even real? What was going on? Riley had worked so hard to stay alive. She couldn’t be dead. Kelty was dead. Riley couldn’t be dead, too.

  I think back now on how difficult it must have been for Kerry, driving alone along the highway from Vancouver to Whistler, an hour and a half in the dark, left to his own thoughts and fears. At some point that night, after Kerry got home and starting making phone calls, the Thai police confirmed the worst.

  It was October 8, 2009, and the unthinkable had happened. We had lost Riley. Our children, both our babies, were gone.

  The next day, still in a fog but needing to do something, I phoned our local MP, John Weston. We didn’t know how to go about getting Riley’s body back to Canada, and we needed someone to deal with the Thai officials on our behalf. John was so helpful, calling Ottawa and urging the Canadian representatives on the ground in Thailand to get us some answers. I also phoned one of my long-time IBM customers, John Dominelli, someone I had been close to and trusted. John hired a private investigator, because the Thai police weren’t forthcoming with the details related to Riley’s death. We didn’t know yet how she died or when. We only knew that she had been found in her hotel room by the housekeeper.

  I couldn’t get the thought out of my head that Riley, my sweet girl who could never bear to be alone, had died alone. It tore my heart apart. How could I have let that happen? It was my fault that she was dead.

  At first, Kerry and I planned to go to Thailand to bring Riley’s body back home. Wouldn’t we be abandoning her otherwise? But the truth was that I could barely get out of bed. Kerry was my pillar of strength, and he gently convinced me that we should both stay home and let the authorities do their job on our behalf. Riley was safe now and would be home soon.

  Once the Canadian consulate got involved, an autopsy was performed and we learned that Riley had not been drinking or taking drugs before she died. What she hadn’t told me during our many calls, though, was that she had re-separated her shoulder while she was in Chiang Mai. A doctor had given her some medication. It turned out it was far too strong for her, and she had died of a heart attack. She had gone to sleep and never woken up.

  I found some solace in that. Riley hadn’t been in pain. She was feeling good about herself and looking forward to the future. Riley had certainly had her struggles throughout her teens and young adulthood, but unlike her boisterous, share-it-all brother, she had kept much of that inner turmoil to herself. Because she couldn’t control the loss of her brother, or the loss of her “complete” family, she began to control what she could. That’s what led to her eating disorder. Once she had conquered that, she turned to other means of taking away her pain, like drinking. We were blessed that, in both cases, our daughter had recognized that she needed rescuing, and she had trusted us enough to ask for help in conquering those emotional and physical demons.

  In her own way, Riley had chosen hope. In the pursuit of yoga and the practice of Buddhism, she had found peace, purpose, and a healthy lifestyle that once again made her feel safe and complete. She had blossomed into a contented soul with a bright future, as beautiful on the inside as she was on the outside. I had to believe that she had fallen asleep a happy young woman and was now in a better place with her beloved brother.

  The funeral was held on October 21 at Our Lady of the Mountains Catholic Church, the same church where we had said goodbye to Kelty. A number of people spoke, including Riley’s cousins Tegan and Katie. “I know you felt like you were always searching, Ri; you always thought that everyone else had it more together than you,” Tegan read to the congregation. “The truth is that you were way more together than any of us were and possibly ever will be.”

  Britt read a poem she had written. It was hard to watch her struggle through the words, but I knew Rye would have been proud of her strength. Britt was in Los Angeles when her mother called to tell her her best friend had died, and she told us later that she knew the moment she heard her mother’s voice. Her poem, “For Riley Rae,” was an intimate ode to their friendship, tender and mature.

  I hadn’t spoken at Kelty’s service, but I wanted to say something at Riley’s. I don’t know how I managed to keep my composure, and I barely did. Nonetheless, standing up before everyone to open my heart about the loss of my daughter somehow seemed to be part of the healing I needed. I read out a letter I had written to Riley. I wanted to share with everyone her gentle spirit, her will to live from the time she was a baby, her love of sports. I needed to say out loud that although our loss was unbearable, our time with Riley was a precious memory, and there was much to celebrate.

  I talked about how Riley had loved clothes, and not just any clothes but the best and the priciest. Everyone smiled when I recalled the time she came home with a lovely green sweater and proudly announced she had bought it at Value Village, which prompted me to say, “There is a God.” Words could not describe the emptiness in our hearts, I said, knowing we would never see her beautiful smile again. “I will miss you beyond belief and will try not to think about all the things that could have been. Rye, go in peace, my sweet beautiful one. We will always be here for you.”

  My brother Ted, as he had done for Kelty, wrote a song called “Riley’s Gift.” He sang it accompanied by his daughter Lauren, who played the guitar I had bought for Riley when she briefly decided she was going to be a guitar player. Theirs was an achingly insightful tribute that included the lyrics “In a coffee shop in Thailand, she finally got the news / The person she was looking for was standing in her shoes.” Riley’s favourite music rang throughout the church, meaningful songs like Sarah McLachlan’s “I Will Remember You” and Van Morrison’s “Sweet Thing.”

  The theme of the reception was Riley’s recent embracing of Buddhism, and it seemed so fitting. Every person who came put a pebble into a bowl of water. Today those pebbles sit in a bowl on the coffee table in the great room of our house, a quiet reminder of the peace our daughter had found.

  One afternoon in the days that followed, when Britt was visiting us with her parents, she said out of the blue, “Ginny, do you mind if I go down to Riley’s room?”

  Riley had always kept journals, and Britt wanted to read some of them. I had seen the journals in Riley’s room but of course had never read them myself. Britt came up a little while later. “Ginny, I think there’s something in Riley’s journal that you need to hear.”

  It was a passage from a few years previously, in which Riley was writing about a visit in Winnipeg with her grandmother, Dodie: “Oh boy, here’s Dodo. She can’t remember this and she can’t remember that. I don’t think getting old is all that it’s cracked up to be. I don’t think I’m going to be an old person. For what I’ve been through in my life, I don’t think I’m going to be old. But that’s okay. I have lived a really good life and I accept that I might not grow to be an old person.”

  It was as if she had known. I let Britt take the journals, and I’m glad she has them. They are an intimate piece of Riley that is best protected by her best friend. After Kelty’s death, the journal he had started just before he died had disappeared from his room. We had never found out where it went, but we hoped it too was in safekeeping, with someone who had been important to Kelty.

  Even though we had held the funeral, Riley
’s body was still in Thailand, red tape holding up her return home. When she finally arrived at Vancouver airport, a week or so after the service, her body was picked up by the funeral home. I wanted to see her, but I was talked out of going to the funeral home. Keep your memories of when she was alive, everyone said. I ached to hold my daughter, to say goodbye one last time, but I was too much of a basket case to fight it. I wonder to this day if that was the right decision. I had said a proper goodbye to Kelty, had held his hand and kissed him and told him that I loved him. But I didn’t get to say goodbye to Riley, to kiss her forehead and brush my hand over her sweet cheek. That haunts me still.

  A few days before Riley’s funeral, a letter had come in the mail. It was from the Poetry Institute of Canada, advising Riley that a poem she had written, called “Untitled,” had been selected for a book the institute was publishing. A copy now sits on our great room bookshelf, the page with her entry well thumbed. Neither Kerry nor I even knew that Riley had written poetry, but the poem’s maturity and insight did not surprise us. It was a reflection of all that she was, deep and thoughtful and caring. Her cousin Jesse sang the poem at Riley’s service, and our tears were full of pride.

  Not long afterward, Riley’s yoga certificate, qualifying her as a teacher, arrived from Thailand.

  (6)

  Life Ever After

  PEOPLE SAY THAT when you lose a child, you become a member of a special club, a club that no parent ever wants to be part of. It’s true. There is a monumental shift at the core of your being, an internal switch that resets your life to a new normal that’s anything but normal. Even as time heals and life goes on, you are no longer the same person you once were.

  It’s as if the universe has been turned on its head. Children are meant to outlive their parents. Parents are meant to watch their sons and daughters mature into adulthood, go to work, find a life partner and, in a perfect world, marry and have their own children. Parents are supposed to become grandparents, basking in the glow of knowing they’ve done their job as well as they could and have earned the right to spoil the family’s next generation.