Read The Staircase Letters Online
Authors: Arthur Motyer
The Staircase Letters (6 page)
Elma’s reply came the following day, and I wrote again two days after that.
Dear A.,
Actually, I was asleep, so there! Why wouldn’t I be at 11.30 a.m. my time? It’s one of my best times for sleeping. As to Carol and me, of course you too have been, and will be, afflicted with times of wondering how you will survive. You understand, and know how to express that understanding, very well indeed.
As for suffering, I endured far more and— worse—inflicted far more, and with more painful damage to everyone concerned, when I was drinking. Paradoxically, perhaps, a lot of what I learned, and have tried to make a part of my approach to life, comes from that period and from AA. Maybe it’s all just a part of a much bigger picture. I hope so.
Ever … ever … ever …
E.
Dear E.,
I guess it was inevitable that for so many years, as you were coping with your life and your family and I was coping with mine, our communication became little more than an exchange of Christmas cards. Now, when you write as you have just done, I feel the great gap. But we have the present, and the present matters. You’re there. I’m here. But I’m also there.
Ever … ever … ever …
A.
It was, indeed, a great gap, for I had moved my family in 1970 from Bishop’s University in Quebec to Mount Allison in New Brunswick, and the adjustment was difficult for all of us. I was caught up in university politics as a dean and then academic vice-president; my wife was understandably unhappy as she tried to cover up a broken marriage; and my children had to make new friends in a new place. But even before my move to eastern Canada, Elma had produced a son and a daughter, John and Beth, in 1967 and 1969, and then her stillborn son in 1971.
There had been a ten-year addiction to alcohol, and an attempt at suicide, more of a cry for help, when she had slashed her left wrist in three places with razor blades, and was kept in a hospital ward for five days—shut up against her will, as she expressed it. But soon after that, she began her long, tough journey to recovery through AA, and a perfectly healthy son, James, was born in 1973.
In our Christmas cards, there were only incomplete references made to all of these happenings, little notes that did nothing to indicate her deepest anguish, nothing to indicate mine. The nature of friendship, however, is such that gaps of time are of no real consequence, for anything truly there in the first place is never completely lost.
Elma was in better spirits when she wrote to Carol that same December day:
Dear Carol,
You asked me once about AA. Essentially, the idea is that you have to believe in a “power greater than yourself.” This can be, and often is in these more secular times, the power of the group you belong to. Or a special circle of
friends. It can certainly be love. (For many years, that’s what it was for me.) I have known of a number of people who at least began by agreeing that alcohol was a power greater than themselves … but since one is also supposed to believe that this power can “restore us to sanity,” I think one would eventually have to take it a bit further! So, no, one does not have to believe in God, though recently I have discovered that in fact I do, somewhat to my surprise, though I would hate to try to define the concept, since it is both infinitely cosmic and as close as my heartbeat. It’s more a question of believing that there
is
something you can draw on when you need help.
One of the aims of AA is to take yourself out of the centre of the universe. And you do this by reaching out of your own experience to try to help someone else—if you don’t pass it on, you lose it, so to speak. A very old and sound method of healing. I’ve seen it at work in psychiatric wards where far more good was done to patients by fellow patients than by any professional. It’s truly amazing and wonderful
to watch a person who has been sunk in total apathy and depression roused to reach out a hand to help someone even worse off. (Another valuable experience I gained from being an alcoholic—and one which I think has helped me to understand and, I hope, help others—was being shut up against my will in such a ward.)
A very happy note: I had a blood check today, and after the last awful round of chemo, my white cells are down so much and I am so anemic, that I don’t have to have any more chemo until January. I get a blood transfusion next week, instead—a
much
nicer prospect. It also explains why I have been feeling so tired and draggy recently. My naps were certainly getting longer and more frequent. I was afraid it was the beginning of the end, or something.
In addition, for the next four days (I’ve already done one today) I get to “shoot up” with a substance that is supposed to stimulate my bone marrow into making more white cells. All this means that I will
not
barely be
recovering from chemo when my family starts arriving, nor do I have to worry for the next couple of months about every little sniffle someone else may have. Not only that, but my doctor doubled my dose of dexamethasone to help restore some of my diminishing sense of physical balance and coordination—she was actually the one who suggested it!
Anyway, I feel as if I have been given a new lease on life. To say nothing of the excitement of learning how to inject myself, albeit only subcutaneously so far. You never know when a skill like that will come in handy!
Much love,
Elma
On my birthday that year, without even realizing it was my birthday, Elma sent me the sort of present that makes any teacher’s life worthwhile, fulfilling her own injunction to express what is truly in the heart while one is still alive to express it. “Why don’t we tell people what we admire about them and how
much they mean to us more often? We let all these chances slip by,” she had earlier written to Carol, passing on what friends had suggested all of us should do.
Dear A,
This is a somewhat belated reply to something you said earlier about the years during which we were mainly in touch through Christmas cards. Well, yes … in a literal and detailed sense. But when have we ever really been out of touch?
Never forget that, since I was seventeen years old, you have been one of the people who has most influenced my life, and always been one of the most important people in it. You taught me so much about truly seeing and hearing—not just in literature and especially in drama, but in life—about sensitivity to other people and attitudes, about taking the time to care. I can’t think of a way you ever influenced me but for good. You made me a better person than I would have been without knowing you.
No, I don’t mean you’re perfect, and I didn’t put you on a pedestal even when I was an undergrad. You were, for example, a
most
irritating person to work with sometimes on a play, when you said things like—“Well, I don’t care how you get the effect, with or without make-up. I know she’s a healthy twenty-year-old, but she has to look as if she’s fifty and dying of syphilis. That’s
your
problem—just
do
it.” And I did, eventually!
And your understanding was always there, as I hope you know mine was for you, without words, and over whatever time and distance. You said it yourself: “You’re there. I’m here. But I’m also there.” And will be.
Ever … ever … ever …
E.
Knowing that I took time to care, back when we were both young, may have been what led Elma to entrust herself to me, as she did for all those last months of her life. But how do I account for the caring? Was my caring intuitive or premeditated? I should like to think the first, but something of the
second was also mixed in, the result of a personal experience when I was a student at Oxford.
In my final set of critical exams, I did badly, and this after my tutor thought I would do particularly well. “I have great hopes you’ll get a good degree,” said this distinguished scholar, with whom I had been working once a week for two years. Whether it was on the Scottish Chaucerians or
Tristram Shandy
or the use made by Shakespeare of Holinshed’s
Chronicles
when writing the history plays, I was made to cover every possible topic in the great sweep of English literature, starting with
Beowulf
, reading it in Anglo-Saxon, and ending with the Victorians. It was just the two of us in his college study, the ideal way for anyone to learn, with the great man assuring me at the end of two years that I would get a “good” degree, by which he meant first-class honours or a “good second.” But when that did not happen, I was unable to tell him why or explain the results to anyone else. I thought him on an intellectual plane so far above me that he could never have understood my inner turmoil. Besides, I was afraid. Between my own heart and mind, there had occurred a total split.
The lingering effects of whooping cough were
still with me—a serious enough affliction when one is an adult—but beyond that, I was emotionally and intellectually devastated from an unreciprocated love affair that I could tell no one about, because it was with another man. Neither was I later comforted to know that A. E. Housman had suffered much the same academic fate at Cambridge years before, and for much the same reason—and it wasn’t whooping cough. The story is there in
A Shropshire Lad:
Oh, when I was in love with you,
Then I was clean and brave
And miles around the wonder grew
How well I did behave
.
And now the fancy passes by,
And nothing will remain
,
And miles around they’ll say that I
Am quite myself again
.
That was 1896. Fifty years later, being gay was still a criminal offence, and I saw no way to climb out of my despair.
Somehow I survived, but only just. Crossing
back to Canada by ship some weeks later, I seriously contemplated jumping into the dark Atlantic; and that image of myself standing at the rail, looking down into a black ocean, remains terrifying. But I made then a vow that I would try to care as deeply as I could for any student I might eventually have, if I ever became a teacher. I would try for the caring instead of the detachment I felt from those higher up when I was a student in crisis. In that way, I might, at least, redress a balance. Patterns within patterns. Designs within designs. I would do what I could. Elma, in time, became part of that pattern.
It was shortly after my mid-December birthday that Carol initiated a philosophic pre-Christmas discussion with Elma on the nature of happiness. It was timed for the season. No matter the circumstances, doesn’t everyone want to be happy?
Dear E.,
My daughter Anne was here for two days this week, and I asked her if she had any
advice for me. “Be happy,” she said. This made us both laugh because we used to make fun of
Reader’s Digest
articles about “Being Happy While Dying of Cancer.” But it does, in a way, seem a choice we can make. Do you agree or not? Why would we waste precious time being unhappy? But it may be we have no control over this. I think of you every day.
much love,
carol
Dear C.,
Your apparently simple question about choosing to be happy set off a great debate between me and my cousin (whose brother died of cancer last year), and later with another friend whose husband died in September of the same kind of cancer I have, and who has the same way of handling life’s vicissitudes—i.e., usually with a black sense of humour. We ranged all over the map from the existence (or not) of free will, to the nature of hedonism (a very hard philosophical position to refute)— i.e., that if you choose to be miserable, you are
doing so because being miserable makes you happy, so you are always choosing to be happy, no matter what.
I have known a woman, and you have probably known someone like her, who made the worst of every possible situation, and apparently enjoyed every minute of it. Nothing was ever to her satisfaction: there was always a “Yes, but if only you/she/he had …” Of course she made other people miserable, too, (her children felt guilty when she died because they were really
not
sorry) and seemed to take great satisfaction in doing so.
Love always,
Elma