They Left Us Everything (12 page)

I have four of Pat’s sculptures in my living room. Most are mother–child figures, but the largest piece is a two-foottall abstract, reminiscent of works by the late British sculptor Barbara Hepworth. It’s a flowing, organic form that looks like
a pear split open—womb-like—evoking the mystery of life’s beginning. The alabaster is polished smooth; in some places it’s so thin it’s translucent. It sits on the ledge of my living-room window, where light pours in, illuminating it from behind.

I’ve noticed that many female artists—as they grow older and find their voice—become more abstract in their work, and Pat and I debate the meaning of this.

“The sculptures I like best haven’t really been done by me,” Pat says, and tells me that these pieces flow through her, coming from a higher universal place: the sacred place of the divine. These are the shapes that emerge from the stone when she gets out of the way.

I’ve experienced this energy a few times myself during times of heightened creativity. I’ve always called it “My Street of Green Lights”—when everything flows and there are no roadblocks. I’m merely a conduit for something that is meant to be. The results are astonishing, even awe-inspiring. Our hands haven’t done the work; they’ve only been borrowed— it’s the humility of being a midwife.

The theme of mother and child runs constantly through Pat’s sculptures—she has lost two of her four children, and I can ask her questions about grieving that I wouldn’t have dared to ask Mum. A lifelong study of Jung has helped Pat transform her tragedies into art, particularly through the interpretation of dreams. Wombs are the provenance of women, to be carried, protected, and celebrated—lamented, and worked out. She tells me that Jung combined spirituality with religion to interpret ancient symbols. I have never studied Jung. Suddenly it seems urgent that I learn more. I want her to help me.

I describe to Pat a recurring dream I’ve had, concerning Mum’s house. I’m conflicted about staying on there, even though I told the boys I would. In childhood that house was my paradise. As Mum aged, it felt more like a trap. Now that I’ve moved out there, am I taking a step forward or a step back? I don’t want to get stuck there. What will it feel like to be alone for so long?

“When you feel closer to yourself,” she says, “you’re closer to the divine. Then you can deal with your monsters consciously, without having them destroy you.”

Pat urges me to stay with myself. “Some things you can’t do in a collective,” she says. “We all have a secret life—something we work through creatively, through art—we don’t have to share it.”

Pat knows that I’ve been struggling to understand not only my relationship to Mum, but what this ancestral home means to me. I sense that it, too, is womb-like, this container—the source of all my happiness and unhappiness, the two inextricably intertwined, to be understood if at all by the untangling of it. But what is my unfinished business there, my purpose? What will I find?

“Don’t fight it,” Pat tells me. “It’s where you’re meant to be.”

Unpacking the Past

It’s been four weeks since Mum died and I’m knee deep in pocket litter. Each piece is a depth charge exploding a memory.

In a trunk I find an old Langley’s Dry Cleaner’s receipt crumpled into the pocket of Mum’s Chinese dressing gown. Suddenly, it’s 1953 and I’m seven years old again. Dad’s in the shower, late for work. Mum stands in her dressing room, opens her coin purse, hands me thirty cents.

“Quick!” she says. “Run up to Langley’s and get your father’s shirts!”

I stare in disbelief at the old receipt. How could it still be here after all these years? Did she never wear the dressing gown again after that? Did shirts really cost only ten cents each to wash and iron back then?

From Mum’s winter coats hanging in the mudroom I empty the pockets of baggies, chunks of doggie biscuits, Kleenex, her handwritten grocery lists, a key, chewing gum, a ping-pong ball, red lipstick, and more and more Kleenex.

Pocket litter turns out to be ground zero, the debris left
behind that no thrift store will take: small mounds of ash, yet mountains to climb, for me. We are the sum of our habits, and this is the proof of my mother—the Mum I once loved but can no longer recall. I start to sob.

Several of my friends in Toronto offer to help me clear out the house, and at first I decline. Many are in the same situation I am. Why should they have to inherit my work on top of their own? But it’s exactly this shared experience that motivates their generosity; they understand what I’m facing. And so I change my mind. I accept their help, gratefully. They tell me that the internal, emotional work will be mine alone and it will be onerous enough.

Lesley offers to help with the culling of Mum’s clothes. Lesley is a pixie—petite and full of empathy. She’s a well-known illustrator, an acute observer of the human condition, and her whimsical drawings vibrate with tart humour. She and I have often helped critique each other’s professional work and have taken long walks to critique our parents as well. She recently entered the caretaking mode with her own mother, so she understands the demands, but she shows more compassion than I do.

She drives out from Toronto, and we stuff Mum’s sweaters— forty-three nearly identical red ones—into garbage bags and stack them by the front door for the thrift store to pick up. We do the same with dozens of navy blue and black elastic-waist polyester trousers. I grimace at the thought that my children will one day be doing the same for me.

We wade through the sloppy tangle of Mum’s handbags and empty them of tortoiseshell combs, theatre programs, compacts, and mints. I try not to succumb to the memories— when and where Mum used each one—but when I find her
black pigskin change purse from the 1950s, I get mugged. Guilt is seared into my six-year-old brain. Even the tips of my fingers recall the feel of its two metal prongs when I pried them open to steal a nickel.

“Aren’t mothers interesting?” says Lesley as she picks up a lime-green clutch bag from the 1960s. “We cling to that last gasp of being loved by them. Giving that up means growing up.” She stuffs it into the open garbage bag. “Time to let the old girl go.”

When I get to Mum’s mahogany dresser, I can’t bear to clear it. Her one tube of red lipstick, white rat-tail comb, and small, black-strapped Timex lie scattered on the white linen runner amidst emery boards, nail scissors, and the monogrammed silver dresser set inherited from her mother. The fat red tomato pincushion bristles with all her safety pins and brooches. Silver frames, large and small, hold black-and-white family photographs. In 1991, when my brother Sandy died of cancer at age forty-two, Mum had flooded most of the frames with overlapping pictures of him—so there is Sandy in his pram, Sandy on Grandmother’s lap, Sandy in his cadet uniform, Sandy riding a camel in Egypt, Sandy skiing with Dad.

Sandy was an elegant, courtly, highly principled young man. He’d spent his life as a banker overseas, first in London, then in Hong Kong (his birthplace), and later in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. When he developed a rare form of cancer called fibrous histeocytoma, he refused the quarter-section amputation offered at Princess Margaret Hospital—“I’ll look like Lord Nelson without his ship,” he said—and we brought him home to die.

Sandy’s subsequent nine-month period of palliative care rocked our family to its core, even as it stretched out to feel
like a well-choreographed ballet with an inevitable ending that we tried to delay. Using June Callwood’s book
Twelve Weeks in Spring
as our inspirational guide, we transformed his old bedroom in the back of the house into a hospital room; while he could still walk, we helped him downstairs and laid him on a chaise on the verandah. As winter progressed and his tumour grew, he spent more and more time upstairs in his bed. Robin moved home, promising to stay “for as long as it takes,” and Victor and I shared round-the-clock nursing shifts with him. Chris flew in whenever he could.

One evening, I collapsed into a chair at the kitchen table, my head in my hands, hair in my face, sobbing.

“I don’t want him to die! How can we not have Sandy? How can there be nothing left?” Then I became irrational, screaming, “I want a little Sandy … I want his girlfriend to get pregnant … I want to freeze his sperm!”

Mum was sitting across from me, her head down, one fingernail picking at the woven placemat. Dad came up behind my chair and held my heaving shoulders. He let me cry until I had nothing left. But after I stopped, wet tears were still plopping into my lap. I looked up and they were Dad’s.

I said, “I’m sorry, so sorry.”

“Don’t be,” said Dad quietly. “You’re expressing what all of us feel but haven’t been able to say.”

By April, Sandy’s tumour had burst through his chest and climbed above his left shoulder like a unicorn’s horn, a whorl of angry red in a bed of bubbling blisters. It was so heavy Sandy could no longer sit up. The fingers on his left hand had been bandaged in white gauze because gangrene had set in. One morning, as the bandages were being changed, Sandy asked for a mirror. Mum didn’t want to give it to him; she wanted to spare him.

“It’s his body,” I said. “Let him feel in control. If he wants to see it, we shouldn’t deny him.”

Sandy took the mirror in his right hand and, with great effort, lifted it high above his head. He held it there for a long time studying the tumour and the gangrene, saying nothing; then he lowered the mirror and closed his eyes. Beads of sweat formed on his forehead.

When the pain came, syringes of morphine lay like soldiers on the table beside his bed. I was squeamish with needles, so whenever I had the midnight shift, I had to wake Robin to help me give the injections.

Sandy often woke with nightmares, describing horrific scenes of carnage on the battlefields of the American Civil War.

“The horses are on their backs … their legs are in the air … their eyes are wild … there’s smoke everywhere!”

I said, “No, Sandy, you’re at home … you’re just having a bad dream.”

“No, no! I’m there! I’m there! Can’t you see it?”

Other times, he looked petrified, crying, “I don’t want to die … I don’t want to die!”

I sat in the rocking chair at the foot of his bed, talking of reincarnation. Sandy didn’t believe in it.

“I’m going to miss all of you so much,” he said.

“No … it’s us who’ll be missing
you
,” I said. “You’ll be able to be with us whenever you want. You’ll be in a wonderful place—full of energy and light.”

By early May the needles were gone, replaced by a morphine pump that Sandy could operate himself by pushing a button whenever he felt the pain breaking through. The drug went directly into a butterfly needle implanted by the doctor into his vein. The bandage on his right hand now
swelled and wrapped up over his wrist as the gangrene spread upwards; when it needed to be changed, shreds of blackened flesh fell away.

Robin sat beside him for hours, gently massaging his arm. Mum and Dad took turns reading to him. The growth of the tumour was now affecting his ability to swallow. We swabbed his mouth with water as he wasted away.

Towards the end of May, the doctor told us it was only a matter of hours. In fact, he had already signed the death certificate, which Robin kept in his bedroom. Sandy lay with his eyes closed in a drug-induced coma, but I felt he could hear me.

“Today is Robin’s birthday …” I whispered to him, “so please don’t die today … it would be terrible for Robin if you died on his birthday.”

He died the next morning, while Robin was stroking his arm. Dad was outside gardening. Robin opened Sandy’s window and quietly called down, “Dad—Sandy’s gone.” Dad dropped his rake and raced up.

By the end of the afternoon, Sandy’s face was grey—waxylooking and cold. The family had gathered around his bed to say prayers, but after everyone left, I stayed behind and pulled back the sheet. I looked at the tumour. It was red. I placed my hand on it: it was hot … angry looking … still growing.

As a mother myself, I don’t know how Mum absorbed the loss of Sandy. I wish I could have plumbed the depths of her feelings, but she would never share them with me. When I asked her if she was missing him, she answered sharply, “I don’t know what you mean by that question!” But I remember the sound she made the night Sandy died. It was a deep, shattering sonar toll, so loud and echoing it sounded like a submarine
sinking to the ocean floor. This unholy noise bounced off the bones of the house behind her bedroom door for hours while Dad paced back and forth in the upstairs hall. He wouldn’t let us go in to her, and he didn’t either. He just guarded her door until she stopped.

The loss of Sandy was so devastating that, during his funeral, my brain couldn’t grasp the concept that our “sibling team” was no longer five. We were his pallbearers, but we needed three on each side, so I suggested a family friend for the sixth. When Victor reminded me that we needed
two
extra people, I stared at him blankly. He put his arm around my shoulder and said, “Sandy can’t carry his own coffin, now, can he?”

I open Mum’s middle drawer and pause. Under all her practical flannelette nightgowns I feel something hard. It’s an unopened box of the perfume Mum used to wear—Crêpe de Chine by Millot—its glossy black box sparkling with gold dots and Art Deco fans. Whenever Dad travelled he brought her a bottle. They never used endearments like
dear
or
darling
with each other, but whenever he brought her perfume I got excited—it meant he loved her.