The querent reaches a stage of completion.
After our goodbye, twelve blocks away from my mother’s apartment in Etobicoke, I skulked off the bus and walked west. Every ten feet, I looked behind me. I didn’t want her to figure out where my father lived. The restraining order Aunt Sofia had taken out against my mother awarded as much safety as pocket lint.
I called my father and asked if he had time to hang out, if I could see him before I went back to the city. I’d slept poorly through my mother’s snores.
He’d been expecting my call. “You joke? Sure I coming get you.”
I stood on the corner of Lakeshore Boulevard and the street I grew up on, and recalled what my cousin Jerry recently said to me: “Your father looks good. He’s happy. He’s like a new man, with a new lease on life. He’s like the man I remember he used to be when we were kids. I keep expecting him to say ‘everybody in the car, we’re going to High Park for ice cream’ or something.”
It was true. My father’s essence, the part of him that seemed like it had ebbed away, permanently eroded by his time with my mother, had returned. He was funny and philosophical again, with a handful of obsessive-compulsive moments when he dwelled on every material thing he’d worked so hard for and lost.
Once again, I misunderstood his directions and found myself in the wrong spot when he pulled up. I dashed across the street before the light changed and jumped in the front passenger seat.
“Tutte okay?” He reached over and pinched my arm gently.
“No. Not really.”
“Better forget about.”
“Papa, please.”
“I know, I know, easy to say, not easy to do. But what you can do?”
He made us spaghetti with meatballs for lunch, my favourite comfort food, using Aunt Sofia’s sauce. He quoted his favourite passages from the Bible, talked about how his bad experiences have brought him closer to God. Every morning he recited the rosary. Every day he attended Mass.
“The Bible say, no sense living unhappy life.”
“I haven’t read that part. It says a bunch of crazy things too.”
“No make your life more hard then has to be.”
I smacked my forehead. “Now you tell me. Too late.”
“Never too late. Every day new day. You wake up, first thing you say, ‘Thanks God for new day, please no let me make sin to nobody today,’ especially with the stupid people who just here to make problem. And life goes on.”
“Yes.”
“Remember what I was say to you. You was see her, she was see you. You was do like the good daughter do. You should be live your life now. Forget the passato. Like the English say, when the milk is fall down, no can pick it up no more. What’s use to cry?’ I know. Easy for me to say.”
No sentence my father started with “Like the English say” has ever sounded like the original phrase.
“When I’m no longer part of this world, I want for you to be okay.”
“Come on, I was starting to feel better. What is wrong with you?”
I detect the worry in his eyes. The crease in his brow. The “never enough” thought process that is my inheritance. After every meal, I lugged groceries on transit across the city. Staples I could easily purchase at the Loblaw’s across the street, but for my dad buying more than he needed and insisting I haul the rest home.
“Put an apron on you, and you’d be the affectionate mother I never had.”
“When could we ever have a meal like this before?” he asked. “Just sitting, eating and talking about the news, or the weather, or what’s gone on in the world?”
He meant nobody screaming, breaking dishes, or burning food. He thought about my mother still. We both did. Had there been a network of serious assistance, a way of helping her, or a method of true caregiver respite, we might have coped. She might have thrived. The simplest pleasures are the ones most often taken for granted in this life: a quiet lunch shared with cherished souls is high on the list.
An old folk tradition from Bonefro required mourners to set a meal aside for the dish to be consumed by a stranger as a ritual to honour the deceased. I include an extra plate for Mom, ever hopeful she gains nourishment.
I made one last attempt, three more times, to stay in contact with my mother. What I mean is that the carousel ride continued. I didn’t consult the tarot, or survey the opinion of friends or ask my father for his thoughts. I studied the calendar above my desk. I was forty-one and enrolled in a graduate program of creative writing based in Toronto, offered by Guelph University. In between classes and hanging out at my dad’s, I met with new friends, drank coffee and discussed books and craft with other writers. An aggressive infection had seized me. My fever spiked, and pain surged through me when I brushed my teeth. Multiple appointments with specialists couldn’t determine the cause. The aches dredged up decades-old anguish.
I subtracted my age when I first felt truly terrified of my mother: five. The mathematic result—I counted thirty-six years of dealing with broken heartedness and failed diplomacy. The same length of time my parents’ marriage had lasted.
In the quiet balm of my modest apartment, I said out loud, “I’ve had enough.”
For her birthday, Christmas and Easter, I lit candles and followed the advice given by the astrologer in Vancouver—I focused on the flame and prayed, asking my guardian spirit to speak with my mom’s and relay a simple message: an apology sent with love.
A grief counsellor suggested engaging in acceptance exercises with the aid of a photograph. Endorsing non-aerobic activity is a hobby of mine, I told her, and chose an image of three-year-old me. The television, a prized indicator of our success, is the centre focus of the picture. I stand off to the side, hair in puny pigtails, crooked bangs, the serious expression of a child who tries to stay out of trouble and fails. I’m wearing a snazzy dress—white top accentuated by a red collar, cuffs, suspenders and pleated skirt. Stitched to the collar is a tie with black-and-white polka dots: toddler fashionista. Prodded by my mother-photographer, I hold the skirt out, ready to curtsy. In two years, I’ll meet my beloved gran. In four years, I’ll learn to read and write: this permits me to escape the confinement of a suffocating small-world view. In sixteen years, education will be my passport away from a hostile environment. At first (and for a long while), I won’t succeed, but I will try, try again. In thirty-eight years, the photo will be pinned to the bulletin board above my writing desk. I glance up at her—she has no idea what lies ahead, but her worried face knows fear. Her heart will shatter, and her skin will bruise. She will probe ways to turn wounds into words: she will chase dreams, they won’t chase her.
Things could have been so much worse, according to my dad. I agree with him ninety-nine percent of the time. The other one percent I argue, obstinate and loud, because trauma stories, these epics, live outside time.
The legacies carry on, the plot never lost, only complicated. Hurt is inherited, wounds get passed down. With tarot readings, astrology consultations and the occasional palm read, I’m fending off inevitable chaos. A few will remind me they’re not psychic. As if I didn’t know. As if I believed the future could be predicted.
I listen for a comforting phrase: everything will be okay. My home is safe. The worst is over. The next phase of life is about enjoyment.
The soothing words act as a balm. I nod. Exhale. Inhale. In the space of a single breath, so much can happen. Shoulders relax, lungs expand, the heartbeat slows—in the period that follows, I can plan. I can fix. I can find my way out of the maze.
Most often I did this through writing.
In workshops, the banter of feedback focuses on pivotal moments. The narrative progresses from inciting incident to rising action through to the climax where the tension peaks, trailed by falling action and resolution. The plot graph includes a series of higher stakes. The protagonist must change or stands to lose dearly. Redemption, revelation and resolved conflicts—stories with tied-up loose ends, some with a bow—were brought to class as offerings to the muses and fellow students.
But whose life mimicked that sequence? When catastrophe strikes, people are flattened. My family remains busted. I don’t expect this to transform. At times, I could barely register forward momentum, let alone follow a chronicle arrow up and up and away. Occasionally a story and its human host gets stuck, suspended in a state of survival, fighting stagnation. Memories don’t live merely in the mind: recollections weave through DNA, amass in body tissue and accumulate in meridian points.
I wonder: could synapses formed in fear stop lapping a panic track?
Did I create a thicker fog around myself, a pea-souper that misted over reason, in the years I strove to make sense of our saga? Or did I shine a flashlight into dark corners and root out my oldest companions: monsters?
A Pandora’s box opened when my parents married, and inside that container was all the help of the cursed Hope Diamond. As the only daughter of an only son, childless, the end of the tale—one that contained the greatest hits of poverty, misery, misogyny, three generations of maternal madness and a few of paternal melancholy, I wonder how the story ends. What lies pressed between the pages of the Book of Destiny printed and bound on the day of my birth?
This much I know: Nothing is written until a scribe is born.
Someone picks up a pen, or gathers her listeners.
Tells a story, or recites a tale.
Builds a bridge from their world to ours: offers connection, gives us a hand so we can climb out of the gutted space we may have been living in, studying the sky. No longer troubling deaf heaven with bootless cries, we might look upon ourselves and bless the sum of all who came before us, woven into the tapestry of this world and tethered together, each of us playing a part in what is to come.