Here is another story I've written that touches on mental illness. It isn't my best effort but I still hope you will enjoy it Gentle Reader. And keep lobbying Ottawa to not facilitate euthanasia, not for seniors, nor for the terminally ill, and certainly not for mental health consumers and children. If you like the story then please share it with others.
We hadn't seen each other in years, then last year we were working together in the same supportive housing facility and here he is, looking inside the restaurant. His gaze lingers on the art on the wall, for this establishment offers wall space to local painters. His glance passes over us but he doesn't seem to recognize me. I almost call him over then he sees me, smiles and waves. I ask him if he'd like to join us but Adam is very savvy to situations outside of his own and seems to know that this affair should remain in the family. We still work together once a week, though my practice is beginning to build and soon full time I will be counselling the troubled and the chronically disturbed. In the nineties, soon after we had children he painted our portrait as a family and his meticulous brushstrokes still adorn the dining room of the old house. Yes I did feel sorry for him and also guilty because his work is so beautiful and he was asking so little for it and knowing that I had a family to support refused to accept more than the agreed upon fee. I have since offered to commission new work from him but he says he is too busy. He is doing much better now. He has a place to live, government subsidized housing but it's better than couch-surfing he says, and the part time hours he works as a housing support worker he says keep him alive and comfortable. Even though we've had coffee together many times he still hasn't revealed anything about his life. I know that he has been very poor, at times very frightened and now things have improved. I will phone him soon, invite him for a meal, then test on him my entire laundry list of questions. He has always been too polite to ask me if I really appreciate how easy my life is,
a question that scares the crap out of me. I know how expensive it is to live in this city and I also know that had it not been for the big house and Nana's generosity... but I am a coward and I refuse to think of the possible outcomes. I have been very lucky, despite all the surprise pregnancies and perhaps even because of them.
We are all here. Five of us present. Almost all of us. My son couldn't make it. Five generations of one family at the same restaurant table. This doesn't happen every day. My famous grandmother whose ninety-fifth birthday is being celebrated today, her short white hair resplendant and platinum in the spring sunshine. Her smile is still radiant and her teeth and eyes still shine like burnished steel. My twenty-two year old daughter has kept her two year old daughter quiet and now she is curled up like a sleepy cat in her mother's lap. I am the only male. The man in the middle. My son didn't want to come. He still hasn't met his great grandmother. I probably really wanted his support more than anything, being surrounded by women. Megan my wife is busy with a client today. Her massage therapy practice is beginning to take off. My mother, sitting next to her mother, is calm for a change. They have changed her medication. She appears quiet and self-assured without taking orders from her the way she talks and listens to Nana who is cutting her veal with such surgical precision that she could just as easily be holding the knife to her throat.
Last year when he was seventeen Josh told me he is gay. One offspring less to surprise me with an unexpected pregnancy. At eighteen my daughter made off to Quebec where she joined the circus, and became famous for a year. She returned pregnant and now they are living with us in the old house which was built before the First World War by my great grandfather, Nana's father. It has all the proportions if none of the elegance of a sprawling mansion. The house was built with size and function and economy in mind. There are no adornments of mouldings or stain glass or fancy woodwork. Coralee my daughter came home pregnant, by whom she never said. She insisted on keeping what has grown into an achingly beautiful little girl. When Megan and I asked if she was still pro-choice she replied "I am choosing to have this baby and raise it, aren't I?"
My own mother, whenever she wasn't well, often reminded me that I had never been planned, or wanted, that I was the product of a five minute union with another patient in the mental hospital just before her meds were changed. She would harangue me with this, standing in the middle of the living room, ranting and yelling that I was a little bastard that nature had foisted on her and she would climb up the stairs after me as I escaped to my bedroom carrying on with her tirade until I acquired the adolescent good sense of getting out of the house and staying away for as long as I could. At the end of her episodes she would collapse into an exhaustion of weeping, then smother me in unwanted embraces, squeezing my fourteen year old hand between both of hers while begging for forgiveness, reassuring me over and over of her undying love. Her close proximity still repulses me and even now the memory of her wet cheek pressing into my face prevents me from allowing her to embrace me. Fortunately she quit trying a long time ago. I'm still thinking of seeing a psychiatrist.
Mom's birth was perhaps the most accidental of our lineage. Nana, an internationally renouned journalist, experienced her first labour pains while documenting the violent and bloody birth of the modern state of Israel. To this day she
claims that Mom's birth father, my biological grandfather was the twenty-year old son (Nana was over thirty then) of an Arab farmer she was interviewing. He was blown to bits by a land mine just minutes following my mother's conception. That's all we were supposed to know.
Nana has just asked me about my practice these days, and I have replied that they always manage to keep me busy with new patients, or clients as we call them now in our professional efforts to crown our clinical interactions and deliberations with human dignity and respect for the vulnerable population in our care. It seemed logical that growing up with a mother living with voices in her head and subject to frequent breakdowns that I would eventually want to study to be a psychologist. I also know better than anyone that I need help myself and one day I will go out and find it. My wife was five months pregnant with Coralee when we tied the knot. We were both twenty-one. Her parents were strict Catholics and even though she was liberal and prepared to get rid of it she had waited too long and her daddy was holding the purse strings. I had to do something to keep us all alive so I left university and got a job as a bus driver, decent union pay with benefits and we struggled along in a rented house. Mom wasn't doing well. My step-father, sick of coping with her psychotic breaks and illness, left her for a younger woman. Nana suggested, rather ordered us all to move into the big house to look after her. She bribed me, promising to bankroll my education if I returned to university. She didn't live there herself. To this day she insists that she hates that house and only set foot in there last Christmas. Josh was away in Mexico with his boyfriend who is almost thirty. Coralee met her for the first time and now her great Nana is the love of her life.
She rises up unassisted to make her way to the Ladies'. It would be a lie to suggest that age hasn't slowed her but it is still clear that Nana and old age are slugging it out. She doesn't care if she is losing the battle, she will continue to fight til she's pushing up clover. She has said often that she does not fear death, only that she will give ground to nothing that would try to steal from her her vitality, rob her of her life-force. Even when she began to show gray she never dyed her hair, unlike my mother who has worn on her head the same synthetically coloured bronze helmet. Only now can I see the gray finally pushing the colour out. She mentioned recently that she already decided to do this during her last stay in hospital two months ago. The staff were concerned that by not dying her hair or wearing make up that she wasn't showing any signs of recovery. But today, with her lined sagging face free from make-up or greasy embellishment and almost the entire top of her head gleaming silver above the dead flat bronze colour she already commands in me a respect that never existed before. She is poised and unmoved by Nana's demands. I've even heard her laugh a couple of times. Nana as always appears cool and detached towards her, as though not wanting to be seen and known as this woman's mother. In her brief absence we have all come to life and everyone is chatting.
She hobbles back to the table. She refuses to get a walker and still has to be reminded to take her cane with her on her many neighbourhood walks. Her hair still gleams like a white precious metal, her clear blue eyes and aquiline profile as frightening as ever, hovering over us like an ancient hawk-goddess. She has acquired a pronouned stoop though she can still move like a cracking whip. She glares suddenly at Coralee, whose little girl Selena sleeps curled in her lap. Coralee is texting on her i-phone. Nana turns to my mother and says, "Helen, could you please tell your granddaughter to put down her toy and start behaving as though she is among people?" In the fifties, when Mom was a little girl being raised by grandparents, Nana was conducting a series of interviews with Carl Jung, which she always claimed to be a pivotal moment in her life.
"I'll shut it off in a second," Coralee says. "I'm just tweeting some friends right now."
"Coralee." Nana says, "I mean right now."
"In a sec' Nan. I want them to know what's happening is all. It's a special occasion you know."
Nana backs down. Unlike her. Coralee's voice contains none of the defensive defiance I am used to hearing in her. She puts the phone down and smiles at her great Nana, their eyes flashing the same shining steel across the chasm of more than seven decades.
"I am going to buy one of those phones with the gift card you guys have all given me for my birthday," says Nana. "And Coralee is going to show me how to use it."
"You bet, Nan!" She gently strokes Selena's sleeping head and carefully adjusts her sweater.
"If she wasn't sleeping so peacefully I'd ask if I could hold her", Nana says, smiling again.
I say, "Just before we go let's have a group picture, Nana. You could hold her then."
I have never seen her show warmth or affection towards children. Throughout my childhood she ignored and avoided us and only after I got married and she offered me the house and my mom to care for did she begin to warm towards me. I have mentioned that she still hasn't met my son Josh. She has never asked about him. Recently she has been talking to me about her acquaintance with Jung. The series of interviews she did with him for a magazine more than a decade before I was born and her subsequent therapeutic adventure in the care of one of his assistants. For me, Nana is the Twentieth Century because she has seen and been touched and has touched so much of what has come to mark us as a world: the Second World War where she was an on the ground reporter during the bombing of London; the partition of India and Pakistan when she met and interviewed Gandhi, the Naqba and the rise of the modern state of Israel, Jung, Martin Luther King, the October Crisis, the fall of the Berlin Wall and then she finally retired to write her memoirs. She has not mentioned them since, her memoirs, and I still don't know when or if ever she is going to get them published. She is a living legend and we have all lived out our small little lives beneath her shadow. She has never openly told us what a complete disappointment she must find us. That she could spawn into existence such a festering mass of mediocrity, such a brood of sullen bastards as all of us present. There is no choice but to live in awe of her. Only my mother, just in these last two months, appears to have broken free from her.
Nana is back in her little apartment. She refuses to move into seniors' housing and doesn't see why she should. She still looks after herself. Against her will we hired her a house cleaner, who has so far survived four years with her.. She still does what she can to keep her place spotless and feeds herself well. She did give up driving ten years ago. Not because she had to but because she said she was sick of fighting idiots for road space and at her age she wants above everything the kind of serenity that befits her years. The spring sun has given way to rain and the afternoon has turned the fresh green into a sad and dismal gray. Megan is still with her client and I have accepted my daughter's offer of a cup of tea. Selena is playing in the living room. At the table she pours for both of us, tears open a crumpet and spreads butter and marmelade then offers me half. She has never said anything about her year in the circus. I read some lovely reviews about her performance and to this day have not mustered the courage to tell her how proud I am. Saying things somehow cheapens them and this treasure I mean to cherish quietly in the secret place with the love I still have not admitted to her. Helen my mother appears in the room, and Coralee gets up to find her a cup. We sip and chew in silence while the falling rain brings rhythm to our thoughts. I notice as though for the first time really the dark beauty of the original wood panelling and ceiling beams of the dining room, the only room of the house where my great grandfather indulged in the luxury of hardwood trim, and feel almost overwhelmed by a pang of gratitude. Just above where my daughter is seated on a rare white patch of wall smiles our family portrait, the young selves of Megan and me and the small child selves of our children. A thin dark frame completes the effect. I still intend to invite Adam over to see it.
"I am reading them, you know." Helen says between mouthfuls of crumpet.
"Reading what?"
"Mother's memoirs."
"I didn't know she had them published."
"She kept it quiet. You know what she's like."
"How far along are you?" Coralee asks.
"The part about my father."
"Ah, the mystery man," I say smiling.
"She was raped."
"What?"
"It was always so obvious, wasn't it? Yet I never guessed. None of us guessed. Of course not. Who would want to suspect anything so horrible?" My mother struggles to compose herself. "Especially of her!" She is on the verge of tears. Coralee reaches across and takes her hand in hers and she gratefully lets her hold it.
"By that filthy young little Arab. That ungrateful little Palestinian scum. After all she tried to do for his sorry ass and his people. That is how he thanked her. My father. Your grandfather, Doug. After the deed and Mom lay in the hut in the dark, too shocked to scream or cry, not even knowing that the very beginning of me was already taking form inside her, and she told my father, the scum who raped her, that if he went back to his compound towards the south he would evade the Zionist snipers who were after him. He didn't know that she had just sent him through a mine field to his death."
The rain falls outside and here inside the safe dark dining room the amber light makes the wood warm and friendly while my mother weeps silently and elegantly, so different from the psychotic break histrionics of years ago and I know there is nothing in the world that can ever console her.
I feel suddenly nauseous and my daughter wipes tears from her eyes and my mother continues to silently weep and the rain continues to fall on the roof and we all sit huddled together like stone age cave dwellers waiting for the first thunderclap to sound.
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