by Liz Levine
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To the fighters, the hand-holders, the caretakers. This is for you. I see you.
“If I succeed in ending my life tonight/this a.m. I am unsure which stories will remain of me, if any.”
—TAMARA LEVINE
FOREWORD
When my best friend and first love, Judson, got sick it looked like a disease. He was quiet and listless, he lost weight, his skin looked grey, and his eyes lost their spark. His sickness and, ultimately, his death broke my heart, but it made sense to my brain. I saw the illness take him. I saw him fight it, and I saw him lose his battle. I knew I didn’t have a cure for cancer and despite my best efforts, I knew I could not save him.
It wasn’t like that with my sister, Tamara.
She stayed alive—and sick—for decades. But he died.
No one could validate her illness for me—not parents or doctors. When I first started to identify my sister as “crazy,” l was told not to be mean. More to the point, I was told I was wrong. I was told to open myself more to her, to be more vulnerable and more accessible. That is good advice optically. But I was missing vital information: No one was actually aware that she was sick. Or that her deep, cutting cruelty came from illness.
So l opened up, and I got hurt, over and over again. And the more hurt I got, the less it became about getting to know my sister, and the more it became about trying to find the truth. Trying to fix her.
Fixing is a job for the smart and the strong. It’s also the perfect escape for a sensitive soul, so that’s who l pretended to be—and that stuck. So now I’m smart and strong and have survived my sister’s suicide, and everyone wants to share their issues around mental health—like I might have some answers or like l might be able to fix someone. But l can’t.
I wish there was an Al-Anon or PFLAG for this. Maybe then I could give some advice. But there isn’t. And I can’t give that advice. l did this wrong, I didn‘t love her right, and l can’t take that back. The best I can do is try to figure out where I went wrong, to become a detective in death. For now, that means working in reverse. That makes sense to me because the only place I have to work with is the end.
And in this reverse engineering (in the words and the details and the act of being vulnerable with all of the information at hand) I might finally be learning what to do with all the feelings I have. Something that is productive or that might touch someone.
* * *
Six weeks after my sister died, I got a tattoo on my wrist. It says make ________.
Eight weeks after, I wrote the first story for this book.
And I’m starting where all of us do. With the alphabet.
A
ALPHABET
I read a book called The Lover’s Dictionary by David Levithan. And he’s right: every word in the dictionary is a synonym for love.
Every word also works for loss.
ACTION
This whole book is a verb for me.
ASHES
My uncle Brian passed away in June of 2004. He requested that his body be cremated and spread across his property.
We spread the ashes. We hugged. And then we went for dinner.
It wasn’t until we hit the door of the restaurant that my father noted to someone, “You’ve got a little Brian on your back.”
ADDICTED
People always comment on how I never cry. That’s not completely true. I’m rarely if never angry, but I am sensitive and easily hurt, and so I cry in that space—as in, I tear up a little. I don’t cry when I’m sad, or at least I didn’t for years. Somewhere along the line, that got logged in my brain as a weakness. I’m sure it started when I was five and my mother gave birth to quadruplets and one of them, my infant sister, died.
I’m sure my mother cried a lot around that time. And then the surviving triplets came home from the hospital, and they cried a lot too. Just at the time when the triplets stopped crying, my mother lost both her parents. Less than three years later, my parents got divorced. So I grew up in a sea of tears. I never wanted to contribute to the flow, for fear that all of us would drown.
* * *
It is snowing when I wake up on the morning of April 3, 2005. Judson has been dead for four days, and I have not shed a tear. I remind myself that I have survived this long through numerous losses, heartbreak, failed exams, and family drama without those tears. I seem to be fine. I lie in bed and wonder if my suit will be warm enough. Serious enough. Protective enough to wrap me in the illusion of professionalism for the bulk of the day. I am focused on practicalities.
Shower.
Dress.
Practice the eulogy while you dry your hair.
Put on an empathetic smile.
Keep it on all day.
* * *
It’s my turn to give the eulogy. I feel like I’ve waited hours in this synagogue for this moment, yet I feel panicked that it’s happening so soon. I adjust the microphone and look at Judson’s family—right at them. I want them to look back at me, I want to feel their pain.
I want to feel anything.
But I don’t. I don’t cry. My voice doesn’t waver even a little bit, and I wear these truths like medals as we pile back into the car.
The cemetery is surreal: slate-grey tombstones, big fat flakes of snow. I can see Judson’s father, Saul, already there: tall, in a long navy coat and hat with the snow swirling around him, standing at the foot of his son’s grave.
For all the details I have already forgotten about that day and those few months, and for all those details that I never digested in the first place, what stands alone is this image.
I am too cheerful at the cemetery. Greeting people, giving hugs, staying warm by moving around, staying distracted. I’m 29, and my mom still gives me “the eye”—it says, Settle down, look around you, is this behaviour appropriate?
What is appropriate at this moment? Every time I move, my boots make a deafening crunch in the snow. I know I should stand still, pay attention, pay respects, but if I do I’ll start to feel.
* * *
In retrospect, I can sense the tension between how much I needed to feel and how much I didn’t want to. And now I know that it took Judson dying for me to even realize that I had feelings. And it wasn’t the death itself, or the funeral obviously, it was the years that came after that were the most revealing. It’s about the moment I realized, I can’t avoid feeling any longer.
I don’t know when the breaking point was, or if there was an aha moment at all. I just started crying sometimes. Always by myself. And then I started laughing a little harder too. I began to realize that I can feel and that the act of feeling, feeling anything at all, is amazing.
I’ve become addicted to feeling, addicted to the sensation of awe. I seek it out. Mushroom trips, magical adventures, dangerous relationships, and deep, heady conversations. And it turns out, I am good at feeling things—like, really good.
I only wish I’d known about feeling from the start. I wish someone had told me that vulnerability is like a superpower, if handled with care.
But life taught me the opposite.
B
BEGINNING
The point in time or space at which something starts.
The first part of something.
The part that comes a
fter the end.
BRIEF (HISTORY OF DEATH)
Death: It’s about what you are left with.
Who: Katherine, my sister.
How: Illness? Infanticide?
Residue: People die. People die before they get to live. Babies die. Babies get killed.
Who: Gammy.
How: Lung cancer.
Residue: My mother took me to visit Gammy after her first round of chemo. I was eight, and I wasn’t prepared to see her. She was skinny and bald, like someone out of an alien movie. I know I spent lots of time with her—I remember the apartment full of knickknacks not for children, and I remember the small stuffed knitted orange bear I kept at her place—but this vision is now the only living image of her I can recall.
Who: Gramps.
How: He died six months after Gammy, of “natural causes.”
Residue: He was my favourite. I miss him. I am haunted by the idea that someone can die of a broken heart.
Who: I think her name was Kim. She was in my Grade 3 class.
How: Her father came home from work one day and lost it. He pulled out a gun and shot her mother in plain sight. Kim grabbed her little brother to protect him, and her father shot her in the back and then shot himself.
Residue: The little brother.
Who: Jonathan, who went to the boys’ school down the street. I think we were 13.
How: Went out into the backyard after breakfast in his school uniform, put his father’s gun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger.
Residue: I understand that it is possible not just to be killed but to kill yourself.
Who: Casey, a girl in my brother’s Grade 2 class.
How: They told us she died of a broken heart when her big brother left town for university.
Residue: I am re-haunted by the idea that someone can die from a broken heart.
Who: Wendy from the ski team.
How: Skied into a tree in junior team qualifiers and broke her neck on impact.
Residue: I stopped going so fast.
Who: Greg and Chris, friends from high school.
How: Drunk-driving accident.
Residue: I started going fast again.
Who: My friend Natalie’s mom.
How: A brain aneurysm the night of our high school play.
Residue: The sound Natalie made when they told her backstage.
Who: Judson, my first love and best friend.
How: Burkitt’s leukemia.
Residue: Life is about loss.
Who: Tamara, my sister.
How: Suicide; she jumped.
Residue: All the things.
BROTHERS
I have three of them. You should know them all.
Peter was always my favourite growing up. He is gentle and sensitive in a way only he and I share in the family. And he can make anyone laugh. In retrospect, I think this was his way of easing the tension that so often existed in our household.
At the cottage one summer, Mom herded us all up from the lake so she could get dinner ready. There was the usual cacophony of complaints and whines and “just five more minutes,” so by the time we climbed the 200 steps back up to the cottage there were some grumpy faces in the mix and everyone disappeared to their own corner of the cabin to mope and regroup alone. Minutes ticked by in near silence before we heard a voice from the basement: Peter’s sweet little voice. We all scrambled downstairs to find him sitting in the oversized laundry sink, rain boots on, legs splayed out over the edge, paddling with an abandoned canoe paddle and singing at the top of his voice, “Yes, we have no bananas.”
This is his way. Humour. And sensitivity.
Years later, we were driving down the Don Valley Parkway in Toronto. Mom had picked up each of us from our after-school activity of choice and was racing the light in the gathering dusk and aiming to have dinner for four kids on the table, stat. Peter piped up from the back of the car that we had just driven by a pigeon on the road that looked injured and could Mom turn the car around and rescue it? Her answer: “Absolutely not.” It was quiet for a moment, and then Peter’s sweet little voice began to sing “All Things Bright and Beautiful.” Mom grimaced and turned the car around…
Alexis was different. He was stronger, more assertive, and always had a fierce independent streak. He always said what he meant and meant what he said. As a child, he changed his given name from James Alexander to Alexis. It was simple for him: he liked it better. He works his universe like this—bending it to his wishes. When he was older, he would storm out of the house when Mom tried to ground him, and by the time I left home for university, the triplets were barely 16 but Alexis had already started his own business and was running around with a pager that he prioritized like a heart surgeon on call.
Alexis, who I now call Lex, went to the same university as me, and it was in our year of crossover there that we really connected. He would escape residence to come sit on my floor and hang out with my friends. He was awkward and nerdy and always had the front pockets of his dress pants overstuffed with his wallet and keys and notepads and anything else he wanted to carry around. But he liked being around the older kids, and frankly, we liked him. Lex became not just my brother, but my friend. A friend I would choose were we not already related.
Over this same time, Peter seemed to slip away from us. He went out east for university, and while there, he went from being an outgoing, funny, and self-admitted “player” to a quiet, near reclusive man. And as the last decade has gone by, he has adopted what is, to Lex and me, a fairly extreme worldview and a set of political and religious beliefs that have severed him from us further. We miss him.
Finally, there is little Joshy. My brother with the same name as Judson’s brother. Mom brought him home when we were all at university. And I mean literally just brought him home. She met him on a case she was handling for her work at the Children’s Aid Society. He came from a tough background and a broken home, and my mother felt it high time to raise a child who really needed her—so she offered to foster him.
We were all charmed by Joshy immediately. He was bad. Don’t underestimate me—REALLY BAD. Mouthy, volatile, a product of his upbringing. The first day I met him, I stepped through the door of the family home, suitcase and laundry in hand, to find this tiny, precocious child, age six, standing at the top of the stairs, hand on his hip, shoulders thrown back, fiercely telling my stepfather, Allan, “Kiss my butt, bitch.” And I fell instantly in love with his big blue eyes and Harry Potter spectacles combined with all the naive ferocity and failings that years in the system had granted him. Our hearts melted, and he became one of us.
There were three sisters too.
Now I’m the only one.
BREAK
By the spring of 2014, Tamara got offered a job with Save the Children in Australia. I think in her mind—which was getting sicker by the day—the job was a solution. She was going to get away from home, away from the people who were worried about her and telling her she was sick. Away from everything: from the flashing lights and the people following her, from the email hacking and the mind machine interface of her psychotic waking dreams.
The rest of us weren’t sure that being thousands of miles away, literally on the other side of the world, was the best plan, but Momma Bear was prepared to support her—as she always did, with all of us. Tamara gave up her apartment and sold or stored everything she owned, even her car. She moved in with Mom for the last two months before her travels. In the weeks before she left, she asked Mom to borrow the family car for a night so she could make a trip north of the city to say goodbye to some friends.
At 3 a.m. that night/morning after Tamara left, Mom got a call from the police in Belleville, Ontario, the opposite direction from Aurora, which was where Tamara said she was going. It would be the first of many calls that my mother would receive from police over the next two years. Apparently, they had pulled Tamara over, and she rambled on with a crazy story about being told to follow an ambulance. She was so incoherent
that the cops thought she was on drugs.
Mom didn’t tell me this story then. She rarely told me these stories. She felt that they just added ammunition to what she perceived to be my dislike of Tamara. Instead, she continued to outwardly support Tamara on her journey, and encouraged us to support her and say loving goodbyes.
I didn’t know it then, but that goodbye WAS important. After Tamara’s eventual psychotic break, she would never be the same again.
Two weeks later, in early June 2014, Tamara left for Australia. She was nervous and had started obsessing about her perceived role in the Malaysia Airlines crash earlier that spring. She felt responsible for friends dying in plane crashes, for random fires that started in other parts of the city, and, by the time she landed in Australia, she was convinced that she had been abducted in an airport en route and force-fed nuts.
That was one of the few things Tamara and I had in common: a nut allergy. And so, as with all her stories, the fiction (being poisoned) had a grain of truth (the allergy).
She told these tales to Lex and me via Facebook Messenger. The conversations were hard to follow not just because of the ideas but because of how her mind processed them. Her thoughts jumped all over the place, moving from the middle of one saga to the end of another to the beginning of the previous. Sometimes she was confessing to us, and other times she was accusing us of being part of the “conspiracy.”
I tried to tell Mom once again how sick I thought Tamara was. I tried to keep up with the diatribes on Messenger. I tried. And then I didn’t. Then I got on a plane for Los Angeles and spent the summer in the hot sunshine with my friends, developing film and television projects and believing that everything would be OK.
