by Liz Levine
It’s like being the cancer kid. Everyone looks at you with a mix of pity and reassurance.
It’s terrible. On the second morning of the festival, I am sitting at a panel when a woman I met only that morning comes and hovers by my seat. She crouches down in front of me and takes my hands in hers and says, “If you ever need someone to talk to…”
Are you kidding? I met you over coffee this morning! Are you implying I don’t have friends? Of course, I’m only outraged and witty on the inside. On the outside, it’s like I’ve switched off. One sentence in from this woman, and all I can hear is beeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.
My friends swat her away. But no matter how much swatting they do, no one can compete with the deluge of opinions, advice, offers, and anecdotes that flood your life after a crisis. It’s about the pile of emails that say, This happened to my son, my friend, my mother, my daughter… It’s about the Facebook posts and messages of love, and the tweets and the texts on mental health. And the people you never heard from before and you’ve never heard from since. It’s the books people want you to read and the tea that they want you to drink, the baths they think you should soak in and the rituals that have worked for them.
And I know there’s a lot of kindness in those actions and words, and a lot of good advice between the lines and well-intentioned humans at as much of a loss as I am about how to grapple with the horror of it all.
But it’s funny, you know, the stigma of it. Because between all these pitying looks and pious people and emails and posts and books and teacups, there’s no space for words like
psychotic,
or
suicide,
or
epidemic.
There’s no room for how I really feel.
No one wants to hear those words.
Most people are more comfortable with the filler.
FLYING
It is late December 2004.
For the first year in decades, Judson did not ring my doorbell at the family home in Toronto on Christmas Day. He did not deliver my mother a goody basket or sneak me out for a smoke break. He did not return my Boxing Day message. No one is answering the family line at his home.
But I fly back to Vancouver anyway, west and away from him. And then I drive north to the hot springs to celebrate New Year’s. I am in a hotel room when my phone rings.
It’s Judson.
And he has cancer.
He has cancer, and I am tipping the bus boy.
He has cancer, and I am sipping champagne in a fancy hotel room.
He has cancer, and he is determined to survive it.
I get back to Vancouver a few days later and talk to him again. He has not yet left the hospital. They have kept him. The cancer is called Burkitt’s. It is a lymphoma.
It only strikes people under the age of 30. It usually kills people in less than 10 weeks.
But it is not going to kill him—not in the story we tell of our lives. He is big and strong, and they are keeping him to do super doses of chemotherapy immediately. He will get to go home in a few weeks, once they can see how he is taking to the treatment.
I save the number for his hospital room in my phone.
This is when I really become friends with Judson’s brother, Josh. I call the hospital room and Judson is getting tested, sleeping, bathing, and Josh brings me up to speed. Half the time Judson is probably there, just lying there, without the energy to talk to anyone, but Josh talks for him. Josh works harder at maintaining the illusion than any of us: the illusion that Judson is fine, that he will survive, that the family is doing OK, that this is process and that it’s normal. He crafts this part of the story for most of us, and I think that he is the only one who will ever know the Truth of what happened. Of course, the Truth changes.
It’s been less than ten days since I answered my phone in the hot springs hotel. But I know it’s time to go home—I can feel it. Home to Toronto, home to my parents, home to see him, sit near him, smell him—home to childhood.
Josh tells me that Judson is having trouble eating and sleeping. A nurse at the hospital had suggested that he smoke a little marijuana to help with these issues. The nurse also said it would take six months to get a medical card so he can get medical marijuana.
And with that I replaced feeling with action. Problem solving. My best space, where I am Teflon. After a few cryptic phone calls, I’m almost packed and ready to fly home.
Security is effortless, but the time standing at the gate makes me anxious about what awaits me on the other end. My heart is beating so loudly on the plane that I am sure the guy next to me can hear it.
I get off the plane and stand at the baggage carousel watching over my shoulder and wondering when the police will approach me. I pick up my bag with everyone else, and no one looks at me funny. Heart still pounding, I walk briskly out of the airport rolling my suitcase behind me and jump immediately into a waiting cab.
* * *
I go to the compassion club, an organization of medical marijuana advocates, buried in Kensington Market. The guy behind the counter provides me with two small jars. One is labelled FEED ME and the other SLEEP ME.
When I get home, I lock myself in the bathroom and pull out the two jars. I feel calm again, and then I feel giddy. Victory! I toss the jars into my knapsack, kiss my mother, and head out the door to trek the familiar path to Judson’s house.
It is cold in Toronto, and I am bundled from head to toe as I slip and slide down the Avenue Road hill. I am excited to see Judson. I look forward to giving him a hug and look forward to showing him what I’ve pulled off and handing over the gifts.
I am not prepared for what he is going to look like.
For how gray his blue eyes have become.
And how hollow his cheeks are.
FRAMED
It’s Mother’s Day six months after my sister’s suicide, and even though the gifts today are meant to all be for Mom, she has come armed with gifts for all of us. We each get a a giant bag, and from those we each pull out two photo frames. They are two feet wide and one foot tall, and each contains a collage of 74 unique photos of Tamara with one image repeated in both frames (a fact my mother is VERY concerned that we know) for a total of 149 images of my sister.
I think, What the actual fuck? What am I going to do with these? but instead I say, “Oh, thank you, Mom. This must have been so much work.”
I am bewildered. A photograph of your deceased sister among a collection of personal photos in your home or office? Absolutely! An entire shrine of 149 unique photographs dedicated to her… I think not.
Mom tells me she is going to ship my copies to my home in Vancouver. We talk about bubble wrap and shipping companies, and after it all I give her a kiss of thanks, and I leave the two giant frames on the kitchen table for shipping. I’m almost out of the room and away from the pictures when she pipes up, “But, sweetie, take these with you! You can keep them in your room for the week that you’re here!”
I take the pictures upstairs and leave them outside my bedroom door. When I get home that night, they are in my room, leaning against the fireplace. Somewhere around 3 a.m., I get up and put them facedown in my closet. I leave them there.
The next time I come home to Toronto, the pictures are waiting for me. They have been put back next to the fireplace so that they are the first thing I see. I put them back in the cupboard, but before I leave town two weeks later I take them back out and put them back by the fireplace, for Mom.
Four months later, in Vancouver, I’m racing home to my apartment. I’ve been away from Toronto a long time, and it’s now one day before the death-iversary. I can sense that in the pit of my stomach, but it’s not at the front of my mind. Not until I get home, and see that I have a notice of a package from UPS.
And on the day of her death, one year later, I am driving to UPS and picking up the package that contains not one but two very large photo collages of her.
G
GAY
I am n
ot sure when Judson made it official. We had broken up by the time we were 15, sometime during summer camp, but remained fast friends, and he went on to date a couple of other girls, and a couple of boys.
I remember for graduation formal I bought him a pink sequinned shirt from Holt Renfrew that he wore with pride.
GRAVE DIGGER
I’ve been to more funerals than I am years old. And given more eulogies than most people will in a lifetime. I’ve lost so many people that I’ve developed my own lexicon around loss. Words like death-iversary and grief-cation.
My best friend Paul, who has given me the nickname Death-Pro, swears that there is a business idea in this. “You’re a professional at it, Liz.”
So it’s no surprise to me when the phone rings and it’s my mother.
1-800-Death-Pro, how can we help you? I don’t actually say this. I say, “Hi, Mom.”
“Sweetie, I’ve thought about it for a while and I’ve purchased a family plot. Could you come home so we can dig up your sister?”
I was four years old when the quadruplets were born and my infant sister Katherine died—or maybe she was murdered. A nurse at the hospital was suspected of killing babies—forty-three died in the cardiac unit the year that Katherine died, a spike of over 600 percent—and there was a big court case, although the nurse who was charged with murder was eventually acquitted. I was young so I didn’t understand what was going on, and yet I did. It was my first loss and it was fundamental and as a result, I’m the child who doesn’t even question it.
“I’d be happy to fly home and dig up some bodies with you, Mom,” I say. I wanted to go for reasons that I can’t even begin to really explain to the average Muggle. But it was too close to the start of my next project, and too expensive to fly, and too much… so instead I call her the next day.
She needs to talk, I can tell. And it’s about Great-Aunt Tillie. Aunt Tillie pretty much outlived everyone who might have loved her. So by the time she died, the only relative left in spitting distance of the Toronto funeral home was my mother. So the urn came to our house. For the past 15 years, Great-Aunt Tillie has been “living” in our basement next to the freezer, her closest neighbor the frozen lasagna.
“I think we should bury Tillie when we bury your sister, if there’s room,” she says.
And this statement from her prompts a trip to the cemetery later, when I am in town, to check out the aforementioned, recently purchased family plot. There is room for Tillie, but Mom wants to overanalyze it anyway. She even has diagrams. If she had her way, she would draw her own chalk outline just to make sure that everyone fits.
We finally climb back in the car and my mother starts the engine but doesn’t drive anywhere.
“Unless you get cremated, there won’t be space for you…” she says.
I’m OK with that.
When it’s finally time to go to the cemetery to dig up Katherine, Tamara is the only child available and willing to do this with Mom. Tamara was always willing to take care of my mother. Tamara and Mom bundle Great-Aunt Tillie in her urn into the car. Mom tries to put Tillie in the trunk, but Tamara insists on the back seat. “She’ll want to look out the window. I think she’ll like that.” So the three of them pile into the car and spend the ride to the cemetery pointing out to Tillie all the things that have changed in the city since she has been in the basement. As Mom tells me this story, I’m giggling so hard I nearly manage to forget how morbid it all is.
They arrive at the cemetery and go to the graveside, where they’re met by a large, bearded grave digger. According to Tamara, he grunted an acknowledgment but didn’t seem to speak much. Not even to the guys who get shovels out of the truck and pry the stone from Katherine’s grave.
Tamara tells me that she tried to make Mom laugh or distract her. “Look, Mom,” she said. “Great-Aunt Tillie is waiting patiently for us.” But Mom is not laughing. Just a feeble smile and she brushes the dirt away from Katherine’s name and attempts to clean off the edges of the stone. It makes sense to me. They are digging up her daughter, after all.
Time crawled. Apparently, there was a lot of digging. And digging. First to make the hole deep, and then to make it wide. I remember reading somewhere that the soil has a tendency to shift below the surface so urns and even coffins can move up to a foot or more from their original resting place.
By the time the grave digger gets out the metal detector, my mother is in tears. Tamara is finding it hard to keep her engaged. And Mom can’t take it anymore.
She approaches the grave digger, reaches out to clutch his forearm, and, crying, asks, “Does this happen often?”
He is painstakingly slow with his response. “No, ma’am, the bodies usually go the other way.”
GOODBYE
I try to kill time, to erase it, to stop counting down or up or away from the moments I have here, now. Branded with the cancer band on my arm, I spend those weeks in Toronto wandering aimlessly. I wander hospital corridors, city streets, and then, to escape the biting February winds, down into the malls that lie beneath the city. I’ve been wandering there for weeks. Toronto is built that way. You can do that.
And it feels like I’m underground, or underwater. There’s no natural light in this life right now, and people are always crying around me. The smell of the hospital has become too familiar. I’m sick of the waiting room. Even Judson’s house with all the whispering and the tiptoeing is getting to me. I’m sick of getting hit by the waves of other people’s emotions.
While he is in the hospital, I squeeze in meetings and lunches and drinks with other people. I laugh with my friends—our friends, even! I go to parties and have dinners with my family. I even take the time to reach out to people I haven’t seen or spoken to in months.
Judson goes up to his family cottage for a few days in the middle of my stay. I have the gall to be angry with him. How is it possible that I waste a day, an hour, or even a second of my last moments on earth with him?
All my insecurities come to the surface when he is away: maybe he doesn’t like me anymore; maybe we’ve grown apart. I race through the rationalizations. I’ve come home, I’ve supported, I’ve smuggled puppies into hospital rooms, and I’m running out of solutions. Now work is calling. Someone else needs me, and I need to function. My flight is booked. And it’s a relief.
Then I remember, he is dying, he has cancer, and I am, clearly, an asshole.
* * *
We crawl out through his window on my last day in town. The way we always used to. We sit on the roof and smoke a joint. He talks about Josh. How worried he is about him. I get high. And listen. Just to the sound of his voice more than the words that he says.
If I don’t leave for the airport soon, I will miss my flight. At the door I give Judson a hug, and Kathy’s eyes meet mine over his shoulder. I know that she is telling me, This is the last time you will see him. I hold on tighter, as tight as I can, but just for a moment. I don’t want him to know how sad I am. And Kathy looks so sad as she watches us that I have to fight back my own tears.
As we part, I look him in the eye. I look as hard and as deep as I could. For a minute we click in—back to that place where we could stare at each other for hours. A gaze. Love.
I turn, walk down the stairs and almost make it to the end of the driveway before the tears come. I spend the entire walk home memorizing him: the look on his face, his eyes, and his heart.
I feel anxious going to the airport and claustrophobic boarding the airplane. But then I land at home, and it is easier to forget all about the anxiety, the trip, the creepy hospital with its funny smell and the crying family members in the waiting room. I forget about the plastic box that he had inserted into his chest so the chemo meds could be injected into him, and the chunks of hair missing from his head.
It feels like months since he first called me in my hotel room to tell me he was sick. What is two more weeks? At least, that’s what I tell myself.
GOOGLE
It’s been 11
months since she died, and I just googled her for the first time.
The first article is her obituary. It’s not even her obituary, actually—it’s just the small piece we released announcing her death (Is that right? Announcing?). It’s posted on a link to the funeral home. The third article is the same announcement that was printed in The Globe and Mail. Between them both is a link to an article in The Globe and Mail from March 2003 about my father and his work, entitled “Mr. Conflict of Interest.” Then there are the usual links to her Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn profiles, and as you move to the second search page, the stories of her start to filter out and other Tamara Levines begin to take her place.
The first four photos on the image search are of her. So is the seventh photo.
And I think, That’s it. That’s all there is. But as I scroll to the bottom of the Google page, there is a section that reads, “searches related to Tamara Levine,” and this is what that gives me:
Levine quadruplet endowment
Tamara Levine death
Katherine Levine obituary
Levine quadruplets Toronto
Tamara Ashley Levine Toronto
Tamara Levine obituary
Michael Levine daughter
Carol Cowan Levine
I’m struck by the size and scope of the tragedy here.
H
HARD DRIVE
It’s been five or six days since she died, and Mom is taking me to her apartment “to see.” And I want to know what needs to be done and how much there is to do and how I can help. I don’t yet know that Mom will spend years of her life sorting through Tamara’s things or that every trip home to Toronto will involve another layer of unravelling. I’m just looking to go one step at a time, to follow Mom’s lead. I want to know what I can accomplish in these first eight days at home.
