by Liz Levine
They move as a unit from the start. When one cries, they all cry. When one needs a diaper changed, they all need their diapers changed. And then it becomes conscious. When one doesn’t get something they want, tears start, and then there is a subtle check-in with the other two. Then their little chins quiver in unison and each joins the chorus accordingly. They are learning to get what they want from the world, and they are learning it as three.
My parents work hard to ensure that I have “adult time,” that I am unique from The Triplets. This generally comes in the form of “adult dinners” when The Triplets have been put to bed. Unbeknownst to my parents, this is the time The Triplets use to evolve their tiny unit to a full-fledged gang.
As we eat, we hear giggles and shrieks from upstairs, and Mom is comforted by this… until she isn’t. We all arrive upstairs in time to discover the room trashed, covered in diapers and baby powder and diaper cream and toys and three impish faces with hair molded with diaper lotion and coloured with baby powder giggling maniacally. Spiked and studded, they truly are a tiny gang: rebels, warriors, risk takers.
We try again for adult dinner a few months later. As Mom, Dad, and I innocently eat dinner, The Triplets are upstairs plotting. The doorbell rings. Our neighbor stands awkwardly on the porch, apologizes for interrupting, and gestures to the driveway. Every toy that existed in The Triplets’ third-floor bedroom is now in the driveway and on the car. Mom takes the stairs two at a time, and we enter just in time to see Tamara holding the screen from the window as Lex and Peter heave my antique rocking chair out and onto the front windshield of the car. They are not yet three years old.
Mom elevates the natural course of the triumvirate as only she can by wrapping me into it. It started when they were infants, with three matching outfits and one of a slight variation, but then when I am 12 she has the great idea to take a photo with me as Santa and The Triplets as reindeer for the Christmas card. This inspired moment leads to my ultimate terror. Mom takes over Halloween. From Santa and some reindeer to Donald Duck with Huey, Dewey, and Louie or Mary Poppins and the chimney sweeps, and it gets worse from there as the ideas become increasingly used and therefore limited. This haunts my preteen life because every cute boy I meet has a parent who is friends with my mother and so, inevitably, a Christmas photo of me and The Triplets on his fridge.
We all go to the same private school: matching uniforms, check. By the time The Triplets are 10, the boys have moved on to another school, but their friend group crosses over. Every birthday happens in tandem, of course. The boys and Tamara date one another’s friends. Their graduations from high school and even university are celebrated together, and even as they become young adults they are still The Triplets to us.
When Tamara begins living in Europe for work and the boys are in Toronto, their shared birthday becomes a Toronto reunion of sorts. And as Tamara gets sick and eventually moves back to Toronto, the boys are by her side in their own ways.
And now, as I ask my mother how she wants to handle seating at Tamara’s funeral, she is quick to reply, “I want The Triplets with me, one boy on either side.”
A month after the funeral, my brother says to me, “When I was born I was a quadruplet, but Katherine died when we were so young that I only really remember being a triplet. Now that Tamara has died I don’t know if I’m a twin or a quadruplet… but I know I’m not a triplet anymore.”
MUSIC
Dad didn’t ever talk about real things with us as kids, or as adults, for that matter. He didn’t talk about Mom, or Katherine, or his relationships. He talked about “people” and “ideas” but not feelings. As I grew up, I learned that he talked about people and ideas for a living. I learned that he, like all of us, had a way of dealing with feelings, so that he could keep on living.
He wasn’t particularly good at anything emotional. He also wasn’t good at sports or computers or really anything that needed tools or equipment to execute. He referred to himself as “the builder of other people’s chairs.” He was good at that. He was great at the art of the deal and getting on an airplane.
Growing up, somehow I didn’t understand how sensitive he was. I began to see what he was passionate about. He is passionate about art, literature, film, and, surprisingly, baseball. He shares that love with his father.
* * *
It is my first year at university, and I’m home for a hot minute. I have less than 48 hours in town, but a visit with Lex is a priority. We have been getting closer lately. So we meet for lunch, and as soon as we put in our orders my phone rings. It’s Dad. I choose to ignore it. I will see him for dinner tomorrow.
Less than 30 seconds later, Lex’s phone rings. It’s Dad. Lex doesn’t answer either. By the time Dad calls back on my line, we take pity on the dear old fellow and answer. He’s out of breath and slightly panicked… “My TV isn’t working,” he says. “I can’t see the Blue Jays game. You need to come here and fix it.”
We tell him we have just met up for lunch.
We tell we have just ordered.
We tell him no.
We tell him we are catching up.
We finally suggest that he unplug the digital box from the wall and count to 30, then plug it back in and see if it works.
And he tells us, “I gave you life! I paid for your university education! How can you do this to me?” And this is the most emotion I have ever been privy to from the man behind the newspaper at the breakfast table in my childhood memories.
So Lex and I put on our coats, cancel our order, jump in a cab, and arrive at Dad’s home. We unplug the digital box, count to 30, plug it back in, and the game is back on. Dad then chooses to sacrifice the game by driving us each to our next appointments all the way across town. I know how passionate he is about baseball, but it takes a little longer to understand the bigger picture. To understand that he loves us even more than baseball. That this is just the way he knows how to express it.
As I become an adult, conversation with Dad turns to our shared love of the arts, and I begin to see how he is sensitive about external things like books or movies. I watch him watch and see the tears in his eyes, and I watch him fight for the projects he loves and the stories he wants realized. And I can connect to this.
But still, these moments are few and far between. For the most part, he and I share a cynical gallows humour and an ease with letting the small things go and burying the big things six feet deep.
And now, when I am forty, he tells me that after the divorce he used to drive by the house in tears knowing that we were inside with Mom. All this time I’ve accused him of being good at little more than hopping on an airplane whenever it suited him, or whenever something painful was going on.
* * *
I talk to him on the phone in the early hours of Friday morning right after Tamara’s death, and we are both focused on practicalities. So when he calls me again, less than 24 hours later, on Saturday afternoon, I’m surprised.
“Have you read The Globe and Mail today?” he asks.
“Ummm, no, Dad, I’m just packing and heading home.” I wonder what he’s even thinking. Of course I haven’t read the paper. I’ve had flights to cancel and flights to rebook and a universe to rotate because my sister just died! Surely it must be the same for him.
“There’s a great article about Leonard Cohen’s cantor and his final album,” he tells me.
Leonard Cohen just died 11 days earlier, and I know that Dad is affected by this too, so I slow my disbelief. “I haven’t read it yet, Dad, but it sounds interesting.”
“You know his last album was all about death, right?” he asks me.
I’m cautious. “Yes, Dad.”
“So I went to my office today and I went to the YouTubes and looked up his new album.”
I’m quiet. It’s not the moment to correct him about YouTube.
“I turned down the lights in my office and just listened to the album and cried. But I wasn’t really crying for Leonard, you know.”
“Yes, Dad. I know.”
N
NAIVE
I wish I could attribute this adjective to myself.
NIGHTMARES
My nighttime brain is trying to understand the jump. How she got over the railing. How long she paused there, whether she did it one leg at a time,
if she stood,
or sat,
or slipped.
Either way, every time she falls I wake up hard.
And sometimes I can hear her voice in my sleep.
NEW
Now, sometimes, it feels as though Lex and I have to get to know each other again. To talk about something other than her.
NAME DROPPER
My father has been accused of being a name dropper. When asked about it, he argues that he uses it to create comfort. The idea is that clients or potential clients have the sense that if others are well cared for by him, then they will be, too.
Tamara picked up this habit with vigor. Not because it made her clients have a sense of belonging, but because it allowed her to have one. It made the people around her feel important, and that made her feel important.
In her professional life, with those big names around her, she flourished, and this identity she created allowed her to be defiant. Her temper would flare up, and that would shift into her personal life, where she was most defiant with me. She wrote me a nasty note for Christmas 2012 after the family intervention. Even her suicide note, which had paragraphs dedicated to others in the family, had barely a line of text for me.
So I assumed she died hating me.
There’s nothing I can do about this. No one in the family is quick to correct me on it. I have to make that OK. It has to be all right that I tried, and I fought, and I got exhausted. I had an extra decade of the battle under my belt. What she didn’t understand is not her fault or mine.
But it’s hard. I loved her, and it would help me to know that she loved me.
A year after her death, Scott Willis, the Easter Bunny, came to visit me. We talked about Tamara’s propensity for name dropping. Scott acknowledged how bad it was and then told me, “It was always the worst when she was talking about you. She was so proud of you.”
O
OPTIMIST
I just am.
OBVIOUS
I loved her. I always will.
ORDINARY
None of this, not one single piece of this story, makes me special.
OBITUARY
The brother of my best friend and business partner died recently. He was young and left behind three children. My friend wanted me to help with the eulogy. I read the pieces I fixed out loud to him and his mother over speakerphone.
It was very quiet when I finished reading.
Once the moment passed, his mom suggested we start a side business writing obits and eulogies.
Our tagline could be: “So good we make ourselves cry.”
P
PICTURES
People take them to capture living moments. But they don’t. They are static, dead, a flimsy carbon copy of a moment in time.
I can’t remember that moment, the exact moment that picture—the one of Judson and me at the formal—was taken. We are both underage and holding beers. I am in a ridiculous crinoline dress and we are a foot and a half apart in height. We both look something more than happy; we look comfortable, at ease. We are not steeling ourselves for the next blow; we don’t know that they come that way yet.
PUPPIES
It’s week 3 of chemo. It’s hard to say that it’s “going well,” but we are getting used to it.
I smuggle a puppy, Chloe, into the hospital today. I walk in the door with a squirming knapsack and a shit-eating grin on my face. Chloe snuggles up under the covers at Jud’s feet. He says that she is warm, and it is a good couple of hours. We giggle a lot.
But after Josh takes Chloe home, Judson is quiet and withdrawn.
“Is it fucked up that Chloe made me sad?” he asks.
I shrug. “Why did she make you sad?”
“Because I miss it. Normal stuff. A warm dog curled up at the foot of my bed.”
I remind him that he goes home tomorrow. That he will be back to normal stuff then. But I know I’m lying. I get it then. The new normal: impermanent, ephemeral, everything slipping away from him all the time.
It’s like something is forever different now. There’s no gravity in this existence, nothing to hold us here. Nothing to hold everything I care about. The new normal is about letting things go.
It’s about how cool it is around his feet in the absence of Chloe’s warm body.
PERFECT
I’ve known Paul for almost 20 years. For the past decade, he has been my source of sanity when I’m in Toronto, and we have formed traditions that meet both my need to escape the family home and his anxious penchant for one-on-one time perfectly. And our favourite tradition is Festivus with our friend Kendra—or as we know it, REAL Christmas—the one that starts when the torture of family Christmas is over.
Kendra plays host, and as soon as we get together we put on matching onesies (yes, we are almost 40) and pour scotch and roll joints. Then we share our crazy family Christmas stories—and with us, we mean literally crazy. Paul’s mother has Alzheimer’s, one of Kendra’s family members is a heroin addict, and me… One brother is depressive, and my sister is psychotic with paranoid delusions.
We have been celebrating crazy-free Christmas together in one way or another for almost a decade, and for all the horrific stories we have shared and all the torturous moments we have rehashed together, Paul’s only complaint is that he has never seen me cry.
“I mean, it’s weird, Liz. Really?”
This year I’m not planning on going back to Toronto for Christmas for the first time EVER. I have never had a Christmas without my family, in our family home. I think it’s time for me to have a Christmas my way, to start my own traditions, to get a break. But, as Lex is quick to quip, all that changes when my sister jumps.
It’s late November, and the first person I call in Toronto is Paul.
He answers, and I sing out, “I’m coming home for Christmas after all…”
He is thrilled and jumps in with “Yay! I knew you couldn’t stay away!”
“…because my sister just killed herself.”
For the first few seconds, I know he can’t tell if I’m kidding or not. Once it lands, he’s devastated, but his mission is clear: get a copy of The Globe and Mail with the obituary in it, meet me at the airport in 24 hours, feed me, take me to a quiet side street to smoke a joint, and take me to Kendra’s. Simple. He’s on it.
And true to his word, after I drag my bag off the luggage carousel, there is Paul. He wraps me in a giant hug and confesses, “I couldn’t find a copy of the paper. I went to three places. Maybe we can stop on the way to Kendra’s?”
“No problem.” I shrug, exhausted. “Let’s just grab some dinner.”
“Damn,” he confesses. “I was hoping that would make you cry…”
I grin—he’s kidding.
We peel out of the airport, and it’s clear he has a plan. He is determined to succeed in the rest of his mission, and before I know it the ride home from the airport is starting to feel like any other Christmas.
As we get close to the city, he tells me he has the perfect restaurant to take me to and he pulls on the steering wheel, and I grab the dashboard to steady myself as he crosses three lanes of traffic to take the exit. We are laughing when he pulls up to a stoplight. At least I am. And then I feel a shift. He’s looking out his window, and his hands are over his mouth and there are tears in his eyes and all I can do is laugh… and nod.
Yup. This is the exact intersection she jumped into 90 hours ago. There is still police tape around the site, and a day or two later I will discover that there is a stain on the pavement that I don’t want to look at too closely.
And Paul is crying. Full-on sobs. “I’m a terrible friend! I’m totally failing at this.” A
nd I giggle. And he hiccups. And then we are both howling.
The light has gone green and Paul drives ahead. We get to the restaurant and it’s closed, and Paul cries again, and I laugh harder. “I’m the Worst. Friend. Ever,” he says and puts his head in his hands. I assure him that he’s not and that the next thing on his list is totally doable: a side street and a joint. He pops his glove box and smiles proudly as he takes out the joint. “I can totally do this.” He pulls onto a side street, and we get out of the car. I light the joint. “You did it, Paul!” He grins and goes to lock the car, and sets off the car alarm, and it’s SO LOUD and the street is so quiet and for the life of him, he cannot turn it off.
The week is full of more terrible things than I could have possibly imagined. Selecting funeral plots, measuring caskets and urns, picking up bloody evidence bags, packing up her apartment, proofreading eulogies—all of it. And Paul is there for me through every second. Usually shaking his head in wonder that I’m still not in tears.
Don’t you get it, Paul? I love that I don’t cry with you.
The night before I leave, things finally seem to have settled and I’m sitting on the couch in Paul’s apartment while he takes his air-conditioning unit out of the window frame. Josh missed the funeral, and finally I have a moment to text and ask him why.
JOSH
I’m not sure why. I just couldn’t do it. I’m sorry.
And for the first time since this crisis hit, I feel a wave of genuine emotion roll over me. It’s Josh and Judson and Tamara and Katherine and my mother. It’s all the things. And I can’t help it. In this moment, there are tears in my eyes, and Paul notices…
