Nobody Ever Talks About Anything But the End

by Liz Levine

  I can see it on his face. He is finally going to get this moment. He is going to see me cry, he is going to get to make it OK, it’s finally his turn! And in this overwhelming epiphany, Paul panics. He rips the air-conditioning unit from the wall, pulling a foot of plaster with it, and smashes it on the edge of his dining room table before dropping it explosively on the floor.

  He looks up at me, and I laugh. And I laugh and I laugh and I laugh.

  PARIS

  Before I smuggled puppies into hospital rooms, I tried out my first, and what could have been my greatest, smuggling plan ever.

  Judson was dating a girl named Joy. She was a model and going to Paris for fashion week. And Judson wanted to go so badly. And his parents were adamant that he would not.

  He wanted to go to be with Joy, and we liked the romance of it. So we were in on the plan.

  I can’t remember the details of how we pulled it off, or who was involved beyond Karina and myself. I know the plan included borrowing a parent’s car, sneaking a suitcase out the night before he left, lying to everyone about going to a cottage for a weekend, sleeping arrangements, parents who were out of town.

  And we pulled it off. Mostly. Meaning we got Judson to Paris.

  But it didn’t end with giggles and high fives. It ended with all of us, and all our parents, at Judson’s family dinner table with his parents livid and Judson on a flight home.

  I’ve moderated my smuggling efforts. I know I do better with puppies than people.

  Q

  QUERY

  We all poured years of our lives into helping Tamara. My mother more than anyone. And it’s impossible to explain how hard it is—not the giving of the time or the energy, but doing so for someone who thinks you are the enemy.

  We were all bombarded by accusations, constantly. At first it was about being mean, telling secrets, hiding things, sibling things. But the sicker she got, the tougher those accusations became. And by “tougher,” I mean harder to understand, riddled with conspiracy. How does anyone answer an email like this?

  To: Liz

  Date: March 6, 2016

  Hi Liz,

  …I went over to Woodlawn [Mom’s house] tonight for dinner. I was told in advance to take back my card with the 10 weeks of lottery tickets if there were any plays or abuse.

  Before I arrived there were strange emails, then when I got in the door she took Poppy down to be washed with purple towels, there were lots of pre-scripted lines but I ignored them all as I was happy to see Woodlawn and her. I really do love her. But although I laughed off the weird emails and the purple towels ultimately she crossed a line I could not ignore—she fed me dinner with laxatives and then when I ran upstairs to use the washroom there was no toilet paper or kleenex anywhere. I jumped into a towel the only place to find any tissue was baby wipes in my old room which was converted for Wish and Atlas. I am afraid that was too obvious a play to ignore and seemed an inappropriate play from my mother. So with some reluctance I followed directions from the powers that be and asked for the 10 weeks of lottery tickets and my note back.

  …I love Mom and will always be there for her and support her but they are right that I do need to draw the line re being poisoned.

  The answer is: one doesn’t. And when most of the emails looked like this, it meant that I was barely answering her at all.

  QUACKS

  I think we will spend the rest of our collective lives looking for an answer. The diagnosis didn’t explain Tamara’s suicide. Lex’s chronology of events, while helpful in establishing a timeline, doesn’t come close to the explanation that we all need. There needs to be a bad guy here. This must be someone’s fault.

  So in the month immediately following Tamara’s death, I join my mother on her quest to find the bad guy (my words, not hers). We started with Tamara’s shrink at Mount Sinai Hospital. I can’t remember a single thing about him, specifically. But here’s what I do remember:

  His office was piled floor to ceiling with boxes and books and file folders. Shelves that reached beyond infinity with coloured files and scraps of paper hanging out. Messy, disorganized, and almost looming over us. My mother and Allan sat on the couch in front of him, and I sat in a chair to his left. I could hear them talking about the appointment Tamara missed on the Thursday before she died. I could hear a feeble explanation for why the hospital had not called us that day. About why, in fact, they didn’t call us until a week later on Friday afternoon, an hour after we buried her. I can recall my mother laying out the timeline: Tamara’s 11 a.m. missed group therapy session on Thursday, her 3:40 a.m. death on Friday, and the phone call at 5 p.m. a week later to say that she had missed her session. Too little, too late.

  And then there is the conversation I have never heard before about a prescription for propranolol, an anti-anxiety drug. About how no one informed our family or Tamara’s psychiatrist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) that it had been prescribed, and about how my mother found the five-day-old prescription bottle empty on the day Tamara jumped.

  But the idea that my sister might have needed a bottle of anti-anxiety meds to take her leap of faith feels like background noise to me because I’m still floored by the idea that each of these coloured files and scraps of paper represents a life. And for all the details on phone calls and timing and prescription drugs it’s clear to me: this man’s office is a mirror of our mental health care system—and it’s a wonder anyone could survive this experience.

  Months later I go to see Tamara’s shrink at CAMH, and this entire idea is reinforced: if you’re not struggling with mental health issues when you get to this place, you sure will be by the time you leave. Looming, cement, dark, and imposing, this mental health centre has you check in between barred gates, and sends you to a lobby covered in signage about respect, violence, and mental health. The signage has, to my count, at least 15 different font choices and all the colours of the rainbow. Even I feel crazy here.

  Her shrink at CAMH is kind. And smart. His office is clean and sparse. A good sign. But I learn nothing from this meeting. He doesn’t “deal with grief” after all. And I’m giving up on answers. I go for dinner with Dad, and I ask him if he’s worried about Peter. He tells me he doesn’t know what to do for Peter. In fact, he says, “With Tamara, when we all finally circled around her, it was the cure that killed her.”

  It’s an answer and a scathing commentary on our mental health system.

  And he’s not wrong.

  R

  REMEMBER

  I do. All the time.

  REPEAT

  They come like that. One blow after another.

  RECALL

  I don’t lose my keys or my wallet, I never forget stuff I brought, or the stuff I need to bring home. I know memory is fragile. I know these recollections are framed, maintained, distorted, or forgotten. But I trust my mind. And my memory. And I’m usually right.

  I needed to talk about those first few days with my mother. Enough time has passed that I think we can. I’m the only one home at the house in Toronto and the breakfast room is bright and cheery and we’re sipping coffee and giggling, and I know this is a moment I can take with her.

  As we get into the details: dissonance. I’m sure I was home Saturday night, that I stayed with Kendra, that I got to my mother on Sunday. Mom tells me I wasn’t home until Tuesday. What would I have done all those days in between? We talked early Friday morning. Saturday, Sunday, Monday… three more days? I disagree with her. Strongly.

  “No,” she tells me. “I went to her apartment with the boys on Sunday, and you weren’t here, and I remember because I thought it was so strange that they both wanted to look over her railing. I wrote it down in my journal. You weren’t here until Tuesday.”

  I think it’s strange that she wrote all this down in her journal. I don’t think it’s strange at all that the boys needed to look over the railing. I would need to do the same days later. And I still think I’m right. But I’m prepared to acquies
ce that maybe, just maybe, I arrived Sunday night at Kendra’s and came to the family home Monday morning. I do remember walking down the street in Vancouver on Saturday and Dad calling to tell me about Leonard Cohen. I remember I was walking home from the grocery store, so maybe I stayed here Saturday and flew Sunday? I was bargaining.

  She still disagrees. Strongly. Her lips get tense. They form a thin line when she’s frustrated. Especially if she’s trying to hold it in.

  We leave it like that, and I move the conversation forward, somewhere else.

  Days later I lie in bed thinking about it all. Looking for clues, as I do. My email and calendar are no help; they clearly became a mess in that moment. I can’t find a copy of the airline ticket. I go back and read the story about Paul that now lives under the title “Perfect.”

  And there it is.

  My clue.

  He was supposed to pick up the obituary the night he got me from the airport.

  I checked. It was Monday that the obit ran. It was Monday that I flew to Toronto and stayed at Kendra’s house. I got home to Mom on Tuesday.

  RABBI

  Religion and death. It’s impossible to separate the two. And no matter how little religion may factor into your life, when your bloodline is the direct lineage of two of the twelve tribes of Israel and parts of your family are practicing Jews, then every death comes with a rabbi or three.

  The morning that she died, Lex and I start talking about the funeral plans. And the first thing on the list is to organize the burial at the aforementioned family plot. We go to the cemetery with my mother, and it’s the first time I’ve been back since we reburied Katherine and finally gave Great-Aunt Tillie a home.

  My mother paces the plot anxiously and worries about how Tamara fits and if she should be cremated. Lex and I, problem solvers that we are, agree that cremation is the solution, to ensure that everyone who needs to can fit into the plot. Mom agrees, and we are decided until the religious fanatics get wind of it.

  This leads to endless discussions with family members and the resident rabbi, who delivers the news to us, with absolute certainty, that Jews cannot be cremated or they will be trapped in a form of purgatory forever. With equal confidence, Lex, the lawyer, responds, “There is a precedent already set. We buried our other cremated sister here. She can join her twin in purgatory—and I guess you too, for letting us do it!” And with that he ends the discussion. Tamara is cremated and buried beside her identical twin sister. And I think we must be done with all this religious bullshit.

  The day after the funeral, Mom decides to have what she is calling “a gathering.” It’s not a shiva (because she is not religious), it’s not a wake (because that feels too celebratory), so it’s a gathering.

  As I exit my room on the day of said gathering, Mom is standing in the hallway on the second-floor landing, crying. “I can’t go downstairs,” she confesses. “That horrible Orthodox rabbi is sitting in the living room praying.”

  This is a problem I can solve. I head downstairs and introduce myself to the tall man in the tall hat and full robes who is rocking back and forth in my living room muttering to himself in Hebrew.

  “Hi, I’m Liz.”

  He won’t look at me or receive my handshake, and I remember he is not allowed to touch women.

  “So, I think you might have to leave,” I say. “I know it’s all very well intentioned, but we are not a religious family and my mother is really not comfortable with you here.”

  “I’m here for your brother,” he tells me.

  “Well, my brother lives in a lovely apartment in Thornhill, Ontario, so if you want to support him, maybe you could go there. This is my mother’s house and she is grieving the death of her daughter and she doesn’t want you here.”

  At this point, the rabbi has gotten up from his seat and is standing in front of me. “If you tell me how your mother grieves, then perhaps I could support her in that.”

  So I look at the rabbi. And then I wrap my arms around him tight, shimmy my shoulders just a bit, and push my chest into him. And that’s all it takes. Like vampires and garlic, this Orthodox rabbi and breasts.

  My father later quips that he must have run home to take a scalding bath with an iron brush. All I know is that he wasn’t upsetting my mother anymore.

  S

  STORY

  Stories are the things we tell ourselves about our lives. They are shaped by how we approach life. It’s about how we excavate them, the direction we dig and the parts we have the courage to uncover. It’s about how these layers come together to reveal our truth.

  I spent hours of my teenage life at Eliot’s Bookshop in Toronto. It closed recently. I walked past it on a trip home and saw it boarded up with paper over the windows. I stopped and took a picture of it this way. In transition. Not alive but not yet completely gone from living memory. It’s important to me now to hold things in this space. It was on Yonge Street just south of Bloor, and it had an upper level stacked floor to ceiling with dusty books down narrow aisles. I got lost in this space and in these stories. And I have stayed that way—lost and found in the stories around me.

  SHORT

  Tamara was always little. The shortest in the family by a good five inches at least. My mother called her Sweet-pea.

  Being short made her cute. But it didn’t make her small. She was little and loud. Fierce, even. She took up so much space, in fact, that it was easy to forget how small she was. Some days she seemed to loom over everything like a towering monolith.

  On the day she jumped, my mother found a footstool pushed up against the balcony railing.

  STAKES

  I’m used to stories with endings, stories with stakes, stakes that I can control and manipulate. I can build towards an ending—adjusting characters, lines of dialogue, tweaking the tiniest visual cue in a scene to tell an audience, You’re almost through!

  But this story, the one mired in personal grief, is different. There is no end in sight. I don’t know if it’s because I can’t see the end or because there just isn’t one. These stories I’m writing are things I cling to, trying to not let go—to not be pushed over the ledge with her.

  Despite the myriad fictional characters that populated Tamara’s world, the stakes in that world were real—the stakes for her were real. So now the stakes are real for me too. And as I get closer to the end of the alphabet, I can feel the panic in all of this. I have seven letters left to cling to, and then, somehow, I’m going to have to let her go.

  SHRAPNEL

  Commonly defined as “small metal fragments that are thrown off by an exploding bomb, mine, shell, or other object.”

  It’s Halloween, almost a year after Tamara’s death, and I’m calling my mother just to check in. My brothers have been fighting, and she’s worried about everyone’s relationships. She is crying when she picks up the phone, and I don’t know if it’s the sound of my voice or if she was like this before.

  “What’s wrong, Mom?” Dumb question. It has been a dumb question for eleven months, but I keep asking it anyway.

  She tells me that she has such a clear image of last year on this night because it was when they put our dog, Poppy, down. Tamara died so soon after that none of us had been to the house between the two losses, which meant Poppy was never really grieved. But Mom walked Poppy to the vet that day, so for her, the memory is crystal clear.

  Mom tells me that she knew my youngest brother, Joshy, would be sad, so she invited Tamara over that Halloween to hang out with him and give out candy. She has a vivid recollection of turning back at the end of the driveway, seeing Josh and Tamara in tears, and going back to give Tamara a hug. Apparently, Tamara just hung on to her for dear life. At the time I guess Mom thought it was about Poppy. Maybe it was.

  I let her story hang on the silent phone line between us for a moment. I listen to it for her. It’s all I can do some days. And then I move on, and so does she. What am I doing for Halloween? How is work going? How are my travel plans coming?
she asks. And then I ask her about my brothers.

  She’s upset that they’re fighting. She’s confused and frustrated with the choices Peter has made. She’s exhausted: by Tamara, by trying to understand Peter, by all the things. We all are. I can tell she wants to talk about this but also that she doesn’t have the energy to talk about it. None of us do.

  I ask her about her brother, Uncle John. He was in to visit the weekend before. She tells me it was nice. She sounds tired. I know what’s unspoken here. Uncle John and his wife didn’t make it to Toronto for Tamara’s funeral or for the tombstone unveiling only weeks before this visit.

  She’s in so much pain that it bleeds into everything we touch on today. I can hear it in her voice, in the turns of the conversation, and in how hard it is for me to make her laugh. By now I’m searching for something that will bring this conversation light: a laugh, even just a straightforward question of facts, anything except the uncomfortable silence and sadness.

  There’s a pause in the conversation. I can feel her ready to wrap it up.

  “I just felt so sad for both of them today,” she says.

  “Oh, Mom…” I say. I’m tentative, but I have to ask. “Both of who? Tamara and Katherine?”

  “No,” she says.

  “Tamara and Pete?” I can’t quite hide the giggle in my voice as I ask.

  And now she’s fully laughing. “Tamara and POPPY!”

  Right. Of course. The dog.