“Thanks for calling,” she always makes a point of saying, before we hang up. “Have a good night,”I always say, both of us well aware of mornings that might not arrive.
But there are nights when the phone is too far away and she has to lie there and let it ring. Or the phone drops and she can’t retrieve it, so it stays off the hook, the dial tone droning,my line engaged. The staff will be busy or chatting down in the common room,their charges finally tucked away for the night. If the phone isn’t off the hook, I hang up, wait, and try again in 10 minutes. But on some nights the phone is near enough, and her hand finds it.
I hear her speak into the receiver in a wavering but strong voice that is no longer sure who or what will greet her.
“Hello?”
The Broken Year
IT WAS MID-OCTOBER, still warm, with that gold late-afternoon light. Too beautiful a day to drive, I decided when I stepped outside with my car keys. Besides, the bike would be faster. I was hurrying to a yoga class, part of my new regime. The rat race of relaxing! I could still make it, I thought, if I didn’t go back inside the house to get my helmet and panniers. Twinge of guilt over that. Then I slung my workout bag over the handlebars and set off.
As I spun along Carlton Street in high gear my mind spun along too, toggling between life and work—not a great leap in my case. What if, what if, and then, and then . . . Distracted, I only noticed the glitter of broken glass in my path at the last minute. Ride through it or around? I swerved. That must have been when the cloth bag swung over into the spokes of the front wheel; in any case, something sent me flying over the handlebars until my face hit the pavement. I felt the right lens of my glasses press, press into my eye socket and braced for it to shatter. Amazingly, it didn’t.
Now I’m really going to be late, I thought.
I tried to get up, but my right arm in the sleeve of my black jacket wouldn’t move. Oh well, let it rest there. I rolled over and lay in a Corpse Pose. Street yoga. A dark-haired man in a navy blazer stepped off the curb and knelt beside me.
“Don’t move,” he said, “you’ll be okay.” He flipped open his phone and called 911, as pedestrians gawked.
Another good citizen extracted a key from my pocket and locked my bunged-up bicycle to a post.
“I’ll stay with you ’til the ambulance comes,” said the Samaritan, who had a deep voice and a professional manner, as if he tended to falling cyclists on a regular basis. (He turned out to be the general manager of Fran’s restaurant.) He called Brian and left an impeccable message, even though I knew that my husband was at a meeting,with his phone turned off. Lying there with cars detouring around me, I felt surprisingly comfortable and relaxed—the genius of shock.
I tend to agree with Freud that there are no pure accidents. They’re more likely to happen when the under-brain is wrestling with some problem. Later,when I replayed the accident in my mind, there was a moment in mid-air when a supercilious voice in my head said,“Yes! This makes perfect sense.”My fall felt like a choreographed expression of the off-kilter state I had been in for some time. The surrender of flying through the air made me realize how tightly I had been holding on to everything. Trying not to let go.
The funny thing was that I thought I had already weathered the letting-go phase of motherhood when Casey went off to college. He seemed so independent, earning his own money, yet we were still in touch, etc. But it turned out that the genuine pulling apart was only underway now, when he was 24. The numeral doesn’t really matter; it could be 14 or 29. And for me the letting go was tapping into some old, broken places.
The summer and the push-pull with Casey at the cottage had been difficult. I wasn’t sure whether he was going through ordinary early-twenties angst—the kind I went through and thought I wouldn’t survive—or something more fixable that I ought to fix. I began waking up every day at 6 a.m., with the same tape-loop running in my head: Am I being too hands off or too meddling? Should I email him the names of a counsellor/antidepressant/naturopath/ indie record producer, or would that just bug his ass?
The Mother Tapes, wobbly and stretched from being played over and over.
Brian was getting pretty tired of the tapes too, which he heard second-hand, at 7 a.m. After all, it wasn’t as if Casey was trapped in an SUV that had just plunged off a bridge. He was not playing Second Life in a mouldy basement room or pursuing an obsessive email relationship with a 42-year-old bipolar schoolteacher in Georgia. He was just working through a difficult romance, wondering how to make a living with a B.A. in history and figuring out what he needed (or didn’t need) from his parents. Growing up, in other words.
But he was taking things hard and had a cough he couldn’t shake. (“No resilience,” said the textbook voice in my head.) It was his voice on the phone, gallant, trying not to complain, that spun me down.
So I mailed him some vitamin D. I ordered him a full-spectrum desk lamp, for Seasonal Affective Disorder (“You are a funny person,” he emailed,when this sizable appliance arrived at his door). I had thought that at my age I would be looking back on the bygone, roiling emotions of family life in crone-like tranquillity. Instead, here I was still hovering, like a new mom in the ICU.
Maybe the neural circuits that fire up when you have a baby never entirely fizzle out, I thought; the mysterious symbiosis that makes a mother wake up full seconds before her newborn even starts to cry falls dormant as he grows up—but can still be roused, years later, in extremis. The phone rings, you have a sinking premonition it’s your sister with bad news, and it turns out to be true. The soldier’s mother sits bolt upright in the middle of the night, knowing something is wrong. Not so unusual. Why else would we send prayers to people, if we didn’t think they reached them?
“That’s crazy,”Brian observed crisply when I ventured this theory. Our tolerance for nutty behaviour is high in this household, but “hearing voices” or “channelling moods” is not acceptable.
The more pedestrian explanation was that I was not, in fact, a marvellously sensitive satellite dish of a mother. Instead, as my son pried himself out of the family bosom, I was having a wave of separation anxiety (my specialty) and projecting my own panic about what would become of me onto him. His reasonable concerns about his future were stirring up old, irrational fears in me—ones I hadn’t dealt with yet.
My problem, not his.
So a friend recommended a therapist, a mother of grown kids herself. The year before, I’d already done some cognitive-behavioural counselling, a bunch of “strategies” that help keep your thoughts from swerving over into the worry ditch. Which was useful too. I was doing some meditation (although the nasal New England inflections of the voice on my meditation tape could be profoundly irritating. . . . “As best you can, focus on the breath at your nostrils . . .”). I was going to yoga. Sandbagging the levees all round to keep the flood waters at bay. I knew my levels of self-involvement were dangerously high, but not thinking through all this wasn’t the answer either. I had to “work with the murk.”
I cradled my limp right arm with my left, like a sleeping cat. The paramedics arrived and sat me up in the ambulance; they seemed a trifle bored by this middle-aged, helmetless woman who had managed to fall off her bike without even touching a car. One arm of my glasses was broken (not a good look), a cut on my brow was bleeding, there was a gash on my calf. They asked me which hospital I wanted to go to.
“Isn’t St. Mike’s the best place for trauma?”I said brightly, hoping to engage their professional side. It was also three blocks away. Off we sped.
The ER of St. Michael’s Hospital is indeed a trauma centre that also deals with the inner-city cases, the smashed-up drunks and the mentally precarious. A whole crew was milling about the waiting room when I joined them. The paramedics fetched some ice for my elbow. I was in pain by this point and feeling sick but on the whole impressed by my sang-froid; my old habit of rehearsing worst-case scenarios really comes into its own in these situations.
I left
another message for Brian, then called a friend, Janet, and asked her if she felt like hanging out in ER for the next five or six hours. I could have a concussion and I didn’t trust my judgment; if they recommended the Whipple Procedure (an operation that basically removes all your internal organs, then puts them back in again), I wanted some backup.
All the nurses and doctors on duty that evening, I noticed,were unusually good-looking. Had I wandered onto the set of a medical sitcom by accident? At last my name was called, and I was wheeled away to be X-rayed. Then a handsome young doctor (or actor?) ushered me into a cubicle. Janet arrived, then Brian. Brian was jolly and not overly concerned, until he looked at my elbow.
“Oh, that doesn’t look right,” he murmured, blanching.
I inspected it; the elbow was bulbous and lavender-coloured, a Popeye elbow. He helped me shed my jeans so the doctor could clean up my leg. Then I was given a couple Percocets and a prognosis: I had fractured three bones in my elbow and would need surgery, which might involve “some plates and pins.” I would regain the use of my arm, although perhaps not full mobility. Would I like to book into St. Mike’s and wait for surgery—there was a bed available— or go home and mull over my options?
As full of medical opinions as I was, I knew nothing about elbows. There was also a good chance that a surgeon at this hospital would look like Robert Downey Jr.; everyone else did. So I admitted myself and was wheeled off to an older wing of the hospital, gloomy as a 19th-century asylum. The operation would take place as soon as they could schedule a surgeon, they said, which might take a few days.
When I arrived at my room I saw an older woman with a wild corona of white hair sitting on the edge of her bed. She was holding onto her knees and talking, her robe agape. Oh dear, I thought, my roommate. I was in too much pain to be social, but she spoke to me anyway. When I pulled the privacy curtains across, she went on talking, softly and steadily.
Her name was Gwen. She had diabetes, a deep foot wound, something implanted in her upper arm, and she was almost blind. But she was very upbeat. I never did figure out what she was in for. By that time, it was close to midnight. Brian went home, and I fell into a Percocet sleep.
Sometime during the night I woke up. I noticed that Gwen had turned herself around and was sleeping with her head at the foot of the bed, facing the door, which was open. The light from the hall shone on my bed. I closed the door.
“Please, leave it open,” Gwen said in a little voice. I did. The next morning, she apologized.
“It’s because of the camps, you know, I always need to know where the door is when I sleep.”
As I waited for word about my surgery, I heard her story. My roommate was one of only 17 child survivors of Buchenwald. Her father had been murdered when she was five, and her mother was mostly absent, working as a doctor in the Red Army. After leaving the camps, a British patron had sent her to good schools in England, and eventually she came to Canada, where her young husband promptly left her with their two small sons. She got a job in a bank, became a stock trader, invested well in gold, and eventually was able to buy a house and a bit of land—enough to give away a few acres to a young mother in a similar plight. Then she earned a PhD,writing her thesis about the Depression and the 1929 crash.
I wondered why no one was phoning or visiting her. I was slightly skeptical of her saga. Where was her family? “My sons are working in Australia and the Antarctic now,” she said, “but I don’t want to call and get them worried.”
The following night, one of the last things she told me through the curtain before we went to sleep was that she had also lost a three-year-old daughter to leukemia.
“Losing a child is the worst,” she said softly. “That beats everything.” Gwen couldn’t read or watch TV, but had enough peripheral vision to get around. She lived alone, and preferred to. She seemed content.
I, on the other hand, had fallen off my bike on my way to a yoga class and would soon be Om-ing again.
Perspective is good.
I called Casey in Montreal and filled him in.
“Ouch,” he said. “That’s bad.”We didn’t discuss the fact that he was working as a bike courier in the downtown core of Montreal, a city not known for cautious drivers.
“Wear your helmet,” I reminded him. “And don’t swerve.”
I came to enjoy Gwen’s loquacious company. It seemed half the hospital knew and liked her too. And after unavoidably eavesdropping on her phone calls, I decided that her story was true and that she was the real thing: a survivor of the worst possible calamities— the Holocaust, and the loss of a child—who hadn’t lost her kindness or optimism.
Late that night, they wheeled me down for surgery, which took place in the chilly bowels of the hospital, like something illegal. My surgeon was tall and patrician-looking, with blue eyes. Maitre d’-ish. When I came out of the anesthetic, Brian was there, smiling at me, holding my hand. Not worried. Then it was back up to my room and Gwen.
The next night I felt an odd new pain in my back, under the left shoulder blade. Gwen was talking again, on the other side of the curtain. My lungs felt funny, raw. Finally, Gwen registered my silence and fell quiet. She sat on the edge of her bed, softly saying “oh dear” once in a while. Then she put on her yellow robe, inserted her injured foot into a giant surgical boot, and wheeled her walker out of the room. Going for a salubrious amble down the hall, I guessed. I was glad for the silence.
Much later, Gwen rolled back in with two large teas and a bag of cranberry scones on her walker tray. This had required a long, long journey from our Dickensian ward to another wing of the hospital, on another floor.
“I thought we needed a bit of change,” she said, popping the lids off the teas.
There are times when a good cup of tea is the best possible medicine. As we sat eating our scones, a breathless man in a uniform dashed into the room. “Oh you made it, thank God!” he said to Gwen. He was a worker from the Second Cup who had seen her set off at an odd angle, bumping into walls, and worried that she might not make it back safely.
So many Samaritans. All kinder to me than my own thoughts.
The next day, I took a walk down the hall and felt short of breath. Well, I’ve just had surgery, I thought. But when two friends came to drive me home from the hospital, I couldn’t manage the three blocks to their car.
“I’ll just wait here,” I said, hanging onto a fence. Back home, I settled in on the couch. My right arm was in a plaster cast and a sling. The hand sticking out of it was glossy and bluish, but the fingers worked. I could still type. I’ll be back in action soon, I thought.
In the year of broken things, Casey had stayed on in Montreal to continue his graduate studies in Tortured Romance. The on-and-offness with Rebecca was now heading into its second winter. After graduating, he had set up a new apartment in untrendy Park Extension, on a street of Armenian and African and East Indian immigrants. It was a bright, cheap place with front and back balconies, across from a minuscule park. We gave him our shredded old leather couch and other bits of furniture. His best friend and roommate would be moving in when he got back from Japan. Casey advertised for a third person to share the apartment and a pixieish young woman responded. An aspiring writer, she lined her exotic teas up on the counter and seemed like the perfect fit.
In the meantime, every weekday morning, Casey biked off to his job in the rigging department of a company that supplied sound and light equipment for big stage events or concerts by Celine Dion and Springsteen when they came through town.
“It’s the kind of job people take because they think it will make them part of show business,”Casey noted wryly, including himself in this category.
He liked the physical side of the job—the lifting and lugging, and the camaraderie too. As the only Anglo in the Francophone company, he got to brush up on his joual and learn the finer points of wasting company time. Then on many evenings he would bike from work to Rebecca’s apartment for more late-night wrestling with
the relationship. I didn’t hear the details, but I heard the exhaustion in his voice. They’d make new rules about spending time apart or texting.
Then break them.
When I got home from the hospital, the flow of soups, flowers, and good wishes began. Fractures are so unambiguous, I thought; if only anxiety required a plaster cast or a head halo. I was beginning to enjoy my invalid status, but the strange pain in my back was still there. As a well-read hypochondriac, I knew about the risk of blood clots after surgery and their potentially fatal journey through the lungs and into the heart or brain. But as usual, I decided I was over-thinking matters.
Still, when some friends arrived with dinner, I could scarcely sit at the table with them. I was very weak. My lungs ached. I was even more anxious than usual, if such a thing was possible.
I hobbled to the laptop to Google “embolisms.” Intriguingly, anxiety is listed as an official symptom—the body sounding the alarm. It was a Saturday, of course. I phoned my doctor’s office, and the physician on call got back to me.
“Well, I tend to tell anyone with shortness of breath after surgery to go to Emerg, just to be on the safe side,” she said.
“But I feel too bad to go to the hospital,” I whined. I’d had had enough of ER and waiting rooms.
The next morning, Brian drove me to my doctor. Walking up to her office felt like being at 26,000 feet. I dissolved in tears as I described my symptoms. Take her across the street to the hospital, she said.
“Might as well check this out,”I said to Brian, sending him back to work to meet his deadline. “It’s probably just post-traumatic crap. I’ll phone you when I’m done.”
An hour later I was having dye injected into my veins for a test revealing that I had two “rather large” pulmonary embolisms, one in each lung. The demeanour of the ER nurses subtly changed. They didn’t meet my eye. The pace of things picked up. Someone came in and stuck a cartoonishly long needle in my stomach (Heparin, a clot buster). A young resident appeared with a clipboard and told me what to expect: home care, Heparin injections for a week, plus a regime of Coumadin, a blood thinner and former rat poison, to prevent new clots from forming. I would need weekly tests to measure the clotting rate of my blood and the level of Coumadin required. Too much of the drug caused internal bleeding (the secret to killing rats). Many people, I learned, take this drug every day.
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