This Is Not My Life

by Diane Schoemperlen

  In addition to my office hours three days a week, I would be arranging, hosting, and giving a number of readings at other times in other locations, some in the evening as well. The people who had made appointments to see me at Queen’s would be sending me their work ahead of time by email. There would be much reading and critiquing to be done every day. Because my residency contract required that I also do something in the community outside of Queen’s, I would be facilitating a writing group at 99 York with interested members of the prison group. We would meet every other Wednesday morning for three hours. Somewhere in there, I was also going to have to find time to do my own work and keep up with the domestic end of things. The bottom line was, I’d have very little time for Shane in the next three months.

  I’d already told him that I wouldn’t be able to continue our monthly counselling sessions with Edward Blake for the duration and that I’d be visiting on Saturdays only, staying home on Sundays to work. Fortunately he’d been approved to attend Sunday mass at the convent the way he used to. I warned him that I wouldn’t have much time during the day or the evening to be talking on the phone. Since Christmas I’d had him “in training” for this. We’d agreed that he wouldn’t call until after he’d had his supper, around five o’clock. He was doing quite well with this, although when he did call, I could sometimes hear that he was feeling twisted and resentful and sorry for himself—as if this were some outrageous and peculiar thing I was forcing him to do.

  I said, “I love you with all my heart.”

  He said, “I hope so. Sometimes I wonder.”

  I didn’t see how he could wonder. I felt I’d done everything I possibly could for him, and still it was never enough. I had now been with him longer than any other man I’d been involved with.

  I said, “Maybe I’m just not self-sacrificing enough to be in this relationship.”

  He said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  We were on the phone. Again. Yes, he’d waited until five o’clock before calling. But it was now shortly after nine, and he’d called four times since.

  I said it meant I was not willing to give up everything for him—my work, my friends, my independence, my sanity, my self, my life. I was on the edge of sarcasm, because, in truth, I felt I’d already sacrificed more than enough for him.

  Expert though he was at slinging around the sarcasm himself, it often went over his head when he was on the receiving end. In this case, he agreed with me. Sincerely. In a tone that made it clear that he thought this was how relationships were supposed to work and that my shortcomings in the self-sacrifice department were another sad failing on my part, just one more thing he had to put up with. What had he ever sacrificed for me? I wondered but did not ask.

  He’d said often enough in the early days that we would fall in love and become one. By “one,” I knew now, he meant him.

  Even Dr. Quinn had once tried to dissuade him of this pop-song notion of love by drawing a Venn diagram on his notepad: two overlapping circles with the intersecting area in the middle coloured in to represent our relationship and the exterior areas of each circle representing our separate selves. Shane had persisted in not understanding this, had drawn instead two separate circles labelled SHANE and DIANE, and then two more circles, one on top of the other, labelled LOVE.

  Shane said when two people truly loved each other, they’d stay together no matter what happened, no matter how badly one treated the other, no matter how unhappy one or the other or both of them might be. The more he elaborated on this theory, the clearer it became that when he said both people must abide by this compact, he meant the woman. He said this was unconditional love. Unfortunately he used his own parents’ marriage as an example. Dr. Quinn didn’t seem to find this nearly as preposterous as I did.

  I HAD ALREADY TOLD HIM that I wouldn’t be able to have another PFV until late February during Reading Week, when I would have no office hours at Queen’s, and that I wouldn’t be able to have another one after that until April, when the residency was over. Since the last disastrous PFV, the truth was, I didn’t want to have another one at all ever again. If I had been waiting, subconsciously at least, for the last straw, I knew that had been it. I finally understood that I’d been mixed up for a long time about what being strong meant in this circumstance. That being strong did not mean staying. Being strong meant leaving. But I also knew I had to do this residency first, and I intended to do an excellent job of it.

  Did I think I could postpone the catastrophes of my love life to accommodate the schedule of my working life? Yes, I did. Did I think I could put my work first while leaving Shane on the back burner for three months? Yes, I did. Yes, for once I did. First I would deal with the residency and all it required. Then I would deal with Shane.

  The night before my residency began, he called late. We’d already talked three times that evening, him in a different mood each time, none of them good. I was already in bed, almost asleep. This time he said he was feeling afraid of what this year would bring. I knew he meant his health. It had been two months now, and he’d had a few more tests, but there had still been no definite treatment program outlined or implemented. I knew he was trying to manipulate me, putting his health issues in the front of my mind. How could I leave him if he had cancer? I knew he wanted me to feel guilty for being preoccupied with other things. How could any of those things be more important than him? I knew he wanted me to make him feel better. But I was annoyed and half asleep. I did not oblige.

  Then he asked me if I would nurse him if he was dying.

  “No,” I said. “No, I will not.”

  I HAD BEEN WORKING AT HOME ALONE for so many years that I thought it would take some time to adjust to going out to an office instead. But in fact, I recognized almost immediately the appeal of having someplace else to go, of being able to close the door, get in the car, and leave it all behind: the dishes not done, the kitty litter box not changed, the floors not washed, the bathroom not cleaned. And Shane. I knew better than to have the office number added to his phone list, and he, surprisingly, hadn’t suggested it. I’d warned him that I wouldn’t have my cell phone on while I was in the office. Even better, I discovered once I got there that there wasn’t much reception inside those old stone buildings, and it didn’t work anyway.

  I had often envied other people their ability to compartmentalize their lives, a fine art I’d never been able to master. But now I discovered I could do it after all, and I could do it well. I could do it without even trying. Each time I got in the car and headed to the university, I forgot all about him, all about prison, all about cancer, all about all of it.

  Each time I walked down the hallway towards the office with my laptop in one hand and my briefcase in the other, I thought, This is my life.

  Each time I went to the washroom at the end of the hall, I looked at myself in the mirror and thought, Hello again, there you are. Long time no see. Sometimes, if the washroom was otherwise empty, I said it out loud.

  IN THE MIDDLE OF MARCH, Shane had the first of what would be a lengthy series of procedures on his esophagus. As I understood it, the procedure, which took place under sedation in the operating room, involved the insertion of a dilating balloon that was then slowly inflated in an attempt to increase the circumference of his esophagus gradually so he’d be able to swallow and eat properly.

  On the last day of March, my residency was officially over. Except for the prison writing group—they were all enjoying it so much, we’d agreed to keep meeting at 99 York every other Wednesday morning until the end of June. Which was not to say I was now going to take a vacation. I hadn’t had much time for my own writing for the past three months and was eager to get back to it. Plus I was now preparing to present my latest work at a national conference to be held at Humber College in Toronto in early May.

  I decided not to resume Sunday visiting, would use the day to work instead. Shane was still going to the convent on Sunday mornings, but the rules had changed, and nobod
y was allowed to meet their partners there anymore. This rule change was said to be due to a couple having been caught in a compromising position in a church bathroom one Sunday—not at the convent, not even at some other church in Kingston, but somewhere in the western provinces. Following the same policy as teachers who punish the whole class when one student has done something wrong, CSC had prohibited the practice nationwide.

  Edward Blake and I had agreed that there didn’t seem much point in resuming our counselling sessions at Frontenac. He would continue seeing Shane alone, although he said he wasn’t sure that was having much positive effect either.

  Busy as I’d been throughout the residency, I’d kept every single one of my regular Tuesday appointments with Louise. She was the only person I had been entirely honest with about what had happened during the PFV at the end of November. She and Edward were the only people to whom I had admitted that I was now waiting for Shane to die, that I had resurrected my deathbed fantasy, that I figured this would make a good ending to our story, a clean and tidy ending that would let me off the hook, guilt-free.

  On the final Tuesday of March, as we were winding down yet another hour of me going on about the problems with Shane, Louise waited until I stopped to catch my breath and then asked, “Would you be putting up with all this if he wasn’t in prison?”

  I hadn’t thought about it this way before. But I didn’t have to think about my answer either.

  “No,” I said, “I would not.”

  DURING THE MONTH OF APRIL, Shane had two more dilation procedures on his esophagus. Between treatments he’d been taken to the hospital several times because of choking, usually caused by his having become so hungry that he’d eaten something solid when he was supposed to be on a soft diet. In fact, he was supposed to be having Ensure, the commonly available liquid nutritional supplement, but Shane said the prison doctor had refused to order it for him. It took the intervention of a keeper to get him the Ensure.

  In mid-April we had what was to be our last twenty-four-hour PFV before we moved up to forty-eight. Like the previous one in February during Reading Week, this PFV went well enough. I did what I had to do to keep the peace. But still when I awoke the next morning, Shane was already up, sitting in the living room scowling at the TV. I had no idea what was wrong and no intention of trying to worm it out of him. They would be coming to get us in an hour. I couldn’t help but think that if this were a forty-eight-hour PFV, I would have another whole twenty-four hours to get through.

  We got ready to leave. Since he was already in a mood, I figured now was as good a time as any to tell him I didn’t want to move up to forty-eight hours. Moments before Grant and another guard came to let us out, I told him.

  We followed them into the building as usual, towing our stuff in the wagon behind us like children returning from the playground. As I filled out the form and signed the clipboard, I saw that John Logan was the keeper on duty. He was walking down the hallway to his office. Rather than going into the bubble with Shane to wait for John to come and interview us, I headed across the visiting room and down the hallway after him. I didn’t look back, and Shane, who had now put on his good-mood face for their benefit, didn’t follow me.

  I tapped on the glass of John’s half-open door and went in. Without preamble and in a voice as lighthearted as I could muster, I told him I’d decided I didn’t want to move up to forty-eight-hour PFVs after all. I was well aware that I was doing something mutinous and revolutionary by refusing to take the next step. I did not say I didn’t want to be alone with Shane for that long. I said I was so busy with my work that I just wouldn’t be able to manage it. And besides, I said, I really couldn’t stand not being able to smoke. True. John was looking very surprised.

  “Not only that,” I went on, “but the truth is, I don’t like being locked up.” Also true. The novelty of these prison sleepovers had now worn off completely. Of course, I’d never admitted this to Shane. After all, he’d been locked up for more than thirty years—who was I to complain that I could hardly handle it for twenty-four hours, let alone forty-eight? Who was I to complain about missing my son, my pets, my books, my computer, my iPad, my iPhone, my own bed, my own bathroom, my daily trip to Tim Hortons? How could I tell him that when I got home after only twenty-four hours in the trailer, it was with such a sense of joyful relief that you’d think I’d been gone for two weeks?

  Now John was laughing. “I’ve done over thirty years,” he said, “and nobody has ever said that to me before.”

  “Nobody?” I asked incredulously.

  “I mean no visitor. No visitor has ever said that to me before.”

  I may have been the only one who ever had the nerve to say it out loud, but I was quite sure I wasn’t the only one who’d ever thought it.

  ON THE DAY OF THAT PFV, CSC announced it was cutting all funding to the LifeLine program, which would be completely discontinued—this despite the fact that it was an internationally renowned program that had received awards from the International Corrections and Prisons Association, the American Correctional Association, and just six months previously, was the recipient of the Canadian Criminal Justice Association’s Achievement Award. Not only would Stuart and the two dozen other lifers employed by LifeLine now be out of a job, but Shane and the thousands of other lifers they worked with would lose yet another essential means of support. The psychology departments had already been so pared down that an inmate might well have to wait months to see someone. The chaplaincies had also been reduced to the point that at Frontenac, there was now only one full-time on-site chaplain who was trying to look after more than two hundred men of all faiths.

  A spokesperson for Public Safety Minister Vic Toews told CBC News that LifeLine “wasn’t producing any results that improved public safety. We will not spend a dollar on Corrections that is not necessary to keep Canadians safe.” And yet the LifeLine program had been credited over and over again, even by CSC itself under previous governments, with having played an important role not only in the rehabilitation of lifers still in prison but also in their successful reintegration back into society without ever reoffending.

  With the closing of LifeLine, I was struck again by the short-sightedness of the Harper government’s Tough on Crime policies. None of the people making these decisions seemed to grasp the basic fact that almost all of the inmates currently serving time in federal institutions across Canada were going to get out one day. They were going to get out of their prisons and come straight into our communities without benefit of sufficient support or counselling either while inside or after their release. This was not going to go well for any of them. This was not going to go well for any of us. There would be more crimes. There would be more victims.

  Those who would say this could all be avoided if they just kept those criminals locked up forever should be reminded that, according to the Office of the Correctional Investigator, the annual average cost of keeping a male federal inmate incarcerated is now more than a hundred thousand dollars, and nearly twice that for each female inmate.

  Eliminating the LifeLine program was yet another measure that had nothing to do with protecting public safety, yet another egregious decision that put all of us at greater, rather than lesser, risk.

  THERE WAS MORE BIG NEWS TO COME. Following the cancellation of LifeLine on Monday, we learned that Vic Toews himself would be holding a news conference on Thursday afternoon to deliver another announcement. For some time, there had been rumours about the possible closing of Kingston Penitentiary. Surely it couldn’t be that. Even the guards were saying surely it couldn’t be that.

  It was that.

  With little preamble, Toews announced that Kingston Penitentiary would be closed and decommissioned within two years. The Regional Treatment Centre (RTC), a separate maximum-security psychiatric institution for mentally ill offenders located on the KP grounds, would also be closed, as well as medium-security Leclerc Institution in Laval, Quebec. These closures, Toews said, would s
ave CSC 120 million dollars a year.

  Opened in 1835 and designated a National Historic Site in 1990, Kingston Penitentiary was not only the most famous prison in the country, housing Canada’s most notorious criminals, but it was also one of the oldest continuously operating prisons in the world. It was a storied, legendary place, not only among the inmates but among the staff as well. One of the guards at Bath, when once asked by another visitor going in ahead of me if he’d ever worked at KP, said yes, he had, for twenty years, and it was like going to Beirut every day.

  Vic Toews said an institution built in the nineteenth century was no longer effective or appropriate in the twenty-first century. He did not mention that in recent years, hundreds of millions of dollars had been pumped into KP to address these concerns. The closure of these three institutions would mean moving almost a thousand inmates, six hundred of them from KP and RTC. About the same number of prison employees would be affected. There did not seem to be a clear plan as to how this would be accomplished or where these inmates and staff members would go. He did not offer any suggestion as to how the profoundly mentally ill offenders from RTC could possibly be taken care of properly in an ordinary institution. Toews said no new prisons would be built, but existing institutions would be expanded. Again, there did not seem to be an actual plan in place to accomplish any of this.

  Immediately after the press conference, the phone rang.

  Shane said, “The mothership has gone down.”

  If I’d imagined he would be jubilant about this news, I was wrong. In fact, he was stunned. They all were. I could hear the other guys on the phones all around him, calling home in shocked disbelief. Not only was KP was an integral part of the history and identity of the city of Kingston, but also of all the men, like Shane, who had ever been incarcerated there. It was a badge of honour, I think, for him and the other prisoners who could say they’d done time there and survived, had escaped the place, so to speak, with their lives. A part of each of them would be stripped away by this closure.