Sitting in the chapel, our family is feeling all the sadness and seeming futility of Larry’s sacrifice; comfort doesn’t seem possible. But we have agreed to come, so we sit through the first reading and dutifully rise to sing “The Lord Is My Shepherd.” The inmate in charge of transparencies switches on the projector light to reveal that the words to the hymn are upside down on the screen. The chaplain pauses, glowering through bifocals down at the offender, and waits, tapping the lectern with his forefinger. The inmate fumbles with the pile of transparencies but they are slippery and escape his hands, landing scattered on the floor. He scrambles to pick them up and throws another on the projector plate. Now it’s backwards, still unreadable. He tries once more and, finally, we are able to read the words right side up. We begin to sing, our voices hesitant and flat. “Yea, though I walk through death’s dark vale yet will I fear no ill …”
Tom is invited to the front to give his eulogy. The men chuckle when he says Larry wrote a story called “How to Escape.” It turns out the story is about escaping in the mind, transcending physical barriers with imagined journeys. We assume this family message will mark the end of the service. Then the chaplain says, “If anyone else wishes to speak about Larry, please do so.” He looks pointedly at the men across the aisle from us and nods to an anxious-looking, short, stocky man with a day-old beard. “Yes, Robert.”
Robert shuffles to the front. He doesn’t use the lectern but stands unprotected in front of us with a paper in his hands, which are visibly shaking. “I was illiterate when I met Larry,” he begins. “I started in his creative writing class and now I’m a poet.” He shares a poem with us that he and Larry worked on together. Each of the seven stanzas begins with “to my brother of words.” Robert ends with the line “the spikes that come out of my mouth will be sharp as arrows and cutting like a hot knife through butter” then returns to his seat, his face flushed with pride and relief.
Next is Deltonia, a muscular, handsome man with a big grin and a wide white headband around his forehead. “I had a prepared speech I wanted to give the family,” he says. However, it seems he couldn’t get the printer to work, so at the last minute he decided to “speak from the heart.” Until Thanksgiving weekend, he had shared a house with Larry and two other inmates. He tells us how, just last week, he was troubled and depressed. Larry noticed and asked what was wrong. Deltonia explained that his one-year-old daughter had been having seizures and he was worried about not being with her, about how his wife would cope. “Larry taught me to meditate and relax. He said to start from the top of my head and slowly work down to my toes, concentrating on relaxing each body part. And, you know, it worked. I started to feel better.”
The next speaker, an older man with a soft voice and calm expression, talks about Larry as a father. “He was a devoted father. He was determined to find out every medical fact about schizophrenia. He was sure he could cure his son.”
They come to the front one by one, six of them, to speak about Uncle Larry and what he meant in their lives. Because visiting was difficult and always under surveillance and because Larry didn’t write about these men in his letters, our family, before this moment, knew almost nothing about Larry’s life over the past seven years. As the men tell their stories, we slowly begin to understand the profound effect Larry had on their lives in that world hidden from our view. We sit in rapt attention as this touching picture emerges, and gradually the cloud of sadness and futility hanging over us begins to lift.
We are invited to stay for coffee and dainties after the service. The inmates have been baking and a table at the back is piled high with Nanaimo bars, iced cupcakes, chocolate chip cookies, banana loaf and lemon squares—like the ladies’ auxiliary table at any church bake sale on the Prairies.
As we chat and help ourselves to cookies, I watch my daughter. A young man in baggy black pants, with metal studs in his lip, nose and ears and Walkman earphones draped around his neck, is earnestly talking to her in one corner, his face leaning close to hers. My first thought is that he might be bothering her. I quickly join them only to hear her suggesting movies he might like. An East Indian inmate tells us Larry was great because “he had been in the war and he knew things—like how to make bombs.” Everyone laughs and we suggest perhaps he shouldn’t be saying that in here. He adds, seriously, that he couldn’t speak a word of English when he was sent here and that Larry taught him ESL.
Deltonia, a former U.S. Marine, now standing near us, says some of the older inmates have a rough time on the inside, but not Larry. “We felt respect from him and so he got our respect right away. No one would dare touch Larry with us around—we took care of him.” Another gift for the family.
Our initial trepidation gone, Jo and I are now eagerly sharing stories with the men. We tell them about the time Larry got in trouble in university when he flew his rented plane dangerously close to the ground trying to drop pamphlets for the campus election. They tell us Larry was given a motor scooter when his legs got weak and he drove it like he flew a plane, with speed and precision. As chapel was about to start on Sunday mornings they would hear the scooter roar up and stop within inches of the wall and, moments later, Larry would limp in grinning. When the time comes to leave the reception, we wish everyone good luck.
But we know we’re the lucky ones. By whatever combination of fate and circumstance, we are able to walk out into the sunshine and go home.
As Jo drives me back to Vancouver, we talk the whole hour and a half about family, our lives and whether we’re making the most of them, about success and how it’s measured. We remind ourselves that taking risks by entering uncomfortable places can open up new ways of seeing. We’re both lawyers. In law school we learned about the concepts “beyond reasonable doubt” and “innocent until proven guilty.” We wrote exams in criminal law, applied legal reasoning to cases and learned that people with mental illness could be found “not criminally responsible.” But today we discovered how all this can play out in the real world, where someone like Larry could be found guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Today we are humbled by the complexities of “justice.”
Even though I didn’t always agree with Larry, I know he did the only thing he could as a parent and lived the consequences with dignity and meaning, not self-pity. And to add to the richness of this day for me, my daughter and I shared Larry’s unexpected lesson together.
Like many men of his generation, my father saw his main role starting and ending outside our home. He was a man’s man, beyond the world of women and children my mother and I lived in. When friends, neighbours, or even his own father died, he handled arrangements purposefully, appearing not bereaved but simply strong. He seemed to stand above—or at least outside—the stresses that shook my mother and me, taking my mother’s chronic sadness in stride and not apparently affected by it. My mother and I reaped the rewards of his stability: through his work, he kept a roof over our heads; through his public life in many service organizations, he guaranteed our place in the community.
As a child, I felt great pride in him. I remember a July 1, Dominion Day, when I was ten. My father had parked our car at the best spot on the parade route. I was sitting on the hood, wearing my cowboy hat. I could smell the horses, hear the high-strung clatter of their feet on the pavement. There were rodeo clowns throwing saltwater toffees to the crowd and kids like me swarming into the street, then darting back to our mothers’ skirts, pockets full of candy. I remember the soft slump of toffee on my tongue, the bicycles with crepe paper threaded through their spokes and frames outlined in Kleenex flowers, the John Philip Sousa band, the floats drifting past like tall ships, the stampede queens in swimsuits.
Then, at the end of the parade, came the part that only the men stayed to watch: the balers, tractors, swathing machines, and last of all, the combines. And my father, standing on the rung of the ladder that ran up the outside of the cab of a combine, hanging on with his right arm, riding along above the crowd on the outside of the roaring
machinery, talking with a man who was driving, his head thrown back in laughter. He was grand—tall, straight, and seemingly set apart—not like the men watching from the sidelines or hurrying back to a car or truck, carrying a kid in one arm and dragging a bicycle along with the other. I was proud of my dad, proud that he couldn’t be made soft by people like my mother and me.
The combine passed so close I could have called to him, but I didn’t. He was separated from me by a gulf I would never have presumed to shout across. But I do remember a kind of longing—longing to know what he and the driver could possibly be saying to each other, what it must be like to have him climb up the side of a cab just to be with you.
I grew up, unwittingly following in his footsteps, focusing on security and doing everything I could to appear self-sufficient. Turning away from things that might make me soft, I poured myself into my education and later into my job. I took control and I worked unstintingly to maintain it. No one needed to worry about me. I was fine.
At times, I carried a heavy weight of sorrow over the disappointments in my own life, and I knew, in those rare moments when I was honest, that I would have given anything for my father to hold me like a child and make everything better. But I also knew it was never going to happen, so I convinced myself that I didn’t need him; after all, he didn’t appear to need me. Over the years, to protect myself from the hurt of his indifference, I developed an armour of disdain and dislike. And so the decades passed.
• • •
After my mother’s death, when my father was eighty-two, he and I were thrown together because I didn’t have the backbone to abandon him altogether. His response to grief was rage. He stormed through the days, ordering me to do one job after another. I felt mean-spirited when I refused, yet I often did. I also felt unnerved watching him blunder ahead, wrecking everything he touched.
He painted the inside of the house, but his eyesight was so poor he couldn’t differentiate between the strips he’d already covered and those he had not. He had chosen an untinted white. I could imagine him going to the hardware store, picking up a can, taking it to the counter. “Now that’s an exterior paint, Jack,” they would have said. “Are you sure that’s what you’re looking for?”—knowing him, knowing that he was too unstable on his feet to paint, knowing, as everyone in the town knew, that he’d just lost his wife, that a man who’d vested his life in being in control was disintegrating.
“What the hell do you know!” he would have barked at them. “I was painting before you were even born.”
When I saw what he’d done, I felt childishly frightened, grief-stricken and trapped. The once-green walls of what had been my mother’s music room were a crosshatch of roller marks—a diary, a record. He’d reached up and swiped at ceiling tiles, covering no more than two-thirds of the space, catching the metal frames on some of his passes, missing them on others. Slops of white paint had splattered the carpet and run down the walls like slow rain.
I was desperate to turn away and run. I wanted to yell at him to stop making such a terrible mess, and I was ashamed that a daughter could be so mean. When he wasn’t looking, I broke down in tears.
Before long, he couldn’t stay in the house by himself. After a fall, he ended up in hospital and then in a seniors’ lodge—an independent living facility. Single room; single bed. A cell with a television. His rage grew and he took it out on everyone, including me. He demanded that I find him something to do before he went crazy. Then he ranted at the stupidity of what I suggested. He ordered me to get him out of there at least for an afternoon, take him to the bank. Then he shouted at the tellers. I did laundry; I cleaned up urine on the floor of his bathroom. He bellowed, “For Christ’s sake, leave things alone.”
On my visits, I began to notice how many people were watching him, waiting for him to screw up: the lodge administration, the homecare people, staff—alert to any evidence that he could no longer muster the level of independence demanded by independent living facilities. My father seemed to go out of his way not to disappoint them, either unaware or not caring that each time someone other than he carried his meal tray, each time he refused to take a pill, each time he wet the bed, lashed out at a staff member, or caught his foot on the edge of a carpet and fell, each time he cried—all these deteriorations were tallied up. I was anxiously aware that when he’d made one mistake too many, he would be forced out. At last, my father and I had something in common: we both hated the lodge.
Sure enough, the day came. Dementia and Parkinson’s had gone too far. He was having more and more trouble walking. He couldn’t control his bladder, and he was refusing to come to meals. I fought the administration because, like my father, I had grown angry at everything. But the decision was out of my hands. They moved him to an auxiliary hospital.
Once he was there, there was nothing left for me to do for him. His laundry was whisked away daily, his meals were delivered, a catheter took care of the incontinence. Even the bed was automated. Every few minutes, the motor kicked in, dropping the mattress away from his heels where blisters the diameter of baseballs formed under his translucent skin. The bed also shifted his feathery weight away from the bedsore that grew ever larger on his left hip. At first, he thought the motor in the computerized bed was an electric current. He would fight the sleeve of his hospital gown, his agitated fingers struggling to uncover the skin to show me that he was being electrocuted. “For God’s sake, shut it off,” he would order me, partly in anger, partly in fear. I wanted to do it for him and end his distress, but I knew it would only make things worse. He couldn’t understand why nobody would help him, especially me.
Then, thankfully, for no reason I could fathom, he seemed to lose track of the distress. The fight went out of him. But when I sat beside him as he slept, his body relentlessly on the move, raised, lowered, rolled, shifted, the perfect solution for his fragile skin, I wanted to tell him I was sorry he’d been robbed even of the power to be still.
Although he slept much of the time, the two of us also spent many hours sitting in his room, waiting. Circumstances had thrown us into the same small box and left us there. Out of desperation one afternoon, I suggested that we sing. “How would you feel about a little tune, Dad?” I asked, and he said, “Why not?”
They’d gotten him up that day. He was sitting in his wheelchair between the bed and the cupboard. I remember it so clearly. I pulled my chair up in front of his and we sat, knee to knee. I can still see the thin concave of his chest over which his loose sweater drooped. I remember his hands folded together in his lap, his voice thin and reedy. I remember him reaching for the notes, the catch in my throat when he missed them. We sang the oldies with only the hum of a computerized bed for accompaniment.
The second time, or maybe the third or fourth—it became our routine—I brought a little handheld tape recorder and we made a recording, so I’ve got one of his chuckles on tape and a little conversation that I treasure: “How about ‘I’ll Be With You?’ I asked. “Oh, you decide,” he said. “You’re drivin’.”
In time, we branched out from singing and started looking at old photograph albums to fill the hours. We tried to remember names and places. We talked about memories, and I wrote them down as if he were dictating a diary to me sixty years after the event. We talked about his dying and what I wanted him to know before he left me. We even talked about my mother, whom he hadn’t mentioned since her death. I’d seen him rage against impotence and fallibility. Now I saw him cry in grief.
• • •
One afternoon toward the end, bedridden and in pain, my father gave me all that he had left to give. It happened when a nurse came to get him up. The only way he could be lifted out of bed was with a hoist. The staff used it to transfer him to a wheelchair so they could take him down to the bath or lift him into a wheelchair bed so he could escape his room for a few hours. It was after lunch. Dad and I were reading the local newspaper when the nurse came in.
“I better go now,” he said to me
when he saw her, as if he were ending a phone conversation. “There’s someone here.”
She leaned across him, slipping her arm behind his back, rolling his body over as if he were inert. She pushed the sling under him, rolled him back, and hooked the metal rings over the stork-like bill of the hoist. Then she flipped the switch and winched him slowly skyward, the slack going out of the straps first, his arms following the ascending chrome bar, drawn up over his head. The sleeves of his gown dropped back, baring loose flesh. The nurse told him, “Hang on, Jack” as he gripped the chrome trapeze bar, just as he had gripped the bar of a combine forty years before, only now his arms were trembling with effort. His softness resisted the drag, and the downward pull of gravity made his body droop like dough while his arms, raised above him, looked as if they would pull off in ropey strands. Then he was clear of the bed and, shockingly, he swung forward, suspended in space, his white knuckles clenched around the bar, his swollen knees naked, his hospital gown flapping open behind him. The thing I remember most, which brings me both gratitude and pain, is his mouth twisted into a determined grin, a reassurance, as if irony could erase the helplessness and ignominy of it all, as if he were letting me know—as I think he had always tried to do—that I didn’t need to worry about him, he had everything under control.
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