It was heartbreaking being in the children’s ward of the hospital. Most children admitted had some form of rare cancer. We shared a room with a girl River’s age that had undergone brain surgery. Seeing a young child — who should be full of life and able to run around and play outside — confined to a hospital bed for days on end, sometimes months, and hooked up to an intravenous tube with toxic, neon-green juice running through their veins was unbearable, and seeing how sick the chemo made kids was an eye-opening experience. Chemotherapy is a double-edged sword. It kills the cancer cells, but it also kills the good cells at the same time. Most of the children in the ward were very lethargic; they had no hair left and black rings underneath their eyes.
I told the doctor that, if River needed chemo, I wanted to try to treat him first with traditional medicine at home, and if that didn’t work then I would bring him back for the doctors to administer their Western medicine. But they would not allow it. They brought in a social worker who told me that they would have to take River from me if I did not provide him with the proper health care. I felt afraid and did as I was told, even though I felt threatened and alone.
Waiting to find out if the cancer had spread was the longest week of my life. I felt hopeless. River’s health was now out of my control and the only thing I could do was pray. I was not one to pray but I prayed to the only God I knew that the surgery was successful and that the cancerous cells were removed so they didn’t spread to other parts of his body. I prayed that he wouldn’t have to undergo chemotherapy. I prayed so hard that I promised God I would do anything if He would just let my son be healthy. I tried to make a bargain with Him because I was so desperate. I have never prayed so much in my life.
A week later, the doctor said that the cancer hadn’t spread and that River was going to be okay. There was a one percent chance that the cancer would come back throughout his lifetime. I was so relieved that I broke down crying. I had tried to keep it together the entire time we were in the hospital, trying to be strong while we waited for the results, and when we got the news that he was able to go home, I was overwhelmed with happiness and forever grateful that my prayers were answered.
***
A FEW MONTHS AFTER RIVER was released from the hospital, I decided I needed a break — a stress-reliever — and made plans to go out on the town. I ran into Jeremy in the bar and I happily ignored him for most of the night, knowing that he was watching me have fun. I liked knowing that he was bothered by the fact that I was not showing any interest in him at all. And, like a replay of the “pizza smizza” episode, a random guy tried to hit on me and I could see Jeremy from the corner of my eye lurking around me like a shark circling its prey. Before I could scream, Jeremy had jumped on the guy from behind, throwing him off his chair and getting my full attention. Jeremy was thrown out of the bar, and I foolishly followed him to see if he was okay. When he saw that I had followed him, he punched an innocent parking metre and smashed up his hand. I felt sorry for him, so I let him back into our lives. I brought him home and bandaged up his hand and his ego.
Not long after, I ended up pregnant again but had a miscarriage. It had been days since I had started losing blood, and it got to the point where I couldn’t ignore it anymore. I was feeling very woozy and took a shower hoping that it might help. I was so weak that I fainted trying to hold myself up. Jeremy must have heard me calling for help from the living room where he was watching T.V., but my voice was so faint that I felt like I was in a dream where I was trying to scream but no noise would come out.
He helped me out of the shower, wrapped one of my arms around his shoulder and carried me to the bedroom, where I flopped over onto the bed. He tried to pick me up and get me dressed to take me to the hospital, but I had no strength; my body was lifeless. My eyes were open, but I could only see black. Jeremy was standing two feet in front of me and all I could see was darkness. I reached out and felt around for him. He thought I was joking and said, “Stop playing games and get dressed,” but I couldn’t. My lips were blue, and my body was going into shock. Jeremy carried me to the car and drove me to the hospital, where the emergency room nurses immediately wheeled me into surgery.
When I opened my eyes in the hospital after the surgery, I saw an angel. The angel was in the form of a man with large wings and a golden gown. His entire aura was golden yellow. He was hovering above me with his wings spanned out. No sooner had I seen him than he was gone; he faded up into the hospital wall and disappeared somewhere into the heavens. It all took place in less than an instant. I thought I was dead, and the peaceful feeling that came over me was insurmountable. I was enclosed in a blanket of peace, love and comfort. In that minuscule second, I wasn’t worried about anything. I had let go of every single fear I ever had. There is no way I would have ever wanted this for myself, to die so young and leave behind my son. To feel at peace with death was something foreign to me; I was not ready to go yet, but that second of divinity I experienced made me want to stay there forever. I now know that there is more than this life, and that realization is calming. It is the ultimate reassurance. Looking back on that day, I still wonder if maybe I had woken up too soon, before I was supposed to. Or, maybe, I was supposed to catch a glimpse and tell others so that they could have hope and believe. Whichever it was, I am grateful that I got the chance to see my guardian angel.
When the angel disappeared, I heard someone shuffling next to me and I managed to mumble, “Am I dead?” The nurse checking my vitals must have heard me, and she said, “No, you lost a lot of blood but you’re going to be okay.” That’s when I realized that I wasn’t dead; I was lying in the recovery room of the hospital. I was admitted for a week after the surgery and very close to needing a blood transfusion — I had lost more than half of my blood.
Chapter 9
I HAVE A WANDERING SOUL — this I know for sure, because I can’t stay in one place for too long. I need constant change. I need to see new things. My desire for movement must have stemmed from my childhood. When you get too used to being in one place for too long, you start to fear leaving that environment, so you never take chances or step outside into the unknown, which is why I never like to get too comfortable.
I was getting bored working as an esthetician, and I never had the passion for it to begin with. Truth be told, the whole spa thing was starting to drain my energy. I wished that I could be pampered for once and afford to have my feet massaged and my nails done, but I was living on a fixed income and struggling to stay afloat.
After my near-death experience, I realized that life is too short to waste it, so I started considering a new career path. I applied to a few college programs down south that sparked my interest. I read an advertisement for an Indigenous social work course. It was a one-year certificate program that could lead into a two-year diploma. It was a program that I thought I would feel comfortable in because I would be learning about my culture and how to help my community. I applied and was easily accepted. That fall, I hauled all my belongings back to Edmonton, where River and I spent the next year of our lives. Although he was invited, Jeremy chose to stay behind.
As a young mother alone in the city with a young child I often felt afraid and vulnerable. River and I lived in an apartment building downtown and I always felt that I needed to be on guard. The high crime rate in the city was something that I wasn’t used to. Our apartment building had minimal security and it made me uneasy that we could be easily broken into because we lived on the second floor, but I never thought that I would have to worry about my neighbours.
We had shared laundry facilities, and one day while doing laundry I patiently waited for someone to take their clothes out of the dryer. Hours had gone by and it was clear that the person must have forgotten about their laundry, so I took it upon myself to put their clothes on top of the dryer, put my wet clothes in and go about my day. When I went back to get my clothes out of the dryer there was an obscene note left behind for me. It
worried me that someone could be so angry and I was afraid as I walked back down the hall to my apartment with my laundry basket. After reading the threatening note I was extra cautious and watched my back, but the note was just the beginning.
Shortly afterwards I noticed spit on the outside of my apartment door and would often have to clean spit off my car. The worst part was, I didn’t know who it was that hated me so much or if it was just a random coincidence. Either way, I became suspicious of everyone on my floor and I wondered if it was because I was a woman or I was Indigenous or both.
My school was located in one of the shadier parts of the city. It was a small classroom squished between a bike shop and a pawn shop; if you drove by and blinked, you would miss it. There were only five of us in the class and, at the end of the year, only three of us graduated.
One evening, the school invited me and River to a Round Dance at one of the local colleges. River got so worked up when he heard the drums that he started dancing and taking all his clothes off, right down to his diaper. I didn’t notice what he was doing until I looked down at him. The rhythm of the drums flowed right through him. He had the beat of the drum in his heart. His ancestral DNA was awakened. River has always been strongly connected to his culture. He knows how to pluck a duck and gut and scale a fish like a local expert, even though no one has ever taught him how.
River never did have a solid male role model in his life to look up to. He had my papa, for a time, and even though he didn’t teach River bush skills, he would come and visit me and River in the city often. Whenever he told us he was on his way to visit, we would be so excited to pick him up at the airport. Growing up, my papa was not known for his generosity. On my birthdays, he would dish out five dollars and tell me to spend it wisely. He was stingy with his money, which is why he had so much of it saved. My papa had scrimped and saved the money he made from an illegal business, which he carried on for years right out of his little one-bedroom apartment. My papa was a bootlegger, and everyone knew where to go for off-sales come closing time. In Yellowknife, the liquor stores are closed early on weekdays and closed on statutory holidays. The only place you might be able to get a drink on a Sunday is at church, so my papa made a very good living selling off-sales.
I found out about his business when I was still a young girl living with my grandma in her small apartment, after I broke in through his living room window and snooped around in his apartment one day while he was out for coffee with my grandma. He never let me into his apartment, and I would have been as good as dead if I was caught, but I knew his daily routine and that he wouldn’t be home for a while. My papa always walked around with big wads of cash wrapped in rubber bands in the back pocket of his jeans, and I was curious to know how much of it he had stowed away.
Catherine and her Papa sitting on the porch outside of her house in Ontario (photo credit Norine Lafferty)
Along with finding rolled-up bills under his mattress, I also found dozens of bottles of whisky and vodka stashed away in his bedroom closet. Instead of taking the money, I grabbed three mickeys of cheap whiskey, called up my two best friends and told them to meet me up on the rocks behind our apartment building, just up the way from the old folk’s home. We sat and drank until we couldn’t stand anymore, stumbling around trying to help each other up. We polished off two of the three mickeys between the three of us — who, altogether, weighed less than a grown man — and passed out in the hot summer sun. When we finally gained back a bit of our balance, we helped carry each other home. To this day, I can’t smell whiskey without gagging.
On one of his visits to the city, my papa noticed that my car didn’t sound very good and said, “Let me to take it to the shop for you.” When I met him after school at the dealership, he said, “Go pick out a car,” and pointed to the lot. While I was at school, the mechanic told him that my car wasn’t worth fixing, and I was better off trading it in. My little, beat-up car, which I had bought second-hand when River was born, had been just enough to get me from point A to point B, but it was not reliable, and it was falling apart on me.
As I walked around the lot looking at vehicles, I was expecting to hear him tell me he was joking. But he walked along with me and helped me pick one out. No one in my family could believe that my papa bought me a vehicle, but he did, and he bought it in rolled-up, hundred-dollar bills wrapped in an elastic band in the back pocket of his rolled-up jeans because he didn’t trust banks to hold onto his money.
I hold dear to my heart the times when he came to visit me and River. We would often go out for Chinese food in the restaurant of the hotel that he stayed in while he was visiting. I can still hear him call River “the boy” in his husky voice as my papa tried to get his great-grandson to laugh by making funny noises at him. I think having River around helped my papa deal with the loss of his sons. I can’t imagine how my papa and grandma must have felt having their boys leave this world so soon. Children are good for the soul and having River around was very healing for my papa. I think River filled his life with so much love that it made him forget about his sorrow. He lightened up around River and forgot what he was ever angry about.
***
WHEN RIVER AND I WENT back home for Christmas break, we spent it at Jeremy’s mom’s house. She lived in a beautiful home a little ways out of town, and it was a nice getaway from the hustle of city life. One night, on Christmas Eve, I saw a bright, white light about fifty yards outside the window of the loft bedroom. It was about four in the morning and I was the only one awake. I stared at it for a few minutes, until it started slowly moving toward me. At first, I thought it was a helicopter, but it didn’t make any noise. I became afraid and closed my eyes, hoping that it would go away. When I opened them again, it was slowly making its way back up into the atmosphere, fading out of sight. In the morning, I told everyone what I had seen. “You wouldn’t believe what I saw last night!” I tried to describe it as best I could, but they thought I was just trying to get them excited about Santa and his reindeers, so I gave up trying to explain.
Jeremy was there that Christmas, and we reunited once again. That was also the Christmas we got stranded out at the cabin. Jeremy, his cousin, my girlfriend and I made plans to skidoo to the cabin and spend the night there. The cabin was across the big lake and over a few portages, about an hour and a half snowmobile ride. There was a break in the weather that night. Most of the week it had been in the minus forties and fifties, so we were lucky to have minus thirty with no wind chill. Jeremy was in charge of getting the skidoos ready, and I was in charge of the food. As overly cautious as I am when it comes to being out in the bush, I had packed cans of food and supplies to last us the entire winter, just in case we had any emergencies. Jeremy scoffed at me for bringing so much food, saying, “What are you bringing all that for? You would never know how to survive in the bush!”
When we got out on the big lake, one of the skidoo belts broke, but it was a quick fix. “Too easy,” I thought to myself. We started up again and, on our second portage, our skidoo light slowly died out and the skidoo came to a gradual stop. Jeremy’s cousin and my friend were behind us on the trail and we could see their skidoo light wane, too, seconds later. Jeremy had forgotten to put gas in the skidoos.
When I asked the obvious question, “Did you fill up the skidoos before we left?” Jeremy got mad and took the bag I had packed full of food and supplies and threw it around and around over his shoulder, like he was practising to throw a shot put, and chucked it into the bushes. Everything came flying out and scattered in the snow. I just stood there, staring at him and shaking my head.
We all met up in the middle of the small pond between portages and tried to figure out what to do. I was the only one who wanted to go back, and I was outnumbered because walking across the big lake would have been too cold. If we stayed in the trails, we would be sheltered from the wind — plus, their rationale was that the beer was already at the cabin. So, we hunkered dow
n and started walking the long trek toward the cabin under the starry sky and the northern lights, stopping every once in a while for a break.
It took us four hours to walk to the cabin and, right before we turned the corner to the cabin, Jeremy’s cousin dramatically fell to his knees, saying, “I can’t go on any further!” We all laughed at him and told him the cabin was only a minute away. When we got to the cabin, we were pretty much stranded because we had no cellphone service. I tried to have fun and make the most of the night as we played board games, drank too much and warmed ourselves by the wood stove. The next day, Jeremy and his cousin left us girls at the cabin while they walked in minus fifty to go get help. They were rescued by a hunter who was checking the trails; otherwise, I don’t think they would have made it back without freezing to death or, at the very least, losing some fingers and toes.
The way I see it looking back now, throughout an entire decade of my life, wherever I went, Jeremy was never far behind. He would be drawn to me like a magnet when I was doing well for myself. Inadvertently, he stole my positive energy so that he could use it to build himself up. He would completely drain me of my ability to live until I only had a drop of life left in me, and then he would disappear again only to resurface when my batteries were fully charged. This was our cycle. Our honeymoon phases never lasted long. The explosions always grew more intense than the last time. Things continually got worse for us the more we tried. We were both moving in completely opposite directions. I was starting to shine, while his light was slowly fading.
Like everyone else our age, I liked to have a drink or two, but I never binged. Waking up and drinking again after a night out was the last thing that I could think of doing, let alone actually stomach. Because many people in my family suffer from alcoholism, it is almost a sure thing that I am an alcoholic, too — but, for some reason, I can go weeks and months without having a drink or even craving a drink. The problem is that, when I have one drink, I usually can’t stop until the night is over and I’m dying of a hangover the next day.
Northern Wildflower Page 9
