She

by Shireen Jeejeebhoy

  Chapter 1 — Back in One Hour

  “I’M SO LUCKY to have a family, adopted or not! I’m so lucky to be alive!” Judy Ellis Taylor tells her three school-age girls out of the blue on this chilly September morning. They roll their eyes, having heard this before many a time.

  Judy didn’t know her biological parents, a twenty-three-year-old nursing-student mother and a twenty-seven-year-old painter father, nor did she care to. To Judy, her real parents were Marjorie and Percy Russell. Shortly after her birth on March 26, 1936, they had scooped up the little round-cheeked, black-haired baby and taken her home. At first, Marjorie hadn’t wanted to adopt this baby. Only six months had passed since their second adopted child had died suddenly; but Percy talked to Marjorie gently and persistently until he convinced his devastated wife that she could adopt again, that she could have her dream of children, children who would live. She acquiesced, and they adopted Judy from a Presbyterian home. To help ensure that both their girls, Joyce and Judy, their first and third adopted children, would have the best chance, they moved from Rosedale to a large house in the valley of York Mills, where violets flowed up to the door in springtime. It meant a one-hour drive to his engineering job, but Percy made it sweeter by bringing home chocolate éclairs. Meanwhile, Marjorie anchored their family life with big weekly Sunday lunches after church.

  It was a good decision, for Judy thrived on life. She attended the prestigious Bishop Strachan School during her junior-high years and joined the young people’s group at St. John’s Anglican Church. At thirteen years old, this healthy, mischievous girl pledged herself to Christ at Camp Gay Venture in Haliburton — she didn’t explain why to anyone, just did it — and became a camp counsellor at the same time. Like a mother bird, Judy took charge of the little girls at the camp, including Sandra, a small seven-year-old. Judy especially loved teaching the little ones to ride. But being Judy’s pupil was not an easy thing: she had a tendency to kick her charges out of the nest if she felt that they could handle it, plus she had a penchant for practical jokes.

  One sunny day as the group cantered together, Sandra’s black horse (known as Blacky) threw her off. Sandra sniffled on the ground, feeling sorry for herself, while the others milled around. They expected Judy to pick her up, dust her off, and plop her back on her horse. Instead, she steered her horse over and, looking down from her great height, demanded, “Well? What are you going to do about it? I’m going back to the barn. You can either walk or get on your horse and follow me.” She gestured to the others to follow her and rode off.

  Sandra howled. Some of the kids looked back, but not one slowed down. They disappeared toward the barn. Sandra stopped, mouth open. No point howling anymore. She closed her mouth. She stood up, climbed onto Blacky, and trotted back to camp, where Judy was waiting. “Well, if you hadn’t done that, you probably wouldn’t ever have ridden again,” Judy informed the little girl. “Now take Blacky in and groom her.”

  That fall, Percy decided that Judy would be better off at his (and my) alma mater, Jarvis Collegiate Institute, near the heart of Toronto, and had her transferred there. She did reasonably well. By age seventeen, she knew what she wanted out of life: to find a husband and have a family.

  Judy joined her girlfriends at the church picnic near Fenelon Falls that summer, hoping to find a husband. She did. Her friend introduced her to her boyfriend’s buddy. Cliff Taylor was a taciturn, slightly older fellow with a sudden smile and a shock of dark hair. He had to grow up quickly after his mother had tried to kill him along with herself, leaving him alone with his alcoholic father while his younger sister was shipped off to boarding school. By age sixteen, he had dropped out of school to work. He developed a philosophy of paying his own way with cash only. He didn’t believe in credit cards or debt, except for a mortgage perhaps. Unlike Judy, he didn’t live in the genteel areas of town, but he had become successful in sales and was doing well monetarily. Still, the educated, well-off Judy clicked with this man from the wrong side of the tracks. He loved her with a devotion that drove him to cross the threshold of a church, a feat he vowed never to repeat after their marriage on July 27, 1957, in St. John’s Anglican, and she loved him with a strength he could count on.

  Cliff bought a new house for his bride, and they settled comfortably into Scar-borough life, spending weekends up at the cottage near his father’s place in Bobcaygeon, Cliff paying for everything in cash, as usual, and Judy looking after their growing brood: Cyndy, Julie, and Miriam. Judy had grasped her dream. With her family complete, she went on the birth control pill, a fairly new drug back in late 1966. She was wildly happy and having fun.

  But God wasn’t impressed with Judy’s life plan. He gave her the gifts of toughness, generosity, kindness, healing, advocacy, and teaching. Her dream was too mundane for those gifts, and He would call her to travel to unfamiliar places, places so dark, frightening, and unexpected that she would have no choice but to trust in His faithfulness to her.

  Stomach pain was the first intimation of the change to come. The stomach pain was so bad that, after three months, it forced her to see her general practitioner (GP) in February 1967. Despite X-rays, blood tests, and referrals to specialists, nothing revealed the source of her pain, although by 1970 her insatiable appetite and loss of weight clued one of her specialists, a gastroenterologist, into the fact that she might have hyperthyroidism. She joked to her girls that she could run up and down the road at ninety miles an hour, making them laugh while she hid from them the wrenching pain deep inside her. By the summer of 1970, her endocrinologist irradiated her thyroid. Perhaps things would settle down now, Judy and Cliff hoped.

  But the pain squeezed harder. Her doctor prescribed morphine; Cliff and Judy hid that, too, from their girls, or so they thought. Family conversations took a strange turn. The talkative, joking Judy suddenly would stop mid-sentence; they would all pretend she hadn’t and would gamely continue on the conversation without her. Suddenly, she’d pop back up and finish her sentence. Unfortunately, she would soon space out again, and cries of “Mom? Mom!” from her girls would go unheeded. Frightened, the three dared not ask about this phenomenon when she resurfaced from wherever she’d been, and they pretended that everything was normal. Judy had deceived herself into thinking they hadn’t noticed, clenching her teeth against the truth, fighting both the pain and the effects of the morphine.

  Wednesday, September 23, 1970, dawns cold. The pain had increased during the past weekend. She had spent the time at the cottage, lying balled up on her bed while the children played with their dog, Goldie, under the sunny fall skies. Back at home, she had pushed herself to get through Monday and Tuesday, but today, Wednesday, she calls her GP. With Cliff by her side, she dials his number. He’s on vacation. His partner takes her early morning call. He instructs her to call her endocrinologist, the one who irradiated her thyroid. She calls him, but her symptoms are outside his field of specialty, he informs her. She hangs up frustrated and decides to soldier on. “I’ll be fine,” she assures Cliff so that he will leave for work and not worry about her. She has toughed it out for over three years; one more day will not be so hard.

  But Cliff feels unconvinced. He writes down his work number and commands her to call him.

  Later that morning, after her family has left, Judy’s neighbour Frances comes over for their usual cup of tea and chat. After one look at Judy, Frances runs to fetch her next-door neighbour Fran. They return to find Judy lying on the chesterfield, wearing shorts and shivering. Fran dashes into the bedroom and grabs a pair of slacks and a blanket. Judy — the one who always does things for herself, who never discusses her health, who never talks of her ailment — now lets her two neighbours bundle her up.

  Fran asks her, “Where’s the pain?”

  Judy points to, but dares not touch, her sore stomach and confesses her whole story.

  Fran thinks that maybe it’s appendicitis and is livid at the doctor’s inane advice. They should call Cliff, she asserts, and she takes the s
lip of paper with his work number on it and calls while Frances offers Judy some tea.

  Judy cannot abide the thought and turns her head away. Fran suggests that she make lunch for Judy’s girls at her place. Judy nods.

  Frances has to go back home, but Fran stays. Judy feels maybe a visit to the bathroom will help. She rises carefully from the chesterfield and leans gratefully on her neighbour’s arm for the short walk down the hallway. But the bathroom visit doesn’t help. The pain hangs on, her nerves screech at her every movement. She lies back down on the chesterfield with relief.

  It’s eleven o’clock. The phone rings. Fran picks it up. It’s Cliff, calling her back. “I may be wrong, but that wouldn’t cause what she had, right?” she asks him, referring to Judy’s hyperthyroidism.

  Cliff doesn’t know; he says it’s all incomprehensible to him, this illness stuff.

  Fran gets off the phone as lunch is fast approaching. She has to get it ready and bake cookies for her son and for Judy’s three girls. “I’ll ask Frances to keep an eye on you till after lunch,” she tells Judy. She runs out the door under the scudding clouds and light rain to Frances’s place. Although Frances has her own four kids to make lunch for, she pops over several times and takes messages from a worried Cliff. He’s coming home early, and she lets Fran know this when she returns after lunch.

  At 5:30 PM, Cliff barrels in from work. He watches Fran leave with a worried backward glance at Judy. He unwraps the fish ’n chips he’d picked up on his way home and coaxes his wife to eat at least a little bit. Fish ’n chips. The last meal of her life. If only they had known, he would’ve gotten something nicer.

  Fed and off the couch, Judy takes a deep breath and throws her affliction out of her mind. Life cannot stop just because my innards are screaming, she thinks. Her girls need new running shoes, groceries need to be bought, for it’s Wednesday night, grocery night. She tells Cliff to get the car ready, and she steels herself for the drive to Parkway Plaza. There in the middle of the grocery store, she sways.

  Cliff grabs her and half carries half walks her to the car with the girls running along beside them. Cliff rushes them home and settles his wife on the chesterfield. He whips across the street to ask Frances if she can look after the children while he takes Judy to the doctor’s office.

  Frances doesn’t hesitate to say yes, and the two race back to his house. They wrap Judy up in blankets.

  As Cliff carries her out the door to the car, Judy — ever protective and still trying to hide her illness — calls back to her girls: “We’re just going to the doctor’s. We’ll be back in an hour.”