Dropped Threads 3 (20 page)

In fact, the subtle hazings that go on in the academy make a high school look civilized. And a successful woman is not immune. In fact, she is likely to be the object of disgruntled or vituperative colleagues and students. I have weathered various attacks on my character and scholarly integrity; I have had to correct misinformation that was being repeated about me and I have seen other women subjected to the same subtle harassments: their publications held up to minute scrutiny, their accomplishments downplayed, their commitment to research belittled. The only armour possible is to love the work, to make the work its own reward.

So why bother staying, why continue in such a bear pit? Why not give it up and spend my time writing? The question
calls for cogent answers. First, the temptations of the academy are many. A regular salary, an office (not necessarily with a view) and a version of life-schedule, along with the lure of a substantial library, are too much to resist. I am happily engaged with literature, happy to be immersed in intellectual thought. Why should I give up the work that I love because some people would like to make me miserable? Far better to refuse to be miserable. Second is my powerful sense that women must not allow the academy to function as such a punitive institution; if we flee its bruising, we leave the field open to the bruisers. On the other hand, we must also take care not to become bruisers ourselves, not to internalize the sneering, the scoffing and the quibbling. The third is the obvious delight and inspiration that students provide, coupled with the fact that students deserve good teachers, good teaching, people who give them the very best attention. If teaching in the humanities is left to those who would reduce it to its basest level, then the future of study in the humanities is short indeed. Finally but not least, I love literature and I want to instill that love in every student I encounter.

I continue to mesh teaching within a university and writing (writing across genres: fiction, history, non-fiction, journalism) because for all that an institution and its follies might seek to destroy our joy in this profession, universities exist, nevertheless, as movable feasts. At the end of Audrey Thomas’s irascible novel,
Latakia
, the narrator declares to her lover, “The best revenge is writing well.” Having lived through the various pitfalls and pratfalls of this profession, there is always available that comforting mergence of subject and practice. For a writer, the best revenge is writing well, but even better is to make of life material for writing. I make notes on jolly and generous and thin-skinned administrators alike, on ascetic and jealous and cheerful and eccentric academics.
I talk to the cleaners and the women in the coffee shop, I try to inspire both avid and melancholic students. I cherish this work because it is material, cloth of a sort that will eventually become a story, a tale both tender and parodic. There is no stronger compensation than to make of these frictions a fascinating fiction.

When my mother
was five months pregnant with me, my sister Susan—who was five years old and the firstborn—contracted leukemia and died. I gather she was sick for a very short time. Treatment was limited in 1948, hope futile. Apparently my mother visited her hospital room every day for the paltry hour allowed, and I went with her, floating oblivious inside. I still dream of hearing her cry.

I grew up in a family that had difficulty acknowledging Susan’s existence, her life, her death, her truncated potential. Perhaps their need was to carry on, to forget, to put the loss behind them; grief is personal and there is no prescriptive path. For me, having never known my sister, the need was vastly different, and for as long as I can remember I lived with a pressing sense of something missing, of a huge hole my parents stepped around that threatened to engorge and drown us all if we dared to peer into it. And yet I was continually drawn to the edge, lured not by salacious curiosity or perilous attraction, but by some intense, innate need to know.

My father refused to speak of her; I was instructed never to ask him to. My mother spoke seldom and softly, hurt, I realize now, by my questions and baffled by the insistence of my interest. “You weren’t there,” she said, trying to spare me pain and implication, but instead I felt excluded and denied.

When I was old enough to receive them, my mother gave me three items that belonged to Susan. A hinged locket engraved with her name, a baby mug with her initials and an elegant napkin ring. They are all empty vessels, all silver and cold to the touch. I believe my mother’s need was to rid them of sad memory, whereas mine was to fill them up. My task was like trying to animate a precious shell or dress a ghost.

Information was what I wanted, and what my parents could not give me. No headstone, no birth date, no death date. In my thirties I was counselled by a wise friend to visit Susan’s grave to see if that would settle the haunting and satisfy the quest. I knew she’d been cremated, so once again I prodded my mother and forced her to remember. “Where,” I asked “are Susie’s ashes?” Without a pause my mother replied, “We never picked them up. We left them at the funeral home.” And the subject dropped like lead, like a tight-fisted ball of stiff-upper-lipped anguish sealed and compressed and forced down to sink out of sight.

It took another decade, but finally I determined to find Susie, which I realize now was really a way of finding bits of myself—my capacity to face misfortune, to handle tragedy, to approach loss, to accept imperfection.

It began on her birthday. I was driving from my farm to the city to give a paper on nineteenth-century female literary characters and medicine, a critical feminist presentation that exposed the damaging power of misogynist doctors. It suddenly struck me as I passed between fecund fields on that spring day that this was Susie’s birthday. I’d somehow learned the date by then, though my parents never told me. After I gave my paper, in that moment between the last sentence and the first question, I came out of academic mode and confessed that my sister, had she lived, would have turned fifty that day.

I told my audience about her death in a hospital in that very city, about the doctors’ rules which limited my mother’s visits and kept her away from her dying child’s side. Instead of questions I got anecdotes from many of the women there, some of whom remembered those days of maternal exclusion. They told their stories and shared in mine, infusing personal experience into literary criticism.

Having spoken in public about Susan, I was compelled to know more. I requested her death certificate and by citing my family medical history I was able to obtain a copy of the original document. When it arrived I felt an unexpected solar-plexus-punch of emotion. I walked up my lane from the mailbox, then slid the letter knife into the government envelope, withdrew the official crested legal bond and read “Full Name of Deceased” followed by all I knew of her, in elegant cursive script.

The form demanded race, and “Scotch” was written in. My father’s signature verified the document in dark ink, the pen nib thick but the letters steady and sure. The saddest part was medical. The physician had attended her only on the day she died. Susie was pronounced dead by a stranger, a duty doctor. I imagined the scene, imagine it still.

To find her remains I traced the funeral home. I learned that this
does
happen, that people sometimes leave ashes, that the law allows for burial in Common Ground after a year. They had no record, however, and it took a number of inquiries to narrow down the search, but as I’d begun to look on a Friday afternoon I had to wait impatiently and impotently through the weekend until business hours on the Monday to make the final call. I hesitated, fearing failure perhaps, more loss, but when I dialled I got a recording and for the first time said her full name out loud: Susan Betsy McLean. Soon the return call came: “We have her. She’s
here, buried in Common Ground.” Simple as that. A name on a ledger, a spot on a map. Susie’s is one of perhaps a hundred urns in a crypt in an unmarked, and unmarkable grave, for it is forbidden to place a tombstone over a common plot.

Finding Susan was cathartic. All the tense excitement and bravado of my illicit quest dissolved into a surge of grief and sorrow for her, for my parents, for what could not be spoken and for my own loss of a sister I should have known. I left flowers on the spot and returned only once in a spirit of botanical sabotage to plant miniature bulbs furtively over her grave. I’ve not seen the result, but I imagine the snowdrops and crocus breaking through in her initials, the scylla multiplying and spreading into a blue pond.

What I learned from this experience went far beyond my own response. It incurred absolute fury from some family members and open thanks from others. I did not dare to tell my father, and when I tried to talk with my mother she stopped me, said she did not want to know. I discovered that just as there is no certain recipe for love, there is no single remedy for grief. My parents did not do the wrong thing by letting Susie go, they simply did what they were able to do, perhaps what they were counselled to do at the time.

Janice Kulyk Keefer writes: “You’re born with family like a chain around your neck: metal rings, each one kissing, biting into the next. And even if you break a link, the chain doesn’t dissolve. It just sinks under your skin, you wear it without knowing.” Susie was the broken link in my ancestral necklace and finding her let it rise to the surface, catch the light and shine.

What I am learning not only involves my mother, my father, my sister, but also affects my relationship with my children. I am not my mother. My search for Susie disclosed my very different needs and ways. I could not respond to
Susie’s absence in my mother’s manner, and I see now that I cannot expect my own children to respond in mine. It has nothing to do with right or wrong; it’s about difference.

As adolescents, my daughter and son had far more than their share of grief from a rash of untimely deaths at their school, from all manner of causes. They manage the pain of their losses individually, discussing it, or not. What they feel is personal and legitimate, and I must listen when they want to talk, and be still when they don’t. I offer the things that help me, like poetry and music, and try to recognize and accept their personal elixirs of physical exertion, creativity and risk. I know that we react uniquely and not necessarily as we are taught.

From my sister’s ashes rose not a single phoenix but a multiplicity of fledgling possibilities. Finding her fragile remains healed a painful wound, sealed a mysterious hole and exposed a missing link in my lineage. I have learned that my quest provided not what I once believed my parents wilfully withheld, but rather what I now realize they were absolutely unable to give.

It took me some effort to find Susan. Now that my parents are dead and the chance to hear their narratives is gone forever, I realize it was the actual search for my sister that settled me. The story never would have satisfied me coming from reluctant tellers. I know I had to do that work alone.

Janice Kulyk Keefer,
The Green Library
. Toronto: HarperCollins, 1996.

I was a feckless
young woman and people did not expect much of me. I knew this. I had seen surprise and immense relief in my father’s eyes when he realized I was marrying the loving, steady young man I began dating at seventeen. On the faces of my kindly in-laws I recognized unvoiced incredulity: “Can our intelligent son really want to marry this callow girl?” When I became pregnant, I sensed that my doctor had similar reservations regarding my maturity. He agreed to replace a general anaesthetic with something new called a saddle block, but gently cautioned me that childbirth might not be as simple as I expected from my reading of the book
Childbirth Without Pain
.

As it happened my son’s birth was very near painless. Healthy, crying and covered in white mucus he was whisked out of the delivery room before I could hold him or even really look at him. Later, back in my hospital bed, rested, washed, creamed and bedecked in a white eyelet bed jacket made for the occasion, I felt exceedingly pleased with myself. Despite what others had expected of me, despite what I myself had feared, I had succeeded in giving birth to a baby! Moreover, I had accomplished this amazing feat without making a fool of myself in some stupid, altogether childish way. If I could do that I could do anything! On that bright morning I existed inside a bubble of elation, my whole being
filled with a sense of success, of power and certainty that I had never felt before—and would never feel again.