I read an article in the newspaper a few days ago, you know the kind, really an obituary of sorts, famous man dies, and then they tell you about his life, the slice of it for which he was famous. I didn’t recognize the name, but the photo framed within the words of the article was startling. The moment, captured in the visual format of the photograph, had defined the photographer’s career, won him the Pulitzer Prize. I hadn’t seen the image when it was first published, probably too young to be shown a photograph of a man with a gun to his head and about to die, his face squeezed with fear, stripped of all else but the realisation that this is it, death, no where to go, no escape. The man was young, Vietnamese - and he did die seconds later, brains blown out to the horror of the American war photographer, who hadn’t expected execution in the next frame, but interrogation by the captor. The captor was also Vietnamese, much older, face unmoving, taut, grim. He stood with his arm outstretched, pointing the barrel at the young man’s temple, about to pull the trigger, about to blow his brains out. That’s how I remember it anyway, sitting here at my laptop writing.
Although I hadn’t seen that photograph before, I had seen others that had become part of a universal psyche. That child fleeing down the road, stripped naked, body burned by napalm, horror on her face. That other young girl, from Afghanistan, maybe thirteen, a woman in her culture, face covered with scarves - mouth, cheeks, nose, forehead hidden from the infidel. She looks out at the photographer, and therefore looks out at us. Her eyes are arresting, beguiling, unknowable. They can’t be forgotten.
Then that Buddhist monk, sitting calmly on the ground, legs crossed in lotus position, cityscape all around him, body engulfed by flames, dunked in gasoline and set afire - a suicide protest of the Viet Nam War. I first saw the photograph in my introduction to psychology textbook at university. I can’t remember its context within the course, but the photograph took on a new context for me, one that is painful to recall. A young woman I knew disappeared when she was nineteen. We had worked together as lifeguards and, on this particular evening, she left work alone after the public swim was over, at nine o’clock or so. She must have done the usual things that lifeguards did during their shifts and upon closing, since no one reported anything out of the ordinary when questioned by police. She must have blown one long whistle blast when the session was over, cleared the water of swimmers, corralled them toward the shallow end and off to the change rooms, scanned the pool bottom, took a pool test, dipped the test tube under the surface and scooped up water, checked the concentration of chemicals, the chlorine levels, the pH, squirted disinfectant around the deck and under the concrete bleachers where the lifejackets hung, squeege-ed the suds towards the drains, locked the doors to the viewing gallery with the Allen key. She would have worn her whistle tucked under the bathing suit at the side of her leg, like all of us, so not to be choked if executing a rescue. She would have climbed the steps to the staff locker room, changed out of the green uniform Speedo, white stripe down the side, hung up her yellow guard tank top, and left. She was never seen alive again. Two weeks later, they found her remains on an isolated trail in the woods behind the sports complex. A Canadian Tire can was empty beside her. She had doused herself with flammable liquid, sat down on the path, and lit a match.
I met her when I ran away from my small hometown as a teenager and got a full-time job teaching swimming lessons in the big city of Ottawa. Janey was physically strong, and smart, and pretty, not in that fragile petite way, but in an unbreakable way. She took me to her house once when her parents working, and I wandered about the rooms in awe of upper middle-class suburbia, particularly in awe of her bedroom, everything little-girl perfect, the rugs, the curtains, the bedspread, the Pointe shoes dangling over the doorknob. She was amused by my awe, especially about the ballet. She told me she had taken lessons since she was a little girl. I couldn’t imagine. My father worked in a factory, never earned more than $10 per hour his whole life, five kids to feed and a wife. Ballet never entered the equation.
I didn’t believe the police deduction when I heard it, didn’t believe it for years later, that Janey could kill herself, and in such a violent way. But my thoughts kept circling back to the fact that she had taken the same introduction to psychology course as me, read the same first-year textbook. The police had found the textbook in her bedroom, the photo of the Buddhist monk, highlighted.
Near the end of his life, the photographer who took the photo of the young Vietnamese man about to be shot at gunpoint wouldn’t hang it in his studio, even though it had made him famous and won him the Pulitzer Prize. He said the image didn’t tell the full story. He felt badly for the man who held the gun, a conclusion impossible to reach by the photo alone. This man, the killer, was a South Vietnamese officer, now retired and living in the United States. His life had been made difficult because of the infamy resulting from the photograph. The other man, the killed, was a Viet Cong soldier who had infiltrated the village and hours earlier, slaughtered a family that the officer had loved and freshly grieved. The context was war.
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A faint beeping occurs at the same time every day in my living room. The time is exactly eight fifty-five a.m. The beeping lasts for one minute and then stops for exactly twenty-four hours. And then it starts again, like clockwork, which is precisely what it is.
The beeping is an alarm from a baby blue sports watch my husband brought home as a gift for our daughter from a trip. The watch came with a set of instructions folded up into a neat little square about one inch by one inch. The instructions themselves were written in a font much smaller than the one you are reading now, which by the way, is 12 Times New Roman. We fiddled to set the watch with its three little buttons that had to be pushed in a specific sequence to program the second, the minute, the hour, the date (mm/d/yr), and who knows what else – well, obviously an alarm. Somewhere along the way, we admitted defeat, but not enough defeat to toss out the watch. Instead it sat in some corner of the house, beeping away every morning at eight fifty-five.
It must have beeped through a winter, and a spring, and a summer, and then an autumn - one full revolution of the planet around the sun before I heard it. Beeped through snowstorms that marooned our house waist-deep in snow, through spring monsoons that left a lake on the crescent big enough to paddle. Beeped through the blooming of the Japanese Silk lilac in my front yard, planted to replace the dead crab-apple tree that the neighbours loved and sent dagger looks in my direction as if I had somehow killed it, rather than the tree just rotting, the natural order of things, living and dying. Beeped right through the early summer death of my mother and the sorting of her last paltry possessions, her keepsakes and bank savings given away in the final few years of her life in that free-floating manner in which she gave everything away.
It is late summer before I gather the strength to face my mother’s room, face her possessions. Sort through the Goodwill clothes that, in the end, were much too big for her. Bag them for the return journey to Goodwill. Then the hats, and more hats. I keep the black velvet tam with the little embroidered flowers scattered joyfully across it like stars in the night. Give the rest to an artist relative, Jo-Ann, who loves hats, wears them well – isn’t her hat lovely, my bed-ridden mother would say when Jo-Ann came to visit.
I throw out the crumpled Kleenexes stuffed into the dusty black purse, the old receipts, the candy-striped red and green mints still in their twist wrapping, sort through the many pairs of black frame reading glasses by the bed (although she hadn’t been able to read for a long time along), the Jackie-O sunglasses, the costume jewelry, divide them into little piles for her grandchildren, her great-grandchildren. Throw away the plastic bedpan that she somehow managed to maneuver beneath her, even in the last week of her life. Throw away the half-empty pill packages, the opened package of adult diapers that were put under her to catch what the bedpan didn’t. Keep the Magic Johnson basketball shoes, the bright wraparound Tahiti skirt, the Richard Simmons exercise tape she gleefully bought for herself at Giant Tiger on our last crazy shopping spree - her ankle broken and in a cast from a fall, oxygen canister slung over the arm of her wheelchair.
I come across the black leather wristband that looks like it belonged to Madonna, instead of my mother, or at least to Wendy, the nose-ringed grandchild in the sea of grand-children, the wristband meant to support the hand broken while getting out of bed in the middle of the night, when she thought she could still do those things. Swinging her useless legs over the side of the mattress, pulling herself up by the bedrail, feeling her way to the bathroom, hand clumsy on the dresser, reaching for the wall, the edge of the sink, the night light dim, somewhere along the way falling, crumpled and frail on the linoleum, crying for help, don’t let me die, please don’t let me die, I don’t want to die.
My sister-in-law, Nancy, and I sorted throughout the day, and in the evening, we drank until we were drunk. Told each other things in that wine-soaked way that happens when the bottle is uncorked, and you are alone together, and you’ve just finished something, like packing up a dead mother’s last possessions.
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And still that little watch just kept marking time.
Right into the fall, the tree in my yard crying leaves until it stood there naked, nothing left to cry, nothing left to do but hibernate. It wasn’t until then, while sitting in the rocking chair in my living room, sipping coffee, the house silent, that I noticed the beeping. Listened curiously to identify the source of the sound. Then it stopped. Just like that.
A few mornings later, I heard it again. Followed the faint beeping, discovered the baby blue sports watch discarded in a small dish of odds and ends. Realised with a start that the watch must have beeped like that for a full year, one minute each day, the people in the house oblivious to it. I thought to throw out the watch, but it seemed wrong to get rid of it now, after all that time, so I left it there in the dish.
Now it is December, the narcissus and crocuses and tulips in my garden a faint thought that mixes with memory. The flower of the Japanese Silk lilac, the colour of old lace, are more distant still, in both mind and matter, for there is a particular order to blooming, always the narcissus and crocuses and tulips before the lilac, never the other way around.
Christmas arrives, and we pack the car and drive the six-hour pilgrimage to our hometown, where my husband and I both grew up, and where we haven’t lived for thirty years, but visit in a hit-the-target-and-get-out-of-there fashion. For the first time in those thirty years, I am not visiting a parent at Christmas. My hometown no longer holds a member of my immediate family, not my parents, not my grandparents, not my brothers and sisters. We visit my husband’s parents.
I think my grief is put away, but it hits unexpectedly as I curve off the 401, drive the exit that leads to a house-lined street. It is night, that deep black hole where you can only trust that the rest of the world exists in the dark as you remember it, that it exists at all, since you can’t see it. That this particular road, North Augusta, leads to King Street, with its row of old stone mansions, the once-homes of millionaires built along the bluffs of the St. Lawrence River. Trust that the river is still there, still flows from west to east, that the Three Sister Islands still huddle side-by-side, forlorn juts of rock and sparse trees, home to seagulls, and nothing else.
It is the first time I make the connection with the name of the islands. I am one of three sisters, the middle island between Alice Elizabeth, “Alice from Buckingham Palace,” and my younger sister, Angela Marie, Angel Mary. Why we called her that, I don’t know, although I do remember why we called her Tiny Whiney as a little girl. The moniker is linked in my mind, for some lost reason, to my oldest brother’s nickname of Big Bear. He gained the nickname by rearing up from the cave of his bed like an angry bear aroused from hibernation, sleep disturbed by ghosts perhaps, the old lady who had once owned the house having died in the corner of the room.
It is cold even for Canada, sub-zero if you use Centigrade, sub-32 if you never adjusted to the metric system, and think in Fahrenheit. The windshield wiper fluid, made to endure temperatures to minus 40, has frozen, refuses to squirt up and clear away the glass, hibernating itself. Everything is hibernating. The bitter cold leads me to an absurd thought that I know is absurd, even at the time, but logic doesn’t matter. I can’t stop the thinking. Driving off the 401, turning into my hometown, surrounded by night, I start to cry, thinking of my parents in the ground, not far away from here. I hope they don’t feel the cold, panic for a horrible moment that they do, want to put a blanket around them, to keep them warm.
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This memoir is a work-in-progress. Parts have appeared in poem-form in the poetry collection, Above and Below the Waterline