Mourning Has Broken

Mourning Has Broken

C. A. Balawyder

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 C.A. Balawyder

All rights reserved.

License Notes: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Ebook formatting by www.ebooklaunch.com

Mourning Has Broken is a memoir.

Some names have been changed.

ISBN: 1461029279

ISBN-13: 978-1461029274

eBook ISBN: 978-1-61914-018-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011905047

DEDICATION

For my father and mother, and in

memory of my sister, Diana

ACKNOWLEDMENTS

Many thanks to all my friends who encouraged me while I was working on this project. In particular, Debbie, Geralyne, Jean-Yves, Jocelyne, Joanne, Louisa, Louise, Sylvie, Ursula and a very special thanks to my writing partner, Thelma Mariano.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction

No Man Is an Island: I was eleven then and had come home and found my father sitting at our blue Arborite kitchen table with his elbows on the edge, his head cupped in his hands, weeping.

Don’t Bring Me Flowers: In her insecurities, my mother found someone else I loved more than her.

Now, It Is Very Serious: When do you give up hope? When does it become cruel to continue life support?

Watching a Sister Die: My sister will die tonight. The words tighten over me like a tourniquet.

The Beginning of Grief: My sister died this morning and all I can think of doing is washing windows.

Comfort Me with Memories: Making recipes from people who have gone from my life is a way of mourning them.

Selecting Clothing from the Dead: I begin to feel her presence as if she is in the room with me. Is this part of coping with the loss?

Hasta Siempre: I knew something was terribly wrong. When her son finally called, he asked, When’s the last time you saw my mother?

Losing My Religion: My religious revolution left my daughter, Catherine, without a religion. She came into my life at a period when I was homeless, both religiously and spiritually.

Ne Me Quitte Pas: Until he told me that, until I listened to this song, I never knew how much he loved my sister, and it was then I understood the depth of his pain.

The Guest: As I go inside, my anger turns into fear, and it keeps poking at me while I keep poking it back into its dark hole.

The Stained Glass Window: Stained glass needs the clean rays of sunlight to bring out its gleaming beauty. Like humans need the stimulation of light; otherwise their beauty is hidden in the inner folds of their darkness.

Regrets, I’ve Had a Few: Now that she’s gone, I have her photo on my mantle, and I talk to her about things I was too afraid to when she was still alive.

Mourning Has Broken: Perhaps she comes to me because I am one of the few in her family who believes that we can still communicate with each other. Who else will listen to her? Or feel her?

I’m Going to Miss You, Caramel: It is the second Christmas without my sister and my Mother; I am in a holiday mood.

To Thine Own Self Be True: Neediness, I have read in so many self-help books and heard from professionals in the mental health field, is something one should rid oneself of, as if it were a wart or too much clutter in one’s home.

I look upon time as no more than an idea,

and I consider eternity as another possibility

- Mary Oliver

INTRODUCTION

Nine months after my mother passed away, my sister, Diana, died. Already I had lost a father and a good friend, and death was familiar to me from an early age, but nothing in my past prepared me for the death of my sister. Although she had been diagnosed with cancer five years ago, I grasped onto the belief that she would emerge from all her treatments and all the horrendous side effects intact. We would continue to travel together. Rent a beach house on Cape Cod. Talk endlessly over the phone about books we had read, the latest fashion, children, men, and politics. I would have all the time in the world to be with her, grow old with her. After all, she had always been in my life, and to envision a time when she would be absent from it seemed surreal, impossible...at least not for now and not for many years to come.

Her death tore my heart apart. The grief I felt for her was more intense than any grief I have ever felt for the death of someone dear to me. Perhaps it was an amalgamation of unmourned griefs, or maybe it was because it was closer to home. To lose a parent puts your mortality next in line; to lose a sister, you are no long in line—you have crossed the threshold.

When my mother died, I wrote Don’t Bring Me Flowers, an essay which I have included in this collection of essays on mourning. In the weeks which followed my sister’s death, an urge to write an essay about her emerged. It was at page eighty that I realized that the essay had flown off on its own and that I had given myself a mission. For one year I would write about my mourning.

My sister’s early death shook up in me a plethora of grief. These essays are about these griefs, not only of a sister but of a mother, a father, a good friend. It is also during this year that I grieved the loss of friendship, religion, and retirement.

I began to write Mourning Has Broken as a way to grieve my sister’s death. As I progressed, my motivation became one of wanting to write a memoir for my family members. This motivation is always there, but added to it is the hope that this collection provides comfort and healing to others in their grief.

My wish is that whoever may read this book—either in part or in full—will find relevance and be able to draw comparisons with his or her own experience of grief so that in some significant way I may touch and help them heal.

No Man Is an Island

The first time I watched Father of the Bride, I envied the daughter-father relationship. I would like to have played basketball with my father like George (Steve Martin) played with his daughter, Annie (Kimberly Williams-Paisley). While my father was alive, the thought of playing a sport with my dad never figured in my brain circuit and I suppose neither in his. Or if it did, he dismissed it as fathers of my generation tended to do: not paying too much attention to a daughter’s goals which veered out of the more unselfish and care giving feminine ones. Sports were a man’s domain. Although he did attend some of my high school basketball games and I had the certainty that he was proud of me, there existed this distance of physical closeness between us which I tried all my life to come to terms with.

No wonder what I envied the most about the relationship between Annie and her father was the open tenderness and closeness between them. My father wasn’t the sort of man who outwardly showed affection. And he certainly didn’t express it in words. I love you was not part of his vocabulary. It was a foreign language for him, the words twisting around his throat like a snake choking him. As for me, the words I love you always got stuck somewhere between my heart and my vocal chords. To say them would be breaking a family tradition. A betrayal of my roots.

Yet my father was not an unromantic man. He carried in his wallet a photo of my mother wearing a bathing suit, half lying on a rock as if posing as pin-up girl for some sexy magazine or girly calendar. It is hard for me to think of Mother as ever having been seductive, but I suppose she must have been, and that’s what captured my father’s heart as everlasting as the rock she kittened herself on. Now and then, my father would remove the photo from his wallet and slide it out of its yellowed plastic cover. Look how beautiful your mother is, he would say. Not was but is, as if when he looked at her what he saw was not an aging woman but a woman whose youthful beauty remained frozen in his memory.

I wasn’t exactly jealous of my mother, but I can’t say I was happy for her. That wasn’t the way I cared to see her. She was there to answer to my needs and leave her own desires and dreams behind for my sake. Getting the groceries done, making my lunches, ironing my blouses, and correcting my homework, that’s what I wanted her there for. And yet, as the years went by and I began my own relationships with men, I secretly wanted what my mother had. A man who would carry my photo in his wallet and take it out the way my father took my mother’s photo out and exhibit it around like an award.

So far this has never happened; in fact, the opposite has happened. A few years back I dated a guy, L., who raved about his former girlfriends and how many photos he had taken of them. He would show them to me on his computer screen, all filed away according to the girlfriends’ name. Nancy. Luana. Karen. Susan. Sheryl. As if that wasn’t depressing enough, on his birthday his daughter joined us for dinner in a restaurant. L. had his camera and snapped dozens of photos of his daughter, of the outlandishly expensive Penfold Grange she had brought along, of the food we ordered, the restaurant décor, even the waitress, but nary a photo of me.

It would be unfair to say this was the reason I broke up with him, but it certainly was one of the many contributing factors leading to the abdication of our relationship.

Besides this revved-up appetite of wanting my photo in some man’s wallet, I craved my father’s physical affection. Neither my mother nor my father was a hugger. Far from that. Although I yearned for affection from both of them, it was my father’s that I desired most. I suppose this is common amongst girls with their fathers, and surely there have been many analyses of these relationships, Freudian et al. In short, the reasons for my parents’ lack of warmth (and most parents’, really) can be summed up thus: you can only give as much as you receive unless you work it out in therapy. Therapy, in my father’s view, was for crazy people, and if you weren’t crazy to begin with, it would make you so.

It wasn’t that I didn’t feel love from him. Although I love you did not come out of his mouth, it was smeared all over his face when he smiled at me. The words were in his hands when he would pat my head and introduce me to his friends. In the tears of his eyes when he came to drive me to the docks for my ship to Rotterdam.

I was twenty-one and had decided that I was going to Europe. My plan was to go to London, where I would wander around Bloomsbury and see if I could somehow inhale by osmosis some Virginia Woolf literary savvy. To add, the romance of travelling by ship appealed to me. Not being able to afford a cruise line, I learned about the possibility of working my way over on a cargo ship. Avoid the Spanish or Italian ships, I was warned. The men will bother you too much. For a few weeks I hung out at the docks in Old Montreal, talking to ship captains and asking where they were heading. Finally, I found a Norwegian cargo ship that was willing to take me on for free passage to Rotterdam if I, in return, was willing to help with the cleaning of the rooms and loos. It was not London, but close enough. Besides, Holland was not a bad place to dock for a hippie girl of the seventies.

The morning I was to set sail, my father drove me to the docks and insisted on meeting the captain. He appeared before my father wearing his uniform with stripes on his shoulders and a cap with a gold rim around it. By the gleam in my father’s eyes, I could tell that he was impressed. Anxiously, I watched as they shook hands, and the captain then invited my father on board where he showed him what would be my room for the next ten days—the pilot’s room, who came on board only in case of emergencies. It was a top deck room with a balcony and bathroom, complete with shower and thick towels the color of blueberries with the ship’s name-Solship- embroidered on them. It was the most luxury I had seen in my entire life. At home I always shared a room with my sister, Diana, and towels were thinned by too much washing and frugality. I tossed my backpack on the thick white eiderdown covering the single bed and then followed my father and the captain down the steep stairs of the ship back into the parking lot where he had left his car.

I don’t know what he would have done had the captain turned out to be a ruffian and not the distinguished man he was. I suppose he would have forbidden me to go on board. Lucky for me, my father favored men in uniforms. Particularly those in positions of power. He himself would have looked wonderful in a uniform, and perhaps it was his secret desire or maybe his lifelong disappointment not to have worn one.

But as it was, my father seemed reassured although there were no signs of happiness in his eyes. As we silently made our way to his car, we passed by two of my friends, Bram and Norman who had come to say goodbye to me.

My father paid no attention to them as he passed them. They might as well have been lampposts standing there. I made a sign to my friends to wait as I accompanied my father to his car. He settled in the driver’s seat and I was about to say good-bye when he started to cry. I had only seen my father cry on one other occasion. I was eleven then and had come home and found him sitting at our blue Arborite kitchen table with his elbows on the edge, his head cupped in his hands, weeping. In my child gut I knew something terrible had happened. And it had. His best friend, Roger, had died.

I was too young then to understand the magnitude of his loss or of any loss. No one close to me had died, and I did not comprehend the permanence of death. The idea of mortality had not yet entered my mind. Now, almost fifty years later as I write these words, I find myself with my own elbows on my desk and my head in my hands, weeping for my father’s pain of having lost his best friend.

At the docks, I tried to reassure my father, to tell him that I wasn’t going away for good. I’ll be back, I remember saying. But maybe he was thinking about his