At 19, in 1985, I’d really started to live on my own after Dad went into his care home and I’d had to move out of our little apartment on Hornby Street. It was a difficult transition for both of us, and although I felt a bit terrified at the prospect of paying my own way, I’d already spent months living alone in our one bedroom flat when Dad was back in hospital after his most-recent stroke, so I felt like I was able to keep a small apartment clean, stock it with canned food, and generally take care of myself. I’d had months of experience doing that at 17, when Dad had a heart attack and his first strokes. It was really just the money part that had originally scared me, because I didn’t have any of my own.
At that time, I still saw my parents primarily as my responsibilities; people whom I loved and was obligated to visit, and to whom I was expected to attend however they needed. In an abstract sense, I felt I was following in my mother’s footsteps by being interested in the fine arts, and I recognized that my classmates and friends had started calling me “technical” because of my emergent ease with electronic things, which I got from Dad.
By the time 1988 rolled around, I’d been living with Grace for about a year. Neither of us had ever intended to have kids. In fact, it actually felt like our partnership had made us into each other’s special little family.
A year earlier, in 1987, my sister Kim married her boyfriend Michael and gave birth to a beautiful baby girl named Christina Angela, whom Grace and I babysat a few times.
It looked like Kim and I had each found our special person, and had paired-off to start our own households. Kim and I weren’t estranged at all, we stayed in touch fairly regularly, but there was an inevitable separation and distancing that came once we’d found our own life paths. Around this time, being out of my parents’ shadows, my whole life seemed more solid, and I hoped that Kim’s life was more stable too.
Dad and I had settled into a Sunday night visit routine where I’d cycle down to his care home on my ten-speed in time for his evening snack. He often asked Wally, the cook, for an extra sandwich to give to me. Those days, I always appreciated some free food. It also felt comfortable to know that Dad was safe and cared for in his Carlton Lodge care home. Visiting him was familiar in tone, like the visits I’d made in years past to see my Aunty Molly in her care home. Now more than ever, my Dad was like an elder to me; less than a father in the familial, parental sense. He was still my Dad, but he was no longer a deciding factor in my everyday life.
I also noticed that I was no longer scared of him anymore, or walking on egg shells around him at all. I didn’t rely on him anymore, but he more often relied on me. He was in what I would now refer to as his “Toothless Old Tiger” phase, and in his eyes and mine, I had truly grown into my own man.
As I focused more on my education and future, my tenuous relationship with my Mum settled into my mind as more of an idea than an active reality. She was almost like a concept, a symbol that I held in my “motherhood” category.
Mum was also the one person whom I never ever visited enough. I often told myself that I’d have to “get out to visit sometime”. It was a familiar nagging reminder I gave myself. Her image stirred a lot of old guilt and regret in me for not visiting her more often. All our old Sunday visits seemed to be soaked in that particular flavour of guilt.
Aside from my feelings, I also worried about her feelings, like how lonely she must feel sometimes, or that maybe she wouldn’t feel anything at all. Maybe dulled senses or foggy memories would have eased her mind, which could have been a weird kind of blessing. Me and Kim had often talked about that. I’m sure Dad wondered too, but he never talked about her anymore.
By 1988, Mum had been on the drug Chlorapromazine and I don’t know what else for at least seven or eight years. I’d heard from her cousin who’d visited her once that she’d also undergone ECT, Electro-Shock Therapy. I really didn’t want to believe that, but it was an absolute possibility. I read that in recent years, ECT had sort of come back into vogue medically, although in a lower doses or in shorter sessions. Still, the prospect of Mum’s brain getting zapped with electricity really repulsed me. To my worried mind, it just sounded like a new form of torture.
Mum had gone through a lot at Riverview, and even to this day, I don’t really know how to frame her life there. It was 24/7 long-term care and supervision, like in Dad’s little care home, but it was also in a one hundred year-old facility that probably had a lot of its own secrets to hide. The nurses and doctors seemed like nice, caring people, but part of me always remained wary and afraid of Riverview. Nothing ever really normalized it in my mind.
By extension, I always felt nervous when visiting Mum in Riverview. I never knew what to expect of her, or if she’d recognize me or respond to me. Our visits probably never lasted more than 30 or 40 minutes. When visiting, I just tried to distance my feelings and just give her some news from my life, like how college was going, or an update on the doings of Dad or Kim. Nothing really seemed to make any impression on her, and I often felt grateful if we even just made a few moments of eye contact. We had the same colour eyes, and I really just wanted to know that she saw me.
Poor Mum had been side-lined from our family for years; a peripheral part of our lives since 1977. All the same, I don’t know if my writings about her can ever do proper justice to how much I loved, missed, and regretted her role in my life. Still alive but separated from us by distance, resignation, and barred windows, she felt like a living ghost, and her memory stayed deeply embedded in the corners of my heart. With her, it just felt like a never-ending goodbye, waving to a figure out on the horizon who never waved back, and whom you could never reach.
