Dear Poppy,
I watched a TV show this morning that reminded me of you, and how much I miss you.
The show that my wife and I watch on weekend mornings while we eat breakfast is called “Family Affair”. It’s about a single man raising his dead brother’s children, but it’s really about a new family being formed out of the wreckage of other family breakups; of bringing together broken parts to create a new whole.
It’s over fifty years old now, quite dated in a lot of ways, but has core themes of family devotion, understanding, and love which resonate with me today. You probably watched it with us back when we lived with you on Cook Street in Victoria, in the ’70s.
Anyway, the episode we saw was where the children’s grandfather comes to visit them at their home in New York. The kids are too young to remember his last visit five years earlier, so even though he remembers them fondly and sincerely wants to rebuild a family connection, they don’t remember him and it takes a while before they warm up to him. All the gifts and treats he gives them are received with gratitude, but without feelings of connection or affection.
The grandpa’s daughter had been the grandchildren’s mother, and when she and her husband both died, the children were orphaned toddlers, split up and sent to live with different relatives. By adopting them both, their Uncle had reformed part of their family and started his own journey as a parent. In the years since adoption, their Uncle has become a real father to them.
Grandpa had worked all over the country and in his older years was starting to feel the need to settle down and be closer to his family. By the time he’s visited with his grand-kids for a couple of weeks, they’d begun to bond while sharing memories of the woman they’d both lost. Sitting with his granddaughter, answering her earnest questions about her late mother reminded the grandfather of how his own daughter had once been. Grandfather and granddaughter were now feeling connected by having lost the same person. For each, the other person was a reminder and a living connection and a way to fill in a missing piece in their hearts. As dated as a 1960s family sitcom could be, this show seems well-informed and capable of exploring sensitive topics like death and loss in a delicate way. It also treats the emotions of its children with respect.
Poppy, I still remember being 8 or 9 and having a chat on your knee about your youthful migration to Canada, when you were about 13 or 14. You were reluctant to say much to a curious little boy at the time. I didn’t want you to be sad. Fifty years later, I can still smell your cologne, and feel the cool crispness of your suit jacket and your firm hand around my waist, holding me up on your knee. I can still see your pained face and distant eyes, lost in mysterious old moments.
I think you left a lot of family behind when you left England in 1913 to start your life anew in Canada. You gave up a lot to remake yourself as a Canadian, to meet your future wife, and to raise your daughter Angela. I wish you could have told me about your childhood circumstances. Evidence I’ve found in my adulthood hints that you must have been a British Home Child, sent to Canada by The Salvation Army.
Other than that one lap-top sharing, I didn’t learn any more about your early life during the two years we lived with you. Since I’ve grown up, I’ve been able to find records of some of your highlights among your old papers and photographs, as well as in Canadian government records, which describe your enrolment in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in World War 1, and your career in the RCMP.
As a curious kid living with you briefly, I explored your house, finding evidence of your artistic abilities in the oil paintings and art books in your basement, and through the photographs and home movies you showed us in your dining room. Oil paint and film were your media, and you became a skilled painter and photographer. Your creative, artistic side was passed to your daughter in so many ways, and in her, it blossomed into theatre, music, and singing.
Angela was the angel in your heart, and thinking of what she meant to you and all that you meant to me helps to fill in the gaps left in my own heart. You lost your daughter when she married and moved away, and then lost more of her again as her alcoholism, mental illness became less managed, and her memory loss more pronounced. We lost her to those things completely.
For my part, I want to cast you as the hero in your Hero’s Journey, and a man I’m proud to be connected to and named after. You always carried yourself with quiet dignity, dressed in a shirt, suspenders, and leather wingtips, even to the breakfast table. I never once saw you lose your temper.
Once when I was about five, I was aware of my two names, Ernest and John. I stood on your fireplace’s raised hearth and proclaimed that from now on, I wanted to be called John, not Ernest. Unfortunately at that moment, you were sitting on the living-room couch, right in front of me! I’ve often wondered if my little proclamation ever actually hurt your feelings. If it did, you didn’t let on. I’ve been proud to bear your name for many years now.
There was never ever any question about us loving each other in any case. To me, you were always just “Poppy”, and unlike my mother and father, you never once hurt me or scared me. Ernest Huntley Clarke is always beloved by Ernest John Love.
