Category Archives: history

A brief history of Riverview Hospital

February 27, 2025 admin Leave a comment

“Before its forced downsizing and eventual closure in 2012, the site would house thousands of patients who would be treated and mistreated; sometimes subjected to lobotomies and forced sterilization. However, particularly after the Second World War, physicians put a newfound emphasis on socialization and community, as well as psychotherapy rather than surgery.”

These articles cover the history of Riverview Psychiatric Hospital, in Coquitlam, BC.

https://tricitiesdispatch.com/riverview-essondale-artifacts/

history, memoirs, psychology, relationships

Add water and get stirred.

November 2, 2024 admin Leave a comment

My parents have now been dead for over 30 years. About five years ago, I realized that I’d started to see them more as my ancestors than my parents. It’s begun to feel like my life with them happened a long time ago, to somebody else in another lifetime.

I maintain a large family tree database that goes back about 250 years, and my parent’s names now seem to sit quietly like all the other names and dates on the leaves in my tree. The personal bonds, the feeling of knowing them first-hand, the familiarity I once felt when I used to see them, it all seems to have withered away. The warmth I used to conjure up in my heart when thinking about them seems to have disappeared into the wind now too. It just feels like I’ve lost something special, that my blood connection or association to them has gradually faded. Maybe now they’re more like ghosts than ever before.

I never saw this coming. Worrying about preserving my memories was what originally motivated me to start writing about them back in 1995, not long after my mother passed away. At that time, I wondered if my family memories would fade away, and the stories I remembered would be lost. I knew those things had a shelf life, but still, I suppose that I always took my memories for granted.

It seems now like my stories are still tucked away in the folds of my brain, but perhaps my perspective on them, the glasses through which I review them, has changed as I’ve aged and grown farther away from the original events. Maybe emotional detachment is inevitable and just comes on with time. Maybe the pendulum on my folks has swung over from subjectivity to objectivity.

Sometimes, if I’m sharing memories about our parents or past family times with my sister, I get that old connected feeling back again. It feels comfortable. I think we’re probably as tight as a brother and sister can get, with everything that happened to us growing up. I only have her with me to remember our mother and father the way that we knew them, and I’m so grateful that talking to her helps me recapture my feelings of being my parents’ son again – the feeling of having a childhood and a family home. Even more, I’m grateful if talking to me helps her to reconcile her own side of our family traumas. Sharing is caring, as they say….

Another part of the parental remoteness I felt is the distance I experienced growing up: the long generational space that always existed between me and my parents. I had somewhat older parents than my peers. My Dad was 45 when I was born, and probably 15 or 20 years older than most my friend’s dads. As a kid, differences in age always felt very significant.

My Dad was born in 1921, over a hundred years ago. My Mum’s centennial birthday will come in 2031. They were both kids before World War II. Their world back then was all analog, rendered in radio waves and photographic film. Their telephone calls crackled and sounded shitty, people wrote letters not emails, and a loaf of bread cost about a dime. And I’m sure that everyone grew up smoking and drinking in their teens, because it was cool.

There’s a real psychological distance at work. Maybe as parents and kids, we never really knew each other as well as we could. My parents were adults, and I was raised to believe that they actually knew what they were doing, despite regular evidence to the contrary. I wouldn’t know much about their behaviour habits, their values or ways of thinking until they were already too far in the rearview mirror.

Lots of kids grow up thinking that their parents must have come from a whole different planet. We couldn’t know how much they were or weren’t in control of their lives. Maybe “family” was just a survival construct for adults who were hanging on and getting by in life.

In practical terms, the parent-child relationship has been lodged in my past for over half my life by now. So why did I miss them so much tonight that it came out in little convulsive sobs? Where does that new hurt come from?

I’d thought that the past had been compressed down inside all the little stories I’ve written, told, and sold to myself. Maybe I was just believing my own bullshit. It seems like real regret and loss can unfold old, seemingly-collapsed memories out into new equivalents of depth, like a kind of self-revealing reverse-origami. Maybe my flattened emotions and Cole’s Notes summaries of memories can be reconstituted like condensed orange juice, brought back into their full bitter flavour, with just the watering of a few tears. Add water and get stirred.

history, stories

Pity the Monsters

October 27, 2024 admin Leave a comment

As a kid between the ages of 10 and 16, I was a fan of old-school monster movies and novels.

The Frankenstein monster appealed to me a lot. He never asked to be brought to life, and his innocence became stained as he came into increasing contact with mankind. In the original novel, he spoke like an angel, an idealist, probably expressing the ideals of his young creator, Mary Shelley. The 1931 Universal horror movie made him mostly mute and a victim of his outer ugliness, instead of driven by an inner sense of beauty or ideals. Regardless of the medium or the version portrayed, I saw the Frankenstein monster as a victim of circumstances beyond is control.

Count Dracula was a smooth manipulator and a sociopath, manipulating others to fulfill his own needs with no thought for the eternal hell in which he was trapping his victims. He was a blood junkie, ceaselessly killing for his next fix. Dracula was a true villian, sacrificing others for his own fulfillment. Bram Stoker’s novel didn’t engage me, but the character portrayed by Bela Lugosi was extremely compelling and psychologically menacing.

Doctor Jekyll was the symbol for mood disorders and split personalities. He was bipolar-ism and mood swings taken to extreme levels. The good doctor was the genteel, daytime persona that society expected and accepted. My Hyde was the violent, clawing, lying persona that would occasionally erupt after dark, to wreak havoc.

H.G. Well’s novel “The Invisible Man” was another study in hiding one’s illness from society (in this case, murderous impulses and a burgeoning insanity). His invisibility was somewhat portrayed as an affliction or a curse, exploited as an advantage by its user, and seen as a horror by others.

All these characters were probably symbols of Victorian-era fears and insecurities, brought out in strong relief. But they were modern fears too. I began to understand why those stories and movies appealed to me when I looked around me in my home and in the world.

None of us ever asks to be born, and if life is scary or chilling enough and relief seems hopeless, then we may wish that we never were born at all. The contradictions of values and the hypocracies around us may make us question how much others really value their own lives.

In my worry and self-pity growing up with my alcoholic and depressed parents, I witnessed their violence and sadness and sometimes wished that I could be somewhere else or even not alive at all. I’m certain that my mother felt that way more than a few times in her life.

In my father’s use of fear and his temper, and his absolutist approach to obedience, I saw narcissism and manipulation. Every villain considers themselves the hero in their own story, but what about the victims of their actions? Where is forgiveness and redemption without responsibility?

Jekyll and Hyde were to me, straight-up symbols for manic-depression, which we now call bipolar disorder. My mother had that, and we witnessed a manic episode now and then as we grew up, and especially long periods of debilitating depression. She self-medicated her way through all of it with lots of alcohol. For her, eventually, balance was abandoned.

I wanted to like and sympathize with the victims in the horror novels I read and the movies I watched, because I felt I was a victim of things beyond my control too. I wanted someone to have compassion for me, but for that to happen, I’d have to open up about things, and that was not allowed in my family. Growing up, the most important thing to do was to keep quiet and not draw attention to yourself. I didn’t tell my friends much about the things that happened in our home, but they’d hear about some of it buzzing around the neighbourhood. Our next-door neighbours always knew when someone in my house was yelling, or if the cops had to come to give my parents a warning, or if an ambulance arrived.

Horror in novels and old monster movies was a much safer way to escape.

history, memoirs, relationships

A Ghost in you…

July 27, 2024 admin Leave a comment

There’s a song by The Psychadelic Furs that really got under my skin when I was 19 (it’s still in there).

“The Ghost in You” made me think of the important people who were not with me, most significantly, my sister Kim, and my Mother Angela.

Both of them were alive at the time, but separated from me for different reasons. My sister and I had been pals and playmates until we were about nine or ten. We were often separated as a consequence of family tragedies, misplaced loyalties (mine), or other people’s stupid, selfish decisions (our father’s). As the boy, I aligned with my father, mainly out of fear. As a girl, Kim would have been aligned with our Mother, if our Mother had been there and had been a factor in our lives.

Separation from my mother was permanent and irreversible. We had no relationship to speak of with her from about the ages of nine or ten, as she gave up on her family and escaped her life in situ, drinking herself into alcoholic abandon until her liver quit and brain damage and memory loss became her new abnormal.

She didn’t come back to us, mentally or physically. Once her memory got disrupted, her personality broke as well. She truly left us years before she ever left home and started living in various hospitals and became a ward of the province.

My sister Kim has survived, stayed alive, and made herself a life. She’s dear to me and I’m proud to be her brother. We talk regularly and we care about each other’s lives. I think that’s probably about as good as life can get: knowing someone who always wants to hear from you, and who always wants you to hear from them.

My Mum lived in the long-term care ward in Riverview from 1980 until 1995, where she died after struggling with pneumonia for a week. To me, her life was one of unrealized potential. Now all we can do is try to celebrate her beauty and recognize the traits, attributes, and abilities that she left us.

Memories are my constructs, my proxy rewards for the absence of real people. That’s where my ghosts live, preserved in my heart, freeze-dried in their best, most happiest personas. I greet them gratefully and warmly, like familiar old friends.

The Psychedelic Furs - The Ghost in You (Official Video)

history

Some things haven’t changed much…

July 8, 2024 admin Leave a comment

https://ejohnlove.blogspot.com/2013/07/

history, relationships

Fatherhood

July 6, 2024 admin Leave a comment

My wife’s uncle passed away recently. He was a lovely man, surrounded by a loving family. His passing made me reflect on his reputation as a devoted father and member of his church. He left behind a family fresh in their grief, steadfast in their appreciation, and re-affirmed in their love.

My father died when I was in my twenties, leaving behind a fractured family, a dozen unresolved issues, a legacy of regrets, and no last will and testament. Over the past 35 years, I’ve become used to seeing his failures, arrogance, bombast, and violence in the foreground of my memories. It’s amazingly easy to stay inside the habit of bitterness, self-pity, and resentment. Those reactions were fairly earned at some real cost, and still valid to this day.

All the same, those particularly bitter truths obscure other less-familiar truths, like a dominant popular narrative that doesn’t tell the full story.

It’s common to focus on the negative and painful events to the exclusion of the positive ones. We learn from mistakes (our own or others) but not so much from our happiness and successes. So, I continue to mentally sift through my past, finding and polishing little moments worth celebrating that evoke pride in my father’s successes and joy in contemplating his warm moments.

I’m slowly separating the good man he could be from the toxic selfishness and anger he demonstrated. It’s really hard to separate a person from their actions, but I’ll keep trying to see both my parents as full-rounded people struggling with their demons.

Aside from my Dad, I also have to add that there have been a number of surrogate father figures in my life, who’ve provided support and positive examples of what fatherhood could look like at its best.

My maternal grandfather, Ernest Huntley Clarke (“Poppy”) was especially loved by me and my sister when we were young. He led by example every day, through his quiet, good-humoured, and dignified way of being.

I’ve prospered through the support of teachers who took the time to see and guide me, to help cultivate talents they thought were worth developing. The most impactful teachers I’ve known were when I was in art school, when I was slowly becoming mature enough to begin to appreciate them. Their attentions and challenges grew my confidence and self-worth every day.

My father-in-law, Honesto, provided a quiet kind of love and dedication, gradually accepting me as part of his family, and letting me help him when I could. His actions and sentiments to me were always uncomplicated and sincere.

history, memoirs

Take good care of yourself. (You belong to me.)

June 22, 2024 admin Leave a comment

As a teen, I’d never have thought that in middle-age I’d be taking prescription meds each day to manage my health. (For all I knew back in my teens, middle-age was like an impossible dream. It’s easy to fear that where you are is all there is and all you’ll ever have.)

Growing up, I never saw my Dad take even an aspirin. With him, I’m convinced he would never even admit to being sick. I don’t remember him ever taking a sick day. How does that saying go? Pride goeth before a fall.

My Mum should probably have been taking Lithium or something to manage her manic-depression, but she hadn’t gone to see a Doctor since before we’d come to Vancouver in 1975. In the half-dozen years since then, the only substance either of my parents ever medicated themselves with was alcohol – way too much alcohol.

My Dad only paid attention to his Doctor when he was given the ultimatum “If you don’t stop drinking, you’re going to die!”. That dramatic advice impressed my old man. It probably made him feel like the centre of a big drama (specifically, his survival). More importantly, it gave him yet another great story to tell. I can only guess, but what a risky way that was to feel recognized.

By 1984, my Dad had a heart attack and multiple strokes, and would relapse into alcoholism and break his hip falling in a hospital shower. He had survived all his harsh physical ordeals with his mind and personality largely intact and had succeeded with the hard work of stroke rehabilitation, but was physically broken and partially paralyzed for the rest of his life.

We like to describe major events like these as “wake up calls”, but honestly, I don’t know if he ever “woke up” from his alcoholism in terms of taking responsibility for it. In his last five years of life, I think he stayed sober and relatively healthy because alcohol and cigarettes were forbidden in his private hospital. Left unsupervised, I think it’s quite likely he’d have relapsed and probably died. He did finally die in 1989 at the age of 68.

Back in 1977, my Mother was too far gone into her depression and alcoholism to even leave her bed. She’d completely withdrawn from all of us and the outside world, preferring to stay drunk or to appear to be sleeping all the time. She was unreachable, and we probably stopped trying over the course of the year. I never tried to rouse her, or go in and talk with her. The master bedroom was somewhere you just didn’t go.

One day, her liver quit and she was unresponsive. If she’d stayed home like that for another 24 hours, the Doctor told us she’d have surely died in her bed.

Medical intervention for my Mother came with a last-minute ambulance ride to Burnaby General Hospital. She detoxed after a full blood transfusion, and was not the same person afterwards. She’d survived, but alcohol poisoning had given her permanent brain damage. She’d tried to escape her life through alcohol, had almost died, and then had sort of been “remade” with a slightly different mind and personality. She’d had a painful almost-death and partial rebirth into a new life as a long-term resident in Riverview Psychiatric Hospital.

So I guess I never had good role models for taking care of myself or staying healthy. At the age of 46, my mum almost died from her alcoholism. At the age of 62, my Dad almost died from a heart attack and multiple strokes.

Now, at the age of 58, I’m kind of in-between those two ages, but am successfully managing my diabetes and high blood pressure. I’m taking Metformin and Jardiance for my Type 2 Diabetes and Ramipiril to manage my blood pressure. I do blood tests and talk with my Doctor every few months, I eat way more healthy than my folks ever did, and I walk 5000 to 10000 steps at least 5 days a week.

I guess the point of recounting all this is to show you (and myself) that I’m taking better care of myself in both physical and mental terms. In fact, I’ve learned how each of those aspects can affect the other.

By 2014, my diabetes had been largely unmanaged for about four years. I was pretty large and overweight at that time – maybe weighing 205 or more. Back then, I’d also experience some very dark feelings at least one morning each week (usually Mondays), and sometimes tears would just come to me unexpectedly. It felt like my emotions were actually working against me. In the last ten years since then, my diabetes has stayed in control through my meds and my attempts to improve my diet and daily exercise.

Today, I weight 177 pounds and am on-track to lose a few more and to get my blood pressure solidly inside the normal range. I try to get at least 5-6 hours of sleep each night and often walk more than 8000 steps each day. I feel no anxiety, and those black mornings have become very rare occurrences. I feel more calm, more confident, and more happy.

So better physical health can make it easier to improve mental health, and vice versa. My parents never experienced that while I knew them, but I can still learn from their examples.

history, stories

Dear Poppy

March 23, 2024 admin Leave a comment

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.

genealogy, history, memoirs

Happy Father’s Day, 2023

June 18, 2023 admin Leave a comment

My relationship with my Dad was complicated to say the least, but sometimes it feels refreshing to step back, outside of all the subjective details or personal regrets and grievances, and look at life in terms of the larger patterns that you can learn from; the forest, not the leaves.

Next to the dark stains of personal errors and mistakes – a filter which affected my vision for many years – I can also recognize bright paths of success to be celebrated. It’s healthy to shrug off some shadows once in a while, and enjoy a little objectively-cast sunlight.

Today is Father’s Day, and as I look back on my father’s life today, I think about his family line, his hometown, and some of the trends I’ve glimpsed running through his history. My father links back to his own father in notable ways.

Almost 102 years ago, my Dad, James Evan Love, was born in Prince Rupert, BC, to Albert Bruce Love and Margaret McCallum Owens. By 1928, the Love family home on Eighth Avenue East would total four boys and one girl.

The Love family home in Prince Rupert, BC (c. 2012)

Long enough to forget, a little?

January 15, 2023 admin Leave a comment

This admission is hard to say, but I hope it’s just some natural part of living on and getting older…

My feeling of personal connection to my parents has faded, lessened, a lot. Dad died in 1989 (over 32 years ago as I write this), and Mum died six years later. I just don’t feel that strong an association to them anymore. It’s almost like losing some personal faith. They just feel like ghosts to me now.

They’ll always have been my parents and I can easily say that I loved them each, once upon a time, but it’s been so damned long now since they each died that it almost feels like my living with them or knowing them happened to some other kid, in some distant other life.

I think I’ve been without them now for almost double the time that I was ever with them, including times we were living apart while they were still alive. I’ve been writing about them and forming my web shrine to them here for about 25 years now. That’s longer than I knew my Dad (23 years) and it feels longer for Mum: she left our home to be permanently hospitalized when I was about eleven, and we saw her less and less as the years passed.

Maybe time just erodes everything, and maybe old family times have no special bedrock that can withstand it. It’s frustrating to feel my kid family realities starting to just slip away, but nobody is gladder than me that I started writing it all down here, before time takes more of those old feelings and memories away from me.

Friendships with the living do slip away, so of course one-sided posthumous relationships with dead family would slip away too.

I’ll get my pride back to full strength and accept how life and time change everything.

True Life