In 1978, when I was in Grade 8, my Mother was discharged from Burnaby General Hospital where she’d been healing for a couple of months after her alcohol overdose. Dad told us that Mum wouldn’t be able to live with us because she couldn’t be left alone to take care of herself at home.
Old Orchard
Mum was moved to a private care home about 5 kilometers up Kingsway from where we’d once lived, in a neighbourhood we knew as “Old Orchard”.
The Old Orchard care home was an old building with the surface comforts of a Victorian-era house, hiding the realities of a hospital: leaded glass doors with worn brass handles greeted you as you went in, and the whole front area was a set up like a large livingroom with armchairs and couches for everyone. The layout told another story: floors of no-nonsense linoleum, and furniture-spacing and wide doors and halls that allowed beds, stretchers, and wheelchairs to get wherever they needed to go. It was basically a small hospital dressed up in doilies.
We visited Mum every Sunday, but I can only remember a few glimpses and smells from this place. It was stuffy and had a dry, decaying funk in the air that was probably dry-rot.
Mum was the youngest one there and seemed aware that it wasn’t the right place for her. During our visits, she always repeatedly asked us when she could come home. Maybe she thought this was just a temporary situation – a bad dream – that would be over before long. She seemed unaware of her limitations and never questioned why she was there; she never bargained or pleaded, she just kept asking when she could come home, and there was nothing any of us could say. I figured it was part of the brain damage she’d suffered as a result of her alcohol overdose.
In those awkward moments, me and Kim looked to our Dad for answers. He always had an opinion on things, but he didn’t have anything that could reassure us in this situation. He was as helpless as we were. This was just how it was and had to be, at least for now.
Mum’s emotions were evident for all to see: she was always agitated or nervous and wanting to return “home” (although I never knew where she thought “home” actually was). In years since, I’ve sometimes wondered if Mum felt like she was being punished or “sent away” from us to these hospitals.
At twelve, I was still too young and self-focused to see how much this whole separation between my parents was affecting my Dad. As much as they’d fought and argued over the years, I think my parents still loved each other. Now, Dad just became more sad and quiet on Sundays. I think he dreaded our Sunday hospital visits as much as we did. Along with that dread came the cruel, pernicious guilt one had for feeling that way.
Como Lake
After a year or less, for reasons I never knew, Mum was transferred out of Old Orchard and ended up in a place called Como Lake Private Hospital. It was east of Burnaby, in Coquitlam, farther away – meaning more physical (and symbolic) separation from us.
Still, it was a much more modern care home than Old Orchard had been, and it was nice to see all the trees and green space surrounding the little one-storey care home. It seemed more peaceful, and I hoped that Mum would have a better, happier time living there.
For her birthday that year, I’d bought her a little gold chain necklace. Weeks later, I saw it wrapped around the neck of a stuffed octopus on the little table next to her bed when I peeked into her room. A week later, the next time I visited her and looked in her room, the necklace was gone. I realized that people would steal things from care home residents and that Mum was practically powerless about the theft of any of her possessions.
Sometime in the winter, Mum had a very bad episode where she punched a nurse who’d been trying to use cloth restraints on her. From there, Mum ventured out into the snowy night in her hospital gown and slippers, trying to walk home. After that, Como Lake didn’t want her as a resident anymore and they told Dad she had to go.
Burnaby Psychiatric Centre
Burnaby Psychiatric Centre was a psychiatric assessment facility on Willingdon Avenue in Burnaby, near BCIT. Dad just described it to us as a kind of holding pen for Riverview. We visited Mum there once, and I will say that she seemed more engaged and alert there than at any time in our previous visits. I think she’d been talking with the psychiatric staff and maybe even undergone some therapy.
Dad said “Angela, I told you to behave or you’d end up in Riverview!” I could hear the frustration in his voice. He admonished Mum almost as if she were a small child, and the dire consequences of her situation made an impression on her. After the Como Lake incident, Riverview Hospital had been the big threat hanging over her, and she seemed genuinely afraid and panicked. While marvelling at her animated way (she moved, she talked!), I became afraid for her. This next step felt like it was permanent – one from which there was no return. I knew nothing about Riverview Psychiatric Hospital then, except that it was a place to be feared. Going to Riverview was framed like a punishment, and for Mum maybe it was.
Riverview
Around 1980, when I was in Grade 10, Mum was admitted to Riverview Psychiatric Hospital in Port Coquitlam. What I wouldn’t learn till years later was that she had voluntarily admitted herself. Looking back, maybe that was part of what the Burnaby Psychiatric Centre was about: if the patient had to go to Riverview, they should be admitting themselves and perhaps admitting to themselves that it was the best place for them. I can only hope that Mum made a clear-minded decision about her admission and thought she was doing what was best for herself and her family. We’ll never know her state of mind…
To my pre-teen eyes, the walls and corridors of Riverview were quite scary. As an older adult looking back, they’re similar to the stereotypes from the movie “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”. The ceilings were too high, the linoleum floors were too cold and shiny, and the sounds were too loud and scary. The lack of carpets and drapes meant that the slightest click of a key in a lock would echo for metres down the halls.
It was a place that discouraged noise to ears that weren’t used to its practicalities. Shuffling feet can trip on rugs, and carpeting is harder to keep clean and sanitary, so there was no carpeting. The place was old and seemed to be optimized for a small staff to manage many people in a large open space. My kid brain wasn’t used to all the hard, clinical surfaces, and unhomey, institutional atmosphere. It was designed for mass care from a time when socirty thought that was the best approach.
Our biggest challenge must have been in communicating with Mum. How can you retain a relationship as mother and son, or daughter and mother, or husband and wife, when you can’t get any verbal recognition? What if you can’t even be sure that the other person still even remembers you at all? If my mother Angela had ever been engaged with me as her son, it had been a few years earlier. Now, the person I called Mum couldn’t even prove that she knew me anymore. Maybe, after her alcohol overdose, she’d really lost big chunks of her memory and along with that, her personality. That was the reasoning that I clung to that helped me fight off my fear of rejection before each visit. Even though I could see no proof, I had convinced myself that somewhere inside my mother’s quiet heart she still loved me and still loved her family.
As I experienced this more and more over the fourteen years my mother was institutionalized, I gradually stopped thinking of her as “Mum”. She wasn’t really a mother to me anymore, and as her memory loss seemed to demonstrate, the title and role of Mother didn’t matter much anymore.
Even if Mum couldn’t remember us that well and our family bond was slipping away into some kind of strangeness, it became important to me to see that she wasn’t forgotten. But wishing that and seeing it through are not the same thing.
Gradually, my visits to Riverview became less frequent, going from weekly, to monthly, and then just quarterly. Wherever I was living, I’d stare at the coast mountains and just wonder how she was, as if she were in a far-off land and not just 20 km down the highway in Port Coquitlam. But it was the non-geographical distance between us that hurt the most – the helplessness of her situation, and ourlong lack of connection. I’d always wanted to know her and feel connected to her. I felt such grief for Mum too, for her lost family and her own lost life potential.
I felt tremendous guilt over not visiting her more often. Each Riverview visit after 1989 would be just as difficult as the last one. I’d just visit her whenever I was able to screw up the courage to take those long bus-rides out to Coquitlam.
Even if she didn’t know exactly who I was, I wanted to keep knowing her, and to keep thinking of her as someone I cared about, named “Angela”. In my mind, she gradually transformed from “Mum” to Angela”.
