I can remember how cold the room felt.
How improbable the sensation was when thinking about the warm night air outside. Maybe it was just a trick my mind was playing on me to justify my shaking, but I knew the tremors had nothing to do with the temperature in the room.
I sat on the couch, arms folded around my knees, thinking about how empty the house was now. In the other room Clare, the woman who would eventually welcome me into her family, was gathering up some of my clothes.
I had just returned from the hospital where I had watched as the cancer that had robbed my mother of her confidence, independence, and beauty finally stole her life.
Seven long years of fighting had come to an end.
Now, sitting across the room from the hospital bed that had been brought in during those final weeks, I felt as if my home had suddenly become a graveyard before my thirteen year old eyes.
The house had seen only Brennan’s, three generations of us, and with the exception of myself and my uncle, all were now gone. Lives had been lived here, a family history had been made, and now it was all over.
Then there was a hand on my shoulder and Clare was asking if I was ready to go. I nodded, took her hand, and left.
—
I’m twenty-five years old and I still don’t have my driver’s license.
My mother would probably smack me upside the head if she were alive today and that is what’s running through my head as my girlfriend and I go down the highway from Fredericton to Moncton.
I’m on my way home for the Easter weekend, while Norah is off to Halifax to visit some friends. It’s a trip I’ve been planning for a while now and a mixture of excitement and apprehension is taking hold with each mile that passes.
My brother will be waiting at home with Jude, his one month old son who I’m about to meet for the first time.
Also waiting for me is a trip back to the neighbourhood I grew up in, something I haven’t done in years. Days earlier I had set up a meeting with Kim LeBlanc, a young mother who had lived next door to me and whose son I had been friends with.
I had told her that I was writing a story about my mother for a print journalism class I was taking, and that I had questions I was hoping she could answer.
She agreed to speak with me, saying how much she was looking forward to reminiscing about the old days.
I told her I looked forward to it as well, but now I’m feeling the familiar tension climb up my back and into my shoulders. I’ve struggled with the strain for years, but it’s been especially bad these last couple of weeks.
Norah once told me about how, before we started seeing each other, she thought it almost looked like I had a hump. A cute one, she assures.
She can’t see it now, but as I think about the old neighbourhood I feel my back going into full Quasimodo-mode.
It might be a long weekend.
—
After mom passed away, Clare and her husband Wayne took me into their family.
They were very much my guardian angels in the weeks that followed.
One night in particular has stayed with me.
I was sitting up in bed, holding a sweater that used to belong to mom. I could still smell her on it; a mixture of moisturizer cream and cigarette smoke.
As I rubbed my cheeks against the soft fabric, I thought about all the times I had curled up beside her during one of her medication-induced sleeps. I would take her arm and wrap it around me, and pretend that she wasn’t sick. She was only napping and soon she would wake up and everything would be okay.
Then I heard a knock on my door as Wayne entered the room to wish me good night.
I couldn’t say anything. All I could do was clutch the sweater and look up at him.
In a flash he had me in his arms and for what felt like an eternity, I cried.
I cried for the childhood I had lost. I cried for all the horrible things that had kept me up at night. I cried until my lungs felt as if they would burst.
Then I realized something; Wayne was crying too. And in that moment, I didn’t feel quite so alone anymore.
I don’t think we’ve ever talked about that night since, but I’ve thought about it many times. It was the night I understood I now had something I never thought I’d have.
—
It’s a strange sensation watching the old NBTel tower pierce the horizon as we approach Moncton.
I’ve seen the sight hundreds of times to the point I could probably draw it from memory, but today’s different. This weekend is a two-fold homecoming.
I point out different haunts to Norah as we pass them, forgetting that I’ve shown them to her already. Maybe it’s more for myself, a way of getting reacquainted with the city.
She’s patient with me, just like she always is. Sometimes I have a tendency to ramble on about things I forget I’ve already talked about, but when I do, she just smiles and gently reminds me. I’ve always been thankful for that.
As the sax solo from Bruce Springsteen’s “Jungleland” blares on the radio, we drive through downtown Moncton, and as with other trips back home, I notice signs of a city that has been growing leaps and bounds since I left it.
Store fronts have been renovated, different businesses have sprung up everywhere, and new buildings have gone up.
We pass a beautiful structure that shines in the sun as it reflect the rays off its giant glass windows. Though it’s not open yet, it’s the site for the new downtown CIBC. I wonder aloud if it’s going to replace the one down the street where my mother had been a bank teller for a number of years.
So many changes.
We pull up to my parent’s house as the song’s final notes tinkle away. Getting out of the car, I feel like an old horse trying to stand up on stiff, tired legs.
Clare and her mother Monica, who’s called “Nanny” by me and the rest of her grandchildren, are at the door before we make it up the steps. This is Nanny’s first time meeting Norah, and she quickly shows the same kindness she gave me years ago when I became a part of her family.
She has a way of making people feel loved and welcome, like she’s known you all your life. That’s something I’ve always admired about her and it’s one of the reasons why she’s the perfect grandmother.
After coffee and a quick purchase of some suspicious looking shrimp flavoured chips at the Korean market four blocks over, Norah’s ready to go. I’m worried because she has another three hours of driving ahead of her, but she insists that she’ll be fine.
She kisses me goodbye and drives off. As I watch the car turn the corner and go out of sight, I feel a sense of focus take hold. Tomorrow will be a big day.
Then I walk inside and have dinner with my family.
—
I was in grief counselling for about a year after mom passed away. Though the sense of loss was huge at that time, the sessions were more for dealing with my guilt.
Survivor’s guilt is apparently a common after-effect for someone who’s gone through a tragedy similar to what I had, and I certainly had it in spades.
I didn’t feel at all like I deserved the second chance I was getting. It just didn’t seem fair that something as wonderful as starting over would come through the death of someone I loved so much.
Not only that, but by accepting my new family, I felt as if I was betraying my old one. That night, after returning from the hospital to my empty home, there was a part of me that felt like it had just seen the final chapter of a story. Like I had been witness to something.
I didn’t understand it at the time, but I wanted desperately to hold onto what had been in that house.
As the years went by I began to lose sight of that urgency. The scope in which you see the world is pretty small when you’re a teenager, and as to be expected I got caught up in its usual trappings.
Soon, much of the pain from that time had dulled. People talk about their lives being split into acts, and I think that that period was my first. But still, the little boy who had to grow up too fast never quite left my side.
Then one day his voice started getting louder.
I was playing a video game with my roommate when my brother Jeff called to tell me that his wife Katie was pregnant.
It was unbelievable. I had just gotten used to him being married. It still felt like it was only yesterday we were living under the same roof. But as I thought about all that, something else suddenly dawned on me.
Norah and I had both recently realized that we were “in it to win it” in terms of our relationship, and had been talking about kids in a couple of years. Now, seeing that my brother was going to be a father, parenthood had gone from an abstract concept to a reality.
I would eventually be a father. Those days were now sooner rather than later, and all of the sudden, it felt like that boy in the back of my mind was screaming at me again. My children would undoubtedly have wonderful grandparents in Clare and Wayne, and the coolest of uncles in Jeff.
However, my biggest fear was that mom and the rest of my family would be forgotten. What would I tell my kids about my mother when the time came? What if all they had of her were some old photo albums?
—
Knocking on Kim’s door, I can’t stop thinking about how small everything feels.
I want to humour myself and say it’s because I’m taller, but really it’s just the change in perspective that comes with getting older.
Kim answers and immediately gives me the type of hug a mother gives to a son who’s come home. We enter the kitchen and her husband John comes in to shake my hand. I’m just starting to feel like a kid again when they call in their daughter Jerica.
In most of my memories she was still in diapers, but now she’s a young woman entering her final year of high school. Kim’s son, who is three years younger than me, isn’t home, but I can see by the pictures of him on the wall that he’s practically a grown man now.
So much for feeling young again.
Kim offers me some coffee then we sit down at the table. John says it’s his cue to leave when he sees me take my tape recorder out, then it’s just Kim and I.
The first thing she shows me is totally unexpected; a set of journals with green slips of paper sticking out everywhere to mark off particular passages. She tells me that she’s been writing all her life and that her journals from that time talk a lot about me.
Then she pushes some photographs across the table. They’re of me when I was a kid, and at once I’m reminded that there were some happy times in my childhood, many of which were spent here.
Together with her son and our friends Matt and Andre, we would spend hours roughhousing outside, watching cartoons and playing video games. It was the closest thing to normal I had for a while.
Kim starts telling stories. She talks about the first time we met, about the Santa Claus parades we all went to, and the nights she spent worry about my mother and I.
One of the journal entries she reads catches me off guard. One day, Kim had invited the boys and I over for a pizza supper. She had done so because there had been talk of me going off to British Columbia to live with my uncle.
I told her that I had no idea that that had been a possibility and she says that mom at the time didn’t know how much longer she was going to last. She had been suffering from an infection in her lungs, and she must have been figuring out her options.
However, she fought it and lived for another few years. As Kim goes on, she reminds me of the strength that mom possessed. A strength that I was starting to forget.
After years of defending her and her bad habits – the smoking, lottery tickets, and emotional blackmail – I had begun to resent mom. She spent so much money and time on things to help her feel better while I shouldered a burden a child should never have to deal with.
My clothing was ratty, I ate horribly if at all, and I often fell victim to the bitter emotional mind games that can be the dark side of caring for someone who is very sick.
But the sickness was exactly where all the pain in our relationship was coming from, and as Kim continues I remember that through the horror of those years, mom did the absolute best she could.
Later on, I look through the kitchen window towards my old house. I ask Kim if she knows the people who live in it now. She says she does and asks if I want her to call them up.
I hesitate. I haven’t seen the house in 11 years and I know that there are many ghosts waiting inside, but after a moment I nod. It’s time to go home.
—
As Kim and I walk to the house, a day from years before flashes into focus.
It was the second or third year since mom’s diagnosis. I was walking home from school, expecting her to be in bed as usual, when she greeted me at the door.
Her usual bathrobe and slippers were gone. Instead, she was dressed in a blouse and slacks. Her hair had been returning after a round of chemotherapy, and she had done it up with some mousse. She smiled down at me, and for the first time I forgot she was sick.
That night she made a big supper for us and afterwards, to my dismay, she sat me down to do my homework with me. I could see the effort she was giving, but by the time we were done going through the spelling words for the next day, her back was slumped with exhaustion.
I walked her to her room and she got in bed. Then I hugged her and rubbed her back until she fell asleep. That night, I prayed that tomorrow mom would be like she had been earlier, but when I arrived home again the next day she wasn’t waiting at the door.
Every so often she would get those boosts of energy again, and each time she would try to use it to be a better mom.
When Kim knocks on the front door of the house, I half expect mom to answer the door like she did that day. Instead, it’s a young woman and her daughter.
Inside, the house feels like a stranger. The person who my uncle sold it to years before had gutted the inside. It’s brighter now, cleaner. It feels alive again, and it makes me smile.
Then the woman’s husband leads me down to the basement and it feels like we’re walking down into a time capsule.
I tell the man about how my grandfather had turned the basement into an apartment for us after mom had me, and that the carpet and built-in bookshelves that lined one wall of its living room were exactly the ones that had been here when I was young.
I can practically see her, sitting in her rocking chair with a bundle in her arms.
—
Back upstairs, I thank the family for letting me into their home. Kim and I part ways at the street corner outside, and I take a quick walk down the road I used to take to get to elementary school.
As I walk, it feels like that boy who left the neighbourhood 11 years ago is right beside me but for the first time I no longer feel like he’s a weakness. I feel strong.
I pretend that mom’s going to be waiting for me at the end of the sidewalk and I begin to think of what I’m going to say.
I’m going to tell her that I love her.
That I know she did her best, and even though it wasn’t good enough sometimes she was still braver than anyone I’ve ever known. That she won’t be forgotten or left behind as just some photo in an album. That I miss her so much.
She’s not there when I reach the end of the sidewalk, but that’s okay.
I know she’s heard me.
