|
Book Review: Globe & Mail; Nov. 18, 2006:
MEMOIR “Sisters of mercy: when siblings die”
PAULA TODD
Sixtyfive Roses: A Sister's Memoir
By Heather Summerhayes Cariou
McArthur & Company, 436 pages, $29.95
Requiem for My Brother
By Marian Botsford Fraser GreyStone, 238 pages, $29.95
A big yellow envelope sits before me with a note: "2 Dying Siblings Books." A valiant younger sister succumbs to cystic fibrosis after a lifetime of volcanic coughs; a mercurial brother is attacked by multiple sclerosis, but finished off by melanoma.
What to do? A glass of red wine, a hot bath, clean the oven? Anything but surrender to stories where there is no possibility of a plot twist, no escape from ravaged bodies and graveside misgivings.
A coward, I choose the thinnest text first, Marian Botsford Fraser's tiny, jagged Requiem for My Brother. It begins with endless rain and heavy hearts, "a grey sheet pulled over the sky." Twenty-two days and 12 hours have passed since her brother Dave's withered end, and now the family readies itself to scatter his ashes, their grief as groggy and muffled as the humid August air.
Fraser beckons us to come as she paddles backward in time to northern Ontario's mosquito summers and skinny dips, when mining the depths of her brother's emotional aloofness did not seem quite as important. And now it is too late.
Not yet, not yet.
Instead, I flip open the alarmingly thick Sixtyfive Roses: A Sister's Memoir, and meet not grief and regret, but the elfin Pamela Summerhayes, diagnosed at 4 with cystic fibrosis, the disease that wraps its sticky fingers around victims' lungs and chokes them to death. Nine hours later, I reluctantly put down this book to make dinner, then stay up well past midnight to finish it. "It was not fear of death. Pam was afraid of unused life."
These books are not about loss as much as they are about lives lived: one with fortitude and insight, the other enigmatically but with a physical passion fed by the glorious Canadian wilderness.
Nor are these books diatribes against devastating diseases that hold families hostage, although I do write a cheque to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation the moment I finish Heather Summerhayes Cariou's Sixtyfive Roses, whispering the book title aloud until it melts into a child's ironic mispronunciation of cystic fibrosis.
"[Pam] trembled like the baby sparrow we found once, fallen from its nest in our backyard. Her heart beat right through my rib cage, in rhythm with my own, as if we were two bodies with one heart.
"I have Sixtyfive Roses."
"I know, but I promise you won't have to die alone. I will be your Protector, and we will die together."
It will not be that easy. And this is where these two very different books converge: Both writers reject sentimentality and bathos, elevating us from the predictable to the perceptive. The price of that insight is the most precious of postwar priorities -- domestic privacy, the prohibition against "airing dirty laundry," the pointing of fingers.
In isolated Dobie, outside Kirkland Lake, Ont., Fraser's family enjoyed the status of a father who managed the local mine. There were trips to Toronto and Florida, a pretty house and a piano. But "my family had secrets, things that remained unspoken. But it was only as an adult that I learned that other families had terrible secrets too and that the habits of emotional rigidity were common."
Those secrets -- her mother's unchecked descent into alcoholism, family feuds, emotional denial -- threw the three Botsford children (including sister Sara) into tight cahoots, but also left them without the psychological tools to decipher one another. "Our family did not talk about the things that mattered most to us." Requiem is Fraser's attempt to understand her brother, to know him, before he dies; and to make sense of it all after he is gone.
Starved of emotional vocabulary, Fraser and her brother speak the language of landscape, sharing a lexicon of granite, pine, lucid lakes and rushing rivers -- and a psychological distance as vast as our country's terrain. They could read a river better than each other.
"A pillow, for example -- a shadowy rock veiled by a smooth sheet of water, some distance from a telltale curling piece of backwater -- could be a subtle pattern to grasp from a moving boat and a challenge to plan a manoeuvre around."
Together, they conquer the rugged Coppermine River that flows north of Yellowknife and across the Arctic Circle, following in the paddle strokes of the Inuit, the Chipewyan and Cree, and explorers Samuel Hearne and John Franklin. "It was not strength that got us through, but trust in each other. Unquestioning. Some would call it love, but that was not a word in our sibling vocabulary." For a decade, Fraser devoted herself to the prickly work of caring for a man who cherished his waning independence. She anguished over substandard health care and railed against a world that too often shuns the disabled. Yet, even as Dave, barely past 50, grew thinner and lesions laced his lung, breast, spine, spleen, kidneys and more, "still, we did not speak of death."
Unsurprisingly, Fraser is at her most spellbinding when she describes place and its power over us, while Cariou is a deft emotional cartographer, her insights evolved, her duty to her little sister lovingly discharged. "Pam said, tell our story. Mother said, tell the truth. The story I have told lies somewhere between truth and memory. Pam survives through the telling. So do I."
In 1958, very little was known about CF except that it was a fatal hereditary and incurable disease buried randomly and undetectably in parents' recessive genes. Symptoms include a constant, mucus-producing cough, pancreatic failure, weight loss and chronic pneumonia; the average life expectancy was five years. "With the advent of my sister's diagnosis, it was as if my family had crossed the waters to a foreign land. We became immigrants in our own lives, leaving behind our identities and relationships as we had known them, losing the future we might otherwise have imagined for ourselves."
Debilitating disease can suck the oxygen from families, and Cariou's parents were nearly consumed by the emotional and financial demands of not one, but eventually two ill children (a younger brother would also be diagnosed with CF). The sheer physical toll of tending round-the-clock to ailing children, while battling the ignorance of relatives and strangers, left the Summerhayes family stretched tight. Not yet in their 30s, the irrepressible couple reached inside even deeper, trying to give their kids a "normal" life while embracing other struggling families. In 1959, they founded the Canadian Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, and in the early days ran it out of their kitchen.
Growing up in Brantford, Ont., Cariou was waging an internal war she was too young to understand: the desire to protect her beloved baby sister, a bad case of sibling rivalry and burgeoning survivor's guilt. Night after night, she lay rigid in the bedroom she shared with Pam, the constant threat of death spawning hyper-vigilance and sibling resentment. "My life was tied to Pam's now, beyond being sisters. I knew that I was willing to give up my life, sacrifice a part of me, as much of me as I could bear, if only God would let her live in return." Ricocheting between omnipotence and helplessness, Cariou raged, fought, threw tantrums and wailed at a silent God. She stopped, started and stalled her life as her sister warded off death. She abandoned a prized spot at the National Ballet School, curtailed an acting career and wore away an early marriage to bear witness to a sister's love -- and guilt. "The child who is dying says, in that case, I better have some fun before I go. The child who sits next to the child who is dying asks, how dare I have fun when my sister is dying?"
In the end, it all mattered: Pam, 26, became one of the oldest CF survivors, passing away gently with her family encircling her bed. She lives on in Cariou's engrossing book, not as a victim of disease but as a feisty, fun-loving, formidable woman. "Pam continues to inspire us to live on the edge of our potential. We do not retreat from life. She would be appalled if we did. . . .All the energy we used to keep Pam alive, we are using to keep ourselves, and each other, alive."
Sixtyfive Roses is a love letter, a thank-you note, a defence, a plea, a setting straight, a reaching out. More than anything, it is an accomplishment worthy of Pam's belief in her big sister..
Paula Todd is the host of TVO's interview program Person 2 Person and the author of A Quiet Courage: Inspiring Stories from All of Us
Go back |
