I myself however would only designate my personal story into just 2 chapters: the life I lived before the death of my mother, and the life I lived after the death of my mother.
"Why only 2 chapters?" one would perhaps ask me. "Surely one's life story would have more color, depth, and resonance than what could be contained within just 2 chapters." Yes of course, I do concur with that sentiment. I'm certainly not saying that these two chapters aren't filled with many, many subdivisions in which my memories and personal story are held, it's just that the event in question was so metamorphosing and transcending to me that it's a book splitter. Hence, two chapters. Chapter 1 is the part of the story in which my mother was an existing and active source of life, breath, energy, love, inspiration, influence and knowledge. Chapter 2 is the part of the story where she just ceased to exist, and the cascade of events that occurred from that point on. Therefore Chapter 2 will continue on until I cease to exist.
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My personal story began as follows: I was born Vanessa Ann McEvoy, on Tuesday, April 7th, 1981. My parents are Joseph McEvoy and Marjorie McEvoy (Ryan). My father was a truck driver and blaster at the Iron Ore Company of Canada (IOCC) and my mother was a teacher turned stay-at-home mom. I have 2 sisters, Joanne and Lisa, who at the time of my birth were 11 years old and 9 years old, respectively.
I was born in St. Johns, NL, but raised in Labrador City. I spend my entire childhood, adolescence and teenage years in Labrador. My two sisters left home when I was still very young (a decade-long age gap would make that inevitable). My oldest sister Joanne left home in 1987 to go to university in Antigonish, NS. I was 6 years old at the time. My sister Lisa left home in 1991 to move to Ottawa, ON. I was 10 at the time. The remainder of that first chapter continues on with just my mom, my dad and me right up to the 6 months after I graduate high school.
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Chapter 2 of that story begins on Sunday, January 2nd, 2000. It was a day that began like any other. Nothing spectacular at all stands out about that day at face value.
It's an overcast, chilly morning, the day after the very first day of the new millennium. I'm 18 years old. My dad and I go off to the morning church service (we were a Catholic family). My mom stays home because she had a very bad bronchial infection and accompanying flu. We come back from church. My mother is eating some breakfast whilst sitting on the couch. The tv is on. We chat. My dad leaves to go visit his sister who has the same flu that my mom had.
I plan on spending the entire afternoon in my bedroom drinking tea and watching Much Music, as there was going to be a marathon of the top 100 videos of all-time airing. I had watched it every New Year's Day for the previous 3 years, and I was going to do the same that year. Then that night, we were going to have leftover ham for supper, and Mom and I discussed how she was going to take me shopping for a new top as a gift on Old Christmas Day, January 6th. (mom always made it a point to do something for Old Christmas Day during my childhood, and she kept it up for me as a teenager too. It was a tradition she enjoyed).
I grabbed my tea and was about to head in my room, and my mom was heading in to take a hot bath. I asked her "Do you need anything?" and she casually replied "No."
I shut my bedroom door and settled in to watch my marathon.
When I think about the quiet calm that happened over that next 15 minute timespan on that day, nothing is out of the ordinary or spectacular. Just normal stuff that most people wouldn't notice. Over the years I've reflected on it, and I think it's my mind's way to hold on to whatever scrap of normalcy that it can. It's almost as if an egg timer was set to go off on that day at that time, starting at 15 minutes and counting all the way down to 1. It's just that on this egg timer, when the 1 minute was up, my life, my sense of security, my emotions, my memories, and my heart would be completely and utterly ripped into shreds at the speed of light and sound, and would take years upon years to mend and heal. A cornerstone in my family would be smashed into a million pieces, rendered irreparable. Written off.
During that 15 minutes of calm, this is all that happened: My mom was in the tub, having her bath. I was still in my room watching the first 3 music videos of the marathon, and my dad was on his way back home from my aunt Edith's house. Dad was pulling in the driveway, then mom was getting out of the tub. I was still sipping my tea. Dad came in the house, mom was coming out of the bathroom, then as Dad was turning the corner into the hallway, my mom let out a massive yelp and fell to the ground. The sound of her falling was not unlike the sound of a bookcase being knocked over. Dad ran to her and yelled "Oh Marjorie, honey!!" I didn't see what happened as my door was still closed. I was frightened and was about to come out when Dad yelled out for me to call an ambulance.
The next several minutes and hours seem like a blur. I remember them, but my mind must have numbed itself to protect against trauma. It's like a point form-dream sequence, and I may get the odd detail wrong. But this is how I remember it: I came out of my room, saw my mom lying there on the hallway floor and ran to the phone. As I was calling the ambulance, Dad was yelling mom's name trying to get her to respond, but she wasn't responding. I don't remember what I said at all on the phone, but I called. Then I think dad asked me to call my uncle Don too, which I don't remember doing, but I do remember him arriving with my cousin Brad in tow. I sat there on the sofa trying to piece together reality when Brad said to me "Common. You don't need to see any of this." and took me to the basement where we sat in the rec room. I was on the verge of hyperventilating because none of this seemed real. I felt like an idiot because Brad was sitting with me and I just couldn't think of anything to say. What can you talk about during a moment like that? I think I apologized to him for not talking or having anything to say, and he told me to stop being ridiculous. We stayed in the basement while the paramedics arrived. I remember hearing a lot of clanging and banging and dragging, and then it all stopped. They took my mom to the hospital. We came back upstairs, and dad told me to get ready and get in the truck. "There's a chance she'll be ok." he said.
I don't remember that much about the specifics of the next several hours, but somewhere in that time frame we arrived at the hospital. I sat in the waiting room. It might have been 45 minutes or it might have been 2 hours. I don't remember exactly how long I was waiting in there.. I also don't remember what I was thinking about. Dad was in with the doctors. I remember I got up at some point to go see where dad was, and then dad turned the corner, saw me, and with a sullen, defeated look on his face he said "They did all they could do."
My mother died of heart failure and head trauma from the fall. When she fell, she went down head first, which knocked her out cold. They managed to revive her heartbeat, but told dad she was virtually brain dead from the fall, and she would be a vegetable. If you ask me, my mother was a person. NOT a vegetable. So therefore I would not want her to be a vegetable, and neither did dad.
A priest was called in to do last rites, which dad and I were present for. Somehow, some way. we made it back home. I do not remember leaving the hospital and I don't remember exactly how we got home, but I do remember that within 1 hour of us arriving back at my house, there must have been 30 people who eventually arrived. The only other family we had in Labrador City was my aunt Edith, Uncle Don and their 2 sons, my cousins Brad and Craig. Everyone else that arrived were neighbors, dad's co-workers, and just random people that wanted to make sure we were okay.
The next hurdle that had to be crossed that night was notifying my sisters, both of whom were living in different parts of Ontario. Lisa was notified first, then Joanne. Within 2 days they both were home.
The next several weeks, had they not happened the way that they did, I'm not sure if I would have been able to recover and heal as well as I did. A strange yet comforting paradox overtook my environment.
Internally, the stages of grief began to filter through my conscience. I could slowly and surely feel the beginnings of a vicious, stormy battle that would overtake me for the better part of the next several years. But externally, my dad, sisters and I were swarmed and showered with an unearthly, unimaginable amount of the most gentle care. A floodgate of love and support from what felt like my entire home town came at us from all angles. It was shocking and overwhelming, but so beautiful and appreciated beyond words.
People who I had never even spoke to or met before in my whole life showed up at our door with cooked whole turkeys and hams with all the fixings, casseroles, trays upon trays upon trays of cold cuts, finger foods, and cookies, loaves and loaves of homemade bread, cobblers, huge salads, fruit baskets, bags of grocery essentials like milk and butter, and some even ordered party-size pizzas and massive containers of Chinese food and just brought them to us, just because. A teacher who taught me one subject in grades 4 and 5 showed up with a massive homemade 6-layer chocolate cake with my name written on it in icing. I mean...how did she remember me??? Or even know where I lived??? On top of that were the flowers, the cards, and gifts like money to help out. It came from everywhere. It was incredible.
And not just the food and flowers. The sheer human support was just naked and unending. I had people from all angles coming at me sitting with me on my living room floor, all urging me to tell as many stories as I could about mom. Everyone that showed up was full of unending hugs and laughter. That's one thing that really stands out. The laughter. During that first 2 weeks or so, no one dared let me or any of us be melancholy and cry. It was joy. Laughing. Talking. Reminiscing. The three of us girls, although we did have our moments, spent the better part of those weeks together picking on each other and messing around, just like we did when we all lived under the same roof. We just laughed and laughed. It was incredibly healing and made all the hard stuff during those weeks so much easier.
The two inevitable hard events in question were my mother's wake and my mother's funeral. I had never, ever been to a wake or a funeral in my life until that time. I remember when we arrived at the funeral home to see the casket, I was so scared to go look. It was such a foreign feeling. Dad had to coax me into the room. I stood outside the room and just peeked my head around the corner a few times before I even went in, and then with the footsteps of a mouse, I finally went in to face the reality that I couldn't hide from any longer.
On the day of the funeral, the sun was shining. We all seemed like we were in good, peaceful states of mind. I was drowning in a blissful sea of denial that morning, as I continually smiled and lied to myself "You know what? It's ok. I'm ok now. I can do this. I'm at peace now. Everything is all good." We got to the church, which I was surprised to find was pretty packed. My mother did not have a lot of close, personal friends, but she was very active in the church. She was a regularly scheduled reader during many of the evening masses. Everyone knew my mom's face who went to those masses.
Being the immediate family members arriving at the funeral of another immediate family member is sort of like being in the wedding party at a backwards, upside down wedding in another dimension. Many elements are similar, in that you arrive to a packed church, walk down the isle one by one to watch an event that is taking place at the front of the church. At the end, everyone walks back down the isle in sequence, and there is a "receiving line" of sorts that happens after. But of course you are not arriving to celebrate the new life of two newlyweds. Instead you are arriving to say farewell to someone you will never see again.
My mother's funeral was bittersweet and beautiful. As my dad says "She sure got one hell of a send off." My mother's closed casket sat at the front of the church, directly in the sun. A ray of sun shone down on it during the whole service and the sun did not let up. The bishop of our archdiocese performed the ceremony, which was amazing. To my knowledge, not too many bishops perform entire funerals for common folk, but he knew my mother and flew to town just to be a part of it. I remember that being a big deal. Throughout the procession, he kept referring my mother as "Our sister Marjorie," which I thought was incredible.
As the ceremony began, I became acutely aware that the artificially happy, positive façade that my family and I upheld before we arrived at the church was about to crumble beneath itself. I didn't know that churches distribute boxes of tissues, and maybe they don't usually, but in those first front pews where we all sat, there were boxes of tissues. It was not long before we all were breaking them open. Lisa broke down first. I was still okay for another little while, that was until my dad broke down. I had never seen my dad cry before in my whole life and it just did me in. I collapsed onto my sister Joanne's shoulder and we all just sat there, trying to hang on. Hang on to.....what? I'm not sure. Maybe anything. Everything. Nothing. Each other. Reality. Space. Time. Life as we knew it.
My uncle Peter who is an accomplished singer, songwriter, and guitarist offered to sing "Amazing Grace" along with the church choir. It was the most glorious rendition of the song I had ever seen. He started out singing it as a solo, then towards the end the entire church choir join him in unison.
It was during that moment that I had my very first dose of intense grief. It smacked me in the guts with an ungodly force. While uncle Peter was singing, I realized what day it was. January 6th. Old Christmas Day. The day that mom and I were supposed to have a much anticipated lunch and shopping date.
For those of you who have been kind and considerate enough to read this, thank you from the bottom of my heart. But right now, I want to get real for a second. I would like to shed some light on the more unpleasant and difficult phases of my experience with mother loss. I truly hope that you know that I'm not doing this to be malicious or mean or scare anyone, I just think it's time for me to truly express my feelings from this whole endeavor. I apologize if the next few paragraphs are harsh or hard to read, but I want to be as honest as possible and I need to get this stuff out.
For those of you who are fortunate to still have your moms, let me ask you all an honest question. Have you ever in your life imagined what it would feel like to all of a sudden realize that you will never, ever, ever, and I mean NEVER EVER again, for the rest of your existence on this planet, have lunch with your mother? Ever again? Or go to the mall or grocery store with her? Or have coffee with her? Or have her make you toast in the morning? Or watch tv with her at night? Or have her fold your socks? Or hem your jeans? Or light the candles on your birthday cake? Or take care of you when your sick? Or hug you and kiss you when your sad? Or give you a Christmas gift that she wrapped and signed "From Mom"? Or talk to her on the phone?
Have you ever thought about what it would be like to never hear her voice again? Never hear her laugh? Never hear the way she pronounced certain words? Never hear the way she whispered? Or coughed? Or sneezed? Or yawned? Or scuffed her feet on the floor in the morning? Or stirred her coffee?
What did she cook you for dinner growing up? What special things did she make for you on the weekends or during birthdays that you remember? Did she make you bacon and French toast on Saturday mornings like mine did? Did she have a special recipe for sweet and sour pork chops that you loved so much like mine did? Did she make you bubblegum-flavoured cupcakes on your 14th birthday? Or make you raspberry turnovers with vanilla icing when you won 3rd place in a science fair at school when you were 12? Did she make you peanut butter and jam sandwiches with the peanut butter spread on the bread exactly how you liked it with not too much jam? Did she fry you eggs sunny side up for breakfast certain mornings and cut the egg whites off of them because you hated them? On Friday nights, did she make you those boxed Kraft Pizzas with the parmesan cheese and oregano spice but with no other toppings because you just liked the pizza the way it was? Did you have a really bad cold when you were 13 and she made you your favorite chicken rice soup and bought a big bag of oranges for you to eat that she peeled and split into halves for you and decorated the plate with cut up green grapes? Did she make your cup of tea just right? Like mine did? Did she make the absolute best lemon meringue pies and the best light and dark fruit cakes and cherry cakes at Xmas like mine did?
Just for one split second, just one, for me today, please just try and picture what it would be like to have all of those things, all of those seemingly mundane, routine things that sometimes are accidently taken for granted, gone from your life forever, for the rest of eternity.
Was that hard to think about? If it was, I am very sorry. But that has been the reality I've been faced with for the last 14 years.
For years now, I have been trying to put into words the grief cycle and the manifestations that occur during it's process, and trying to relate to how it appears at first glance. On paper, the grief cycle as theorized In the Kubler-Ross model (look it up if you need to) appears as a nice , neat, organized pie chart or point-form list, and are as follows:
- denial
- anger
- bargaining
- depression
- acceptance
But we are human beings. We are forces of nature. When an intense bond is broken, the reactions and responses to that broken bond are multi-faced. Ever-changing. Intense. Fevered. I found another model recently that is a much more relatable description for grief, and matched my experience almost exactly, and that is a more recent adaptation to what is now referred to as "The 4 Step Model", which reads as follows:
- Intense Concern
- Despair and Depression
- Recovery
That is the text book breakdown of grief, and now here is my very own personal analysis of my own experience, which I found in a journal entry I made around 2 years ago. The way I felt then is still the way I feel today about the experience, put into words as best as I could do:
"The grief and pain and shock and realization of what had just happened would transform me. The experience of losing my one maternal parent and one of the very few people that have ever been in my life that truly understood me and "got" me, was like nothing I had ever felt before. It was like being trapped on a rollercoaster that you are scared to death of and are crying and pleading to get off of, but it won't let you off. You are forced to stay strapped into it until you get used to it, until the terror and knots in your stomach slowly dissipate and become like a dull, manageable pain. Having no choice but to "get used to" that unfathomable experience was not an easy task, and it took a really, really long time. The better part of a few years. Because as life goes on after that happens, just as you thought the worst was over and you have reached a point of so called "acceptance", you will arrive on a date or an event in your life that will shock you and bring all that pain that you just buried right back to the surface. The wound will feel fresh and like it just happened all over again. Emotional injury you thought was finally sewed up gets ripped open again. This will not happen once, but many, many times. Day in and day out, and in some cases, year in and year out." --- my journal from 2011
One thing my mother taught me and taught me well is that crying is an essential human function. She taught me that if you hold in tears, it can damage you, and I truly believe that. I have never been shy or afraid to cry. And believe me. I was put to the king of all tests with this one. I remember one specific afternoon about 2 months after she had passed, in which I had the house to myself and my dad was working a 12-hour day shift. A wave of grief began to wash over me, and I knew I had to get it out. I went into my room, closed the door, collapsed on my bed in the fetal position, and literally cried, sobbed and screamed at the top of my lungs continuously for 5 hours. Five straight hours. I collapsed onto my bed at approximately 1:30 pm, and didn't stop vocalizing my pain and grief until close to 6:30 pm. My throat was raw, my eyes were swollen, and I was physically, mentally and emotionally exhausted. But you know what? I felt a thousand times better after. Why? Because it just needed to happen.
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There is some good news from this. The good news is that it does get better. It really does. As painful and exhausting as grieving the loss of your mother is, you have to do it. You have to. It tears you apart, but then it puts you back together. The experience is different for everyone and it all depends on your own life, relationships, and coping mechanisms.
My Chapter 2 continues on as varied but glorious tale. 5 months after mom died, I made a big decision and moved away from home. That was another difficult experience because I was now dealing with homesickness and the thought of leaving my dad all alone. Truth be told, I almost didn't do it. The night before I was to leave on the plane the next day to move to Halifax, NS, I said to myself "What am I doing? Why am I moving away to a strange city and leaving my dad all alone? I can't do this!!!"
But I did do it, and with the 20/20 hindsight that 14 years of adult life will give you, it was the most important and best decision I ever made. I became a different person upon moving away. I grew into woman. I graduated college. I made friends that I never would have made and dated terrific boys that I never would have dated. I fell in love with the little city I now call my home. I had many great work and learning experiences. I became cultural. I travelled. I kept my love of pop music alive by going to all my first concerts. I grew into an avid reader and blogger, which is the closest I've ever come to writing a book, which of course I hope to achieve someday. I became a foodie and connoisseur of many things. And best of all, if I had made the cowardly choice to call the whole thing off and stay in Labrador City, I never would have crossed paths with the one thing that has been my #1 source of joy, peace, happiness, success, and love for the past 11 years: my D. Darrell Knox, the love of my life. He is me and I am him. We are the same, yet different in ways that compliment each other. We are the yin to each other's yang. We are partners in life and love forever more. He is essentially the #1 protagonist in my Chapter 2. He is what makes it all ok.
Things got better for Dad too. He eventually married Marg, our wonderful stepmother who has taken the utmost care of him in these last several years and has become a new and important chapter in our family. He moved away from the isolated cold of Labrador after retiring and is now living a wonderful life close to all his family in a beautiful house on the island of NL. It took a lot of years, but I can now finally and proudly say that I am close with my extended family as well. A lot of reconnection has occurred over the last 2 years, and it is now a source of daily happiness and peace in my current life.
My final word about it all is that all that pain is part of the learning and coping process. You cannot control who gets taken from you. You can only learn to be equipped with the tools to help you get through it. You grow from it. As the years go on, it goes from being the center of your life to being just another event that shaped the story of your life.
I'm not saying there isn't a void still left in my life with her passing. It's just now that void is a revolving and evolving one. It changes shape and resonance, and is now just a piece of the Vanessa puzzle. It's not this gaping hole that needs to be filled anymore. It's just a patch on the quilt of my life.
***FOOTNOTES***
My mother was smart, educated, charming, caring, loving, supportive and hilarious.
She supported and encouraged all my music obsessions, all of which are still a part of my life to this very minute. She let me teach her about all the music and bands I loved, and she is one of the few people who really and truly understood on a deep level how important music and bands are to me. She understood that this was a source of joy to me. One time when I was in grade 11, I was in class when I got called over the PA to go to the principal's office and that my mother was on the phone. In a panic, I ran and picked up the phone thinking she had some terrible news. Turns out she was getting me out of school to come home because Much Music was going to be airing Duran Duran's latest video premiere and she knew I had been waiting for it for weeks and that I would want to tape it. HOW FUCKING COOL. DID YOUR MOM DO THAT???? MY MOM DID.
She was a math wiz, as she could easily complete an algebra or long division equation in her head. IN HER HEAD.
She was an eloquent public speaker and avid reader, and she taught me to read when I was two years old. As a toddler, I could both read and repeat out loud anything she put in front of me. It was from this very early experience in my development that I must have acquired my love of the written word.
She loved sketch comedy like Monty Python and Saturday Night Live, and we spend a lot of time together laughing our guts out.
We talked. And I mean TALKED. About anything and everything. That is one thing I can gladly say I did not take for granted. I couldn't count the amount of hours of conversation we shared over the course of 18 years if I tried.
I entered a contest on Much Music in 1994 to win a chance to have dinner with a favorite group, and when I lost, she bought me a statue of a kitten sitting in a boot with a note attached to it that read "You'll always be a winner to me." I still have it.
She put the travel bug in me by taking me on trips to Ontario nearly every summer in the 1990's. Because of her, I could easily live on a plane, train or bus and be happy as anything.
In my stocking at Christmas time, she would put huge packs of VHS cassettes and blank audio cassettes because she knew I loved to make tapes for people and loved taping music videos and concerts that were on tv.
My last footnote is this: my only real regret which is completely out of my control, is that she never got to know me as an adult. We never got to become real grown up friends. She only ever got to know the child and teenage version of me, and not the much more refined grown up version of me. I often wonder if she were to meet me in the street in this day in age, what would her opinion of me be? Would she think I was nice? Smart? Successful? A failure? Would she like me as a person? Would she think I was pretty? Would I be someone she would want to get to know? Would she turn away?
I guess I'll leave the answers to those questions to those who are physically in my life today and who love me. I only hope the answers would be similar,
-Nessa K,
January 3rd, 2014
