Dropped Threads 2: More of What We Aren''t Told

  My last conversation on the air with Kate was September 4, 2001. Her voice was frail and dainty, almost like an old woman’s. She had good things to tell me—she was winning an award from the Metro Chamber of Commerce in recognition of her outstanding contribution to the downtown of Halifax.

  KC: An incredible gift to me to hear these things while I am alive…. There is no question that my job has kept me alive that extra year I’ve gotten. But as far as my health is concerned, I’ve been on a rather slippery slope this summer. My mouth is very sore.

  SR: Does it hurt you to talk?

  KC: Yes, it does and it hurts to eat. My tailbone is sore. What happens with the kind of leukemia I have is your white blood cell count goes sky high, which makes your blood very thick and sticky, which makes it hard to get through the body, which eventually is what kills you. And the week before, I had a seizure. It discombobulated me and confused me and set me back. Yesterday and today are the first days I’ve felt human.

  Those kinds of things have happened. So here I am, still here and doing reasonably well, I think, under the circumstances.

  SR: What’s changed in you because of that seizure?

  KC: Scared me, scared me a lot. I decided that what was going to happen at the end is that I was going to stop having transfusions and lie down and just go to sleep and five days later I’d go away…. It was a real awakening. It’s one thing to talk about it, and here I was—it was actually almost happening. Was I going to be able to pull out of what I was in or was this, the lying-down part, the real clock ticking …? As much as I’ve been talking about these things, when it comes right down to doing it, it’s not as easy as talking about it.

  As we end our conversation there is an understanding that this is likely the last time we will talk on the air. I cannot say goodbye and neither can she.

  There is a series of “See yas” and “Ciaos” and “Okays” and “Lots of love.”

  Her husband later told me about Kate’s side of that last interview. It’s another story of her determination. He told me Kate could barely walk, let alone speak. But she wanted to do it. He took her to the CBC building and guided her to the studio. “She was just going to do it, and that was it,” he said. “That was who she was.”

  Evening, Thursday, October 19, 2001.

  I’ve just returned from dinner with my crew, and I’m back at the City Lodge in Sydney. I’m feeling a splitting pain in my chest as the reality of Kate’s death rolls over me like a fog. I open up my bottle of single-malt Scotch and pour three fat fingers into the sanitized plastic glass provided by the motel. The Scotch burns like a hot river as I swallow, but I down it in three gulps. I don’t feel any different, so I have another three fingers. And then another. I see myself in the mirror, face blotchy, eyes swollen. I put a towel over the mirror. I lie down on the bed and scream into the pillow. Goddamn God damn Goddamn. There is a knock at my door. I get up, get hold of myself and sit behind the desk. It’s my producer, Willy. The door’s open, I tell him. He asks, “Are you all right, dear?” and comes over and pats my shoulder. It’s 10:00 p.m. We have to be at Ukrainian Parish Hall at 6:45 a.m. to get ready for our live public broadcast. He is responsible for every detail of the show. He needs me to be all right. I have yet to look over the scripts. I have yet to write the opening comments for the show. My head is pounding. I can barely form a sentence. I don’t know how I’ll host a debate about the closure of the last coal mine in Cape Breton in fewer than twelve hours. I don’t think I’ll be able to listen to other people’s lives without crying about my own loss. At this point, I’m drunk and I feel numb. But I tell Willy I’m fine.

  Morning, Friday, October 20, 2001, live on the air, me to the audience, 11:15 A.M.

  Yesterday, I was here in Sydney, just getting in the car and I heard Ralph Benmurgui, who is sitting in for me, say Kate Carmichael had died. For the past year I’ve been introducing all my conversations with Kate with the phrase “Kate Carmichael is dying of leukemia.” But because Kate was such a life force and because she was so gorgeous, I never really believed it. Kate was on This Morning throughout the past season, talking about what she called “this amazing ride” of living through dying. And over the year, she became my friend. We drank margaritas together, drove way too fast in her car with Tina Turner blaring through the speakers, and we talked endlessly. She talked about the art of dying. But it was, of course, the art of living. And I firmly believe that her spirit cannot be extinguished by death. Her strength, dignity, courage and grace live on.

  Kate in her garden, Victoria Day weekend, broadcast on CBC June 4, 2001.

  You’re gardening and you’re in the dirt and the soil is warm, new life, new birth … Gardens are about the future, and there isn’t much future left. It makes you pensive…. As I was being pensive sitting there on my bum, I thought back to a lunch I had the week before with Donna Thompson, a very dear friend who has two children with cystic fibrosis. Cystic fibrosis children don’t usually make it through their twenties. Donna’s first child died in 1998. He was an athlete, he was well loved in the community, and the community as a whole grieved the passing of Robbie. I asked her to talk to me about the time when he died, for a very selfish reason. I’ve always been afraid and I continue to be afraid—but I must say now a lot less—of what the end is like. I assumed that a young man with CF gasped for breath, and that’s what frightens me the most, gasping for breath. Donna talked about just how peacefully he went away. And there isn’t a gift that could be given to anyone in my kind of situation that could be greater than that. The reason is, who is there to talk to about these kind of things? Who can you talk to who has experienced the end? Donna has given me a great gift.

  I also asked her where she put his ashes. She told me that she put them in the corner of a crypt, and I asked her, “Do you ever go there to talk to him?” She said, “No I don’t. I don’t need to go there to talk to him. He’s always with me and with the entire family.”

  Donna gave me the courage to believe that when this body is gone I will still be here in the heads or the thoughts or the conversation of some of the people I’ve made an impact on. I fear that the moment the body is gone, the spirit is also gone, and the gift that Donna gave me was, number one, the peacefulness of the going. And number two, that there will be times when something will happen in my friends’ lives and they will say, Kate did that, she made that happen—the first lilac or a really heavy lilac bloom where the whole bush is just hanging with lilacs—Kate put that there. That’s the kind of thing I imagine, that bit of overabundance, that Kate-in-your-face-doing-that-kind-of-stuff. People say to me, “Kate, if there’s an afterlife, when you get up there send me a sign.” And I always say to them, “You pick a favourite bush in your yard, and if that bush blooms better next year when I’m gone, that’s a sign.”

  AFTERWORD

  A dozen or so years ago, a senior colleague treated me with great disrespect and insensitivity. The incident struck me like a blow to the head, though you might think I had been fortunate indeed to have arrived at my mid-fifties without suffering a social injury of this kind.

  I registered a protest to the Head of Department but was told nothing could be done. I felt invalidated, baffled, powerless and even became ill for some months, suffering seizures to my neck and shoulder muscles. I could have gone to the dean, who would have set the situation right, but for some reason this didn’t occur to me.

  Instead, I began to talk about the conflict: to my family, then to my friends. I confess I made rather a drama of it. I told the story twenty times, thirty times, probably fifty times. Each time I told it, the pain lessened slightly. A noticeable dilution took place, and my tale of humiliation developed wavy side curls of absurdity. My tongue became more and more eager to exploit my shame, and I caught myself, oddly, relishing my own anger. Imagine!—I possessed a colleague with whom I was not on speaking terms. Now, that was interesting. Eventually I collapsed the narrative and inserted it into a novel, The Stone Di
aries, and there it rests, enervated now, incapable of hurting me further.

  When I consider the essays in this anthology and those published in its predecessor, I feel the heat rising from the words, and the human relief of having shared a story and thereby mitigating its power. By getting such stories “off our chests,” we are lightened and enabled. Frequently we discover that what we believe to be singular is, in fact, universally experienced. No wonder Holocaust survivors seek each other out. No wonder those who have lost a child turn to others who have endured the same loss. We need these conversations desperately.

  I remember once sitting in a circle of women who had undergone mastectomies. One of the women was eager to show us her new, light prosthesis, which had replaced one that was heavy and misshapen. She reached inside her shirt and removed it and handed it to the woman next to her. We passed this very private cone of plastic and foam around the circle, each of us admiring it in turn, weighing it in our hands, comprehending it and understanding that this ad hoc ritual linked us together and eased the shared loss of our bodily integrity.

  I want to thank each of the women who have brought their stories so bravely to this book. Many of the contributors to the first volume suggested further stories that needed to be told and writers who might be called upon. Susan Roxborough of Random House has encouraged us. Marjorie Anderson has shaped this book lovingly and with great intelligence and tact. Catherine Shields has brought her critical attention to all the manuscripts. Readers across Canada have responded with their own narratives and the knowledge of how women can help each other.

  I am honoured to be a part of this ongoing project, which locates itself at the juncture of my two favourite things: language and the company of women. There we can find courage to go forward in our lives.

  Carol Shields

  May 2002

  CONTRIBUTORS

  CAROL SHIELDS

  Throughout my life, I have been sustained and heartened by women and their courageous resiliency in the face of difficulty. My good fortune has been to observe and document this in my narratives and experience it as a friend and mother. It has been a particular happiness and point of pride to work on Dropped Threads 2 with the editorial tact and wisdom of my daughter Catherine Shields.

  MARJORIE ANDERSON

  My life was first made rich by a storytelling father, a wise, gentle mother and seven interesting and interested siblings. After nearly twenty years of the added richness from teaching literature and communication at university, I am leaving that to spend professional time consulting and being immersed in literary projects. My personal joys are still family, including Gary and our bevy of children and grandchildren, and now the contemplative life at our lake cottage.

  MAUDE BARLOW

  I am the elected National Chairperson of the Council of Canadians, Canada’s largest public advocacy organization, and a director with the International Forum on Globalization, based in San Francisco. I am also the author or co-author of thirteen books, the latest of which is Blue Gold: The Battle to Stop Corporate Theft of the World’s Water. My early feminist roots have never left me but rather accompanied me on my incredible journey.

  SANDRA BEARDSALL

  Born in 1959, I grew up in Brampton, Ontario, with my parents, brother, sister and cats. After university studies in Toronto and ordination in the United Church, I spent several years ministering in Labrador and then eastern Ontario. I now live in Saskatoon, working as a professor at St. Andrew’s College, and making a home with my spouse, stepson and, of course, the cat.

  SANDRA BIRDSELL

  Although I grew up wanting to dance, act and clown, writing became my first love. That was twenty years ago. Since then I’ve published seven books and received accolades and nominations for various awards. Throughout the years I have given up on various hobbies such as sketching, Tai Chi and gourmet cooking. Now I concentrate on gardening, taking vitamins and being what my youngest grandson calls “silly.”

  INGEBORG BOYENS

  I have been lucky enough to spend more than two decades working as a journalist in newspapers, magazines and television across Canada. Then, living in the middle of the country in Winnipeg, on the edge of both urban and rural worlds, I began to focus my writing and interests on food and farming. I have written two books; the second, Another Seasons Promise, was released by Penguin Canada in 2001.

  MARIANNE BRANDIS

  As novelist and life-writer, I’ve specialized in researching, recreating and reimagining the past. I’ve written five award-winning historical novels for young people and anyone interested in the past, a fictional biography of a long-dead English duchess and two novels set in twentieth-century Canada; I’m just completing a biography of my mother. My latest published work is Finding Words: A Writer’s Memoir. I live and write full-time in Stratford, Ontario.

  MARY J. BREEN

  I am a freelance writer and editor, and a former literacy teacher and health worker. As a result of a longtime interest in women’s health and in the relationship between literacy and health, I have written two easy-to-read books for women, Taking Care and So Many Changes (with Lindsay Hall). I have two grown children and one grandson. I live in Peterborough, Ontario, with my husband.

  ADRIENNE CLARKSON

  My life was shaped by my family and our having come through the crucible of war and loss together. My father and mother were courageous, indomitable and as different as night and day. When I was five, we lived in a tiny rented apartment, and my father told me that some day we would go to the opera together, sit in a box and I would wear a long dark red velvet ball gown. He was right.

  MARY JANE COPPS

  Born and raised in Timmins, Ontario, I now call Halifax home. I surround myself with many children, great friends, good books, delightful music, fabulous food and startling words. This is one of several stories that expose the raw emotion of childhood trauma. I’ve been well published as a journalist, have had fiction published in The New Quarterly and A Room at the Heart of Things and have written a young adult mystery novel.

  DEBBIE CULBERTSON

  I am an Alberta writer and editor. My articles have appeared in magazines, including Alberta Views, Legacy, NeWest Review, Mandate, Compass, Prairie Books Now and The Beaver. I am now working on a biography of Roberta MacAdams, one of Canada’s first women legislators. I live with my partner, Heather, and daughter, Rachel, in a small rural community near Edmonton.

  BARBARA DEFAGO

  I’ve spent the first half of my life, so far, in Vancouver and now live a few miles away, in Langley. As a therapist, I have been a privileged witness to the stories of others. As a woman, wife, mother, daughter, sister and mother-in-law, I have been blessed. With illness came listening—to myself. I am honoured to be part of this anthology.

  ANN DOWSETT JOHNSTON

  I grew up in small-town northern Ontario, in a village in South Africa, and on the shores of Georgian Bay, surrounded, for the most part, by women and books. As a journalist, I have been blessed with a profession that has allowed me to continue in the same vein: travelling, talking and exploring the written word. In recent years, I have won a number of National Magazine awards for my work at Maclean’s. My greatest adventure, by far, has been the eighteen-year journey I have shared with my son Nicholas. As he heads off into the world to find his voice, I am rediscovering mine: writing on motherhood, modern life and the evolution of the family.

  MAGGIE DWYER

  I was born in Stratford, raised in southern Ontario and spent twenty interesting years in Winnipeg before moving to Vancouver Island with my second husband. I began writing down the stories that I had long been composing in my head during the afternoons of my years at home with my two daughters. I have published a short story collection, Misplaced Love, and am revising a novel.

  LISA GREGOIRE

  I prefer oceans to mountains. I screen my calls. The first song I ever learned all the lyrics to was Raindrops Keep Fallin on My Head by Billy Joe Thomas—I was five. I knew I
was an adult when I started craving vegetables and sleep. I don’t hold grudges or life insurance, and the man I married is still my best friend.

  LINDA HARLOS

  Health crises notwithstanding, I’m generally busy earning a modest, more or less honest living. I’m fortunate to have propelled myself to several of this planet’s breathtaking (literally!) venues. Although I’m an avid reader who sometimes fantasized about going through the looking glass, this subject wasn’t exactly the publishing debut of my dreams. Love and gratitude to all who accompanied, chauffeured, consoled and/or fed me during my recent ordeal.

  SARAH HARVEY

  I was born in Chicago but have spent most of my life within spitting distance of the Pacific Ocean. At fifteen I began what has turned out to be a career as a bookseller (with lapses into go-go dancing and clam digging), and I’ve been writing for the past fourteen years. I have two astonishing children, an assortment of amazing friends, an appreciation of solitude and a desire to learn Latin dancing before I’m too old to safely swivel my hips.