Stephanie Young
Writer
The Nourishment
23rd December 2024
It’s Christmas in Canada. There is snow. It’s very cold.
Six of us drive an hour from the Ottawa suburbs in the sun as it sets at 4:22 to see the year 1866 recreated in a collection of houses, barns and mills. There is a blacksmith. A park commemorates a battle against the Americans in 1813 that we won, but we weren’t us at that point. We were British.
Upper Canada Village is a ‘living museum’ that becomes a Christmas attraction in December. There is hot cider and a Santa hut. I am a Canadian who lives in Britain where people own houses built in 1866 and 11th century churches sit casually at the edge of every other southern English town. The whole country is a living museum.
But.
Not with lights.
We’ve come to see the lights.
***
When we stepped out into the town square, the universe dark beyond the trees and steeple of the Picturesque church, the world around us luminous, every house and fence and branch wrapped or lined in glowing bulbs, Merryn said to me,
‘I was sitting in the front seat of the car and I was not happy. You guys were all talking and I was thinking and I wasn’t happy, I was even getting scared.’
I raised my hand to put it around her shoulder and rub the bones of her arm. There’s almost no flesh so it’s like stroking a pole, or a stick under fabric. It’s hard not to gasp. I patted her humerus.
‘Oh yeah,’ I said. ‘Those are scary thoughts.’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘And what if Mom and Dad die and I never get a job, what will happen to me?’
She is a young friend who's had an eating disorder for 12 years. Every mouthful is full-on warfare. And three years ago, when she was 20, we thought she’d lost. She could not get out of bed; she was too weak to lift the duvet. Open sores on her legs, murky yellow eyes. Cheekbones so sharp you were waiting for them to pierce the skin.
But that winter she made a decision to live.
She was well enough this autumn, two and a-half years later, to hold down a full-time internship, Monday to Friday, nine to five. Sometimes she would take the bus. They liked her, wanted to hire her.
So I could have argued, ‘You could get a job. You can do anything. You chose to live.’
But that’s not how it works.
‘Anyone who had those thoughts would feel horrible,’ I said. ‘Of course you feel scared.’
‘And I look at Nicky and I could feel jealous, that she’s so stable.’
Her sister has a partner of almost ten years, they own a condo. She loves teaching.
‘But then someone told me once, “Hey, we can’t all be doctors. We NEED the people who can be doctors to be doctors.” I don’t want Nicky to be as lost as I am. Not if I want her to help me. And Nicky said I can always live with her, I'll always have a place with her.'
I didn’t say, ‘Yeah, but you help you.’
Instead, I said, ‘And everything goes up and down. People go up and down.’
Thinking about the fact that her sister has spent most of the year receiving chemo, her life in numbers translating to 1300 glasses of water, 189 pills, 115 blood tests and 60 stomach injections.
Down.
She’s free of it, now. Officially, they told her, one hundred percent.
Up.
Because other people’s worse troubles never help me deal with mine. As Merryn says. How could you help if you’re as unhappy as I am? It doesn’t matter, when you believe what you believe.
Later in the shop, the six of us deciding it’s time to go home, flush with the 19th-century world that was glowing in 21st-century pink and blue and white and red, snow brightening the darkness on this, the second-longest night of the year, a young man will scream at the top of his lungs, ‘Help, help. Get help!! Call an ambulance, he’s DYING, he’s DYING,’ as a small crowd forms around an even younger man, grey, inert, lying face to the floor.
It sounds like it does on television. The screaming man even behaves as they do on television. He paces, terrorised, he grabs his hair. ‘Help, help!!’
The door to the gift shop keeps opening and closing as happy visitors stream on in. ‘Oh, it’s nice and warm in here.’ Not seeing the small group, kneeling to their left, a medic arriving in high-vis vest as a staff member strides shouting through the room, 'Has anyone got an EpiPen, has anyone got an EpiPen?’
This will all happen but not for another hour. Not until after we carol with 20 other people, after we see two ponies pull an antique sleigh, after peering into a stable with reins and halters and hay, eight stalls emblazoned with the names of the animals who live there.
Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen.
It says it’s only -14C but we know it’s colder. (We find out later we were right. It was -23C in the wind.)
‘It all changes, every moment,’ I say to Merryn as we pass the chapel, outlined in white as though a child had drawn it, not with pencil but in light-emitting diodes. ‘Isn’t this moment different now?’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ she agrees. She really thinks this is true. Her mood shifts quickly. lightens. She pauses, turns, strolls off. The conversation is over.
And I realise I'm sorry. I want to keep going. I want to hear myself reminding her of what works. I want to remember, too.
The dead in my family also want it for me.
What is your desire? they ask. Look that way. That helps.
The closest of the dead, my father, mother and brother, are built into the fabric of this season for me. Every December was a moment in our itinerant lives (we moved every 36 months) when, as a rapacious, dramatic child, I got all the singing, all the reading, all the fireside meals, all together, that I wanted.
I’m not trying to recapture something. I know this. I’m creating. Tree after lit-up tree, fence after light-lined fence. Bing Crosby dreams of a white Christmas as we pass Santa in his hut and we are living that dream. We hear sleigh bells on the horses and more snow comes tomorrow.
This isn’t my past I’m having. This is my life.
Merryn and her mother are out of the gift shop when death seems to land on the family who are crouching on the tiles near the hat-and-mitt sets and the festive mugs, bending over their brother, son who is fading from them, so they miss the adrenaline that surges through the air and bloodstream of everyone in ear shot.
They were taking a photo of Merryn near the lights.
By the time they return, the emergency is over. The young guy is sitting up, leaning against a pillar. Breathing again. The bodies of his friends and family spread with relief, like seawater filling a hole in the sand. An ambulance is coming.
He’s going to be fine.
Up.
Back at home we eat Vietnamese takeaway together. Except Merryn. She stays in the kitchen, stirring what she ordered, unhappy, undecided. Giving in to the belief that to eat is to be unloved.
Down.
After we’ve all finished, however, she comes to the table with a bowl of soup. She stays and she talks.
She eats some of the food.
Up.
But I realise as I watch and feel better, look, she’s eating, oh thank god, keep eating Merryn, keep eating you brave girl, that my dead family don’t care. She eats, she doesn't eat, they don't care. They don't mind. They know how things turn out.
If all is well, then all roads are worth it.
And the roads are mine. They do not journey. They are in one perfect place that is out of time that intersects with where I am here.
I am partly here.
They are always up.
Which, perhaps, if I am going to help myself and, as a happy byproduct, someone else someday, is the only way to look.
Merryn near the lights.
My Mother Has Made Me a Valentine
14 February, 2023
My mother was just escorted to 'Craft Afternoon' by Juliet, the exceptionally kind woman we've hired to spend time with her five hours a day, 9:00 am to 2:00 pm, Monday to Friday. It's support we did not know she'd need, given the nursing, bathing and portering to meals, jazz mornings and coffee afternoons she receives in the residence.
She has gone downhill fast. She's been in assisted living only six weeks and is sleeping more and more, but only during the day; she is often found wandering the hall at 2:00 am. Once discovered in the room of another resident, sitting by his bed as he slept, saying he 'needed company'. Which is friendly but would freak the hell out of Paul if he woke up. So we've hired someone overnight, installed a 'Mom Cam' to confirm if she has really fallen or just forgotten how to get out of bed.
'Did you fall, Mom? Did you hurt yourself?' I asked one morning two weeks ago, my sister having driven us both swiftly to the residence, receiving a call that our mother might need to go to ER. She had been found sitting on the edge of her mattress, shouting, 'Help me, I fell, I fell.'
She was up and dressed and clean with brushed hair by this point. Looking perky. It suddenly occurring to me that if she had fallen, there's no way in the universe of physical possibilities she could have got herself back onto the bed. 'Are you okay? Did you really fall?'
She thought about it.
'Maybe I just got stuck,' she clarified.
If my sister isn't with her, I am.
But as I watch Juliet walk, slowly and respectfully beside my mother, leaving the pretty, riverside room with fairy lights and a balcony that is now my mother's home - and which might be her last - my heart clenches. Because I know something Juliet doesn't.
My mother hates crafts.
She is going to take one look at the glue and scissors, blanch, and walker-herself out of the room.
And although she has been nicknamed 'The Smiley Lady' at the residence and one of the delights of her company is her unfiltered joy - at music, babies, trees - 'That one's my friend,' she told me, last week, grinning and pointing out the window to the bare branches of a huge maple - she can be just as unfiltered about what she does not want.
'I'll call my lawyer!' she shouted to a personal support worker, trying to get her into bed last month. 'Go to hell,' she told me, with some energy when last year, her powers fading, unwilling to admit she could no longer live in her two-bedroom condo alone, I suggested we get her live-in help.
And my mother doesn't like crafts.
This was Juliet's first day.
I hoped there would be a second.
An hour later my mother comes back to her suite, smiling. With two valentines. One for me, one for my sister. She'd had a good time. She didn't take it, or herself, seriously, winking at us, saying, as we looked at the doilies, 'I made all those holes myself.' Comedy pause. 'Took forever.'
And the writing isn't bad because she's forgotten how to write. It's because she can't see and her hands can't hold a pen.
And I realise now that my heart wasn't clenching because I was afraid of my mother's violence. I was afraid of my own.
My mother, making crafts. Like a four-year-old. Like a backward child. Producing some unbearably poignant artifact, reversing our roles. I made her a thousand cards throughout my childhood, my adult life, and she ooohed and aaahed, every time, making me feel I was the most transcendentally wonderful human ever to give a mother a thing.
But she was laughing. She liked Juliet. Three hours later they would hold hands and my mother would say, 'Do I see you again??'
I can look at this as just a nice valentine. Given to me on the day for love by someone who has loved me, as she says, 'from the moment we met'.
But it's hard.
Especially when I think of her making all those holes.
