JOURNAL, Thursday, April 4th

Gotta let go of the things
That keep you tethered
(“Mighty Trucks of Midnight” Bruce Cockburn)


I’m drawn to reread the last letter that I wrote to Jean over and over, as if I’m still looking for some detail that I’ve missed or I’m trying to fill in the pieces that Sophie might have been able to offer me; but I have no new insights, and I see nothing more than I did before.

If I put on my teacher’s persona, and listen with teacher’s ears to what’s revealed in the letter about how Claire lived inside Starla, how they listened to the poems, how they were bound and healed, I’d say that there was something particularly bizarre and significant in the student’s perception of self, yet as I said, I had nothing to compare it to.


For the first few years I fully lived this fantasy of Claire’s existence as part of me, and her liberation from the bondage which was her body. Yet if I was so convinced that she lived on in me, and that we were intimately bound in this way, I wonder why I had such a need to list the people that I blamed for her suffering and death.

I can trace my journey to maturity by tracking those I’ve accused.

First there was Jacob and his pack of Satan’s spawn. (I have met at least one “Jacob” every year since I’ve begun working with disturbed children: a child seemingly evil, who is consumed with resentment and strikes out in anger at anything weaker than himself. I find it ironic that the one person that I’ve met in my life who instilled real fear in me was only eight years old and furthermore, like some tragic myth, I’m condemned to be his helpmate, year after year, in each of his new incarnations.)

Next I blamed Ariel. As I made my way through puberty and into the arena of awareness about sexuality and relationships, I resented Ariel and her influence on mom. I saw her as the force that “turned my mother into a lesbian” - more specifically turned her into someone who preferred to live among those strange, dark women than to be with me. I wanted to believe that without Ariel, mom would have been back home baking muffins. It was Ariel’s sharp, angular edges that I most resented: the rock hard jaw line and cheek bones, the ramrod posture, her clipped way of moving and speaking represented to me a person calculating enough to plan and execute Claire’s removal from Sophie’s home, to bring her to the Family where her destruction was only a matter of time.

When I was sixteen and going through the rebellious stage of adolescence, I blamed Bill. Whenever events of importance were happening in my life, Bill was often away saving the world by lawyering or affidavit seeking or doing whatever else it is that Bill does. I blamed him for not recognizing and dealing with mom’s depression from the very beginning; if he could save the world, how come he couldn’t save us?

But I’ve come to realize that Bill, and mom, like so many others of their circle, relied on avoidance and denial as their strategy for life: “Only that which I acknowledge, exists.” Although I resented Bill’s lack of awareness, which I believed eventually led to Claire’s death, I mostly blamed him because he was convenient and because he was my dad, and you’re supposed to be angry with your parents at sixteen.

As I went on to university and began studying psychology and sociology, I even blamed society. I resented all of their social safety nets, so full of holes that they could allow a child to be taken from a loving, stable home in Scarborough and land her on a farm in the wilds of British Columbia with a houseful of lunatics who were unable to distinguish nurturing from neglect.

But when it came right down to it, any blame I lay at someone else’s feet was simply building a wall of illusion to distract me from the knowledge that I blamed myself. So with Claire coexisting inside me, I could give her the chance to live her life while I lived the caregiver’s role that has become so much a part of who I am when I’m at my best, when I’m with kids like Claire.

Should I be embarrassed or angry that I’ve spent all these years living a life that’s been motivated by a combination of atonement and guilt? Would I have been driven in the same way to do the work with kids that has been so rewarding for me and, I hope, has helped a few of them along the way? I don’t resent how I’ve lived my life and I don’t know, given the opportunity, that I’d want to have changed its direction.

When I left Saltspring with Carly, it wasn’t lost on me that what I was leaving behind was the very best and the worst that life had offered me so far. Reliving that time, difficult as it has been, has helped me to realize that all that was good and bad in that experience is part of who I am.

I would never have met Dorrie and John Ross if I hadn’t gone to Saltspring; and who would I be without them? The relationship that we have built over the years, as they would take me to tea when they were visiting their daughter in North Vancouver, and later as we sat for hours in the wonderful garden that Dorrie nurtured so beautifully at the nursing home in Kitsilano where John Ross went to live after his stroke, taught me so much about fidelity and love. It’s probably thanks to them that I’ve been able to build any kind of a relationship with Danny over these past eight years.

My relationship with them was as extreme in its positive gifts as my time with the Family was negative; I’m sure that much of my perception of both experiences is coloured by their proximity to each other. Was the farm really as tainted with evil as I remember it? Was the cottage such a perfect haven of beauty and peace? Neither image could last in the real world where time has a way of softening the roughest crags and tarnishing the most beautiful gardens.

“Suffering insists on being taken seriously.” This is one of Jean’s favourite lines to explain some of the weird things that happen to people when they’re in pain. Since I’ve been working with Jean, I’ve learned to let the suffering flow over me and not to be frightened by it. It’s still painful as it makes its way over broken skin, stinging and burning, but I’ve come to recognize its healing properties, which help to make it much less destructive than if it was flowing through me.

There is wisdom in knowing when to deal with pain. Much as I have wished that we had talked about what happened then, I probably would have resented the intrusion if I’d been forced, at that time, to acknowledge the cold, cruel reality that Claire and I had lived.

Perhaps life has given me a gift of such timing that I didn’t recognize until now. It allowed me to build a life that was firmly founded on my desperate need to be of service to the kids that I see suffering, yet it has recognized another need at this point in my life, the need to build relationship and a loving life with Danny. Life has given me a chance to examine, evaluate and discard some of the useless bits and pieces that I’ve been carrying around, leaving us – Danny and I – room to grow together.

Finally, writing about Claire has been like composing her eulogy, a tribute to her presence here on earth, and all that she meant to me. She never had a funeral. Her passing was never marked by ritual or a special place where we can go to visit her. No wonder she needed to live inside me; she had nowhere else to go.

I can still hear her giggle now and then.

“Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must all have perseverance and above all, confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.”
-Marie Curie

Copyright 2003