’Tis the season of the heart
So it’s Valentine’s Day weekend. The pressure in this world is intense to find someone to love romantically. I know I felt it for decades until I met Jack. It wasn’t worth compromising to love someone who for me, wasn’t worth loving. Even though I had only nine years with him, I feel lucky - the love was real and reciprocated. Many don’t get that - and yes, I believe it’s really a factor of luck. There is no time of year when this point gets hammered home more than mid-February when we are all drowned in the saccharine of this made-up holiday.
Friday night, when some plotted how to get flowers delivered on Monday, others frantically booked tables in fancy restaurants, and still others tried to find something to distract themselves from it all, 300 households zoomed in to hear 12 storytellers share their tales of heartbreak. Thanks, Anne Bokma, for reminding us of the other side of love.
The event, a fundraiser, had some headliners - people whose name recognition would get bums on couches. One was Canadian writer, Lawrence Hill, known for his 11 books, including “The Book of Negroes,” and “The Illegal.” The love Hill felt for his mother was palpable as he described her as a “kick-ass civil rights activist,” and then talked about how she lost the will to live after the deaths of his father and his sister. She sought to die but was ineligible for MAID because while ill, it was not in a life threatening way. Larry organized her death in Switzerland and accompanied her there. He recounted how the experience left him “mired in [his] own grief,” and derailed his writing. He ended on a positive note though, sharing the delight he’s found on a new track, writing a children’s book. Heartbreak can do that too - shift our trajectory.
Christa Couture is a singer/songwriter, filmmaker, and broadcaster. But I know her because of her book, “How to Lose Everything,” which tells of a series of difficult events in her life: childhood cancer resulting in amputation, the death of two infants, the end of her marriage, and the return of her cancer. We all reached for tissue imagining the heartbreak as Couture read a passage from her book describing the agony of singing waltzes to her infant son - including “The Rainbow Connection” - to match the rhythm of his heartbeat as she waited for someone else’s child to die to free up the donor heart he needed.
This doesn’t sound like the evening for a humorist, but Terry Fallis, best known for his lightly comic novels like “One Brother Shy” and “The Best Laid Plans,” got in on the heartbreak business on Friday as he ruminated on how different the grief is resulting from sudden death vs death after a long illness. In the former, “grief whooshes in like a hurricane;” the latter is a slower burn. Fallis recounted how many readers have told him how helpful they’ve found it the way his fictional protagonist, Angus McClintock, works through his grief. McClintock, a recent widower in “The Best Laid Plans” uses letters to his dead wife as a way to make important decisions in his life. And who hasn’t imagined counsel from people who’ve provided good advice in the past but who are not around to do so now.
While the headliners were great and sold tickets, it’s regular people who are the heart of Bokma’s Six Minute Memoirs. Linda McLachlan kicked the evening off with her story of aborting a fetus at 48, an age when she thought “that ship had sailed yet now here was this stowaway.” I sat in my living room spellbound by her story, one I had not heard before and frankly hadn’t contemplated. I was gripped by her honesty about the excruciating yet clear decision she made and felt her broken heart through the zoom screen.
Kieren Williams told of being born filius nullius, a child of no-one. She was put into the home of “suitable parents” whom she found to be quite unsuitable including a mother who beat her physically and with “cruelty dipped words that she aimed straight to [Williams’] heart.” The happiness felt when Williams reunited with her birth parents and younger siblings was shortlived. She was rejected anew for her sexuality. Such a raw tale of heartbreak upon heartbreak, but clearly written from scars not wounds, one of Bokma’s mantras.
I sat silently and with my own heart in my mouth while midwife, Emme Corbeil, recounted birthing her midterm fetus, after hearing the “deafening silence of an absent heartbeat.” While she sought and attained comfort from others with similar experiences, she measured her pain against theirs, feeling that those whose stillbirths were later term should somehow trump her pain. Many of us engage in this pointless exercise of comparative grief: Fallis’ comparison of sudden death vs long illness; my own rumination on whether having a spouse die after 9 years is worse or better than one who dies after 59 years.
Mary Frances Moore and Jen Reid gave more traditional heartbreak tales of breakups. Moore, in a clever play form taken from her script “Bitter Girl” and Reid, telling the classic my-best-friend-ended-up-with-my-boyfriend story made famous by Shania Twain.
Sandy Lubert took us to a dark place unfathomable to many but unfortunately not for all. She talked about how many of us contemplate “what will I do today?” But how for her, the question has often been “how will I do today?” when “hope has been hijacked completely.” Her heartbreaking story of attempting suicide concluded with a sense that the hijackers had freed hope and she feels “closer to fine.”
This event was a fundraiser for two charities: Mission Services, a Hamilton non-profit, multi-social service agency providing access to food and safe housing, and the First Unitarian Church of Hamilton. The church hosted the event and Jamie Boyce, its minister, rounded out the evening with the story of losing an “exquisitely impractical” patent leather shoe as a child. She observed we live in a world “that values soles more that souls.” It was a fitting end to an event that ripped a few bandages off the emotional scars of those watching but also warmed hearts as we witnessed people emerge from the pain of heartbreak.
If you’d like to see my Six Minute Memoir in which I give my account of the last day of Jack’s life, you can find the link here. And let me just say - I’ll miss getting roses on Monday.
