What Was Her Name

It started, her final decline, with a question. Four words. Chilling, irrevocable. What is my name?

She was seventy-five, so perhaps it shouldn’t have shocked you. Except she was at work. She still, at age seventy-five, put in a four-day week. She was signing paycheques when she looked up. What is my name? she asked.

Your mother. She is the she in this piece.

***

She is a late bloomer. In her fifties, with your youngest brother at last in school—yes, she was forty-five when she bore him—she resigns as homemaker and gets a job with Children’s Aid, guarding other people’s kids. Soon she tries for a different job, director of a halfway house for male offenders.

It’s a bold move. She has no background in social work other than the brief stint with Children’s Aid. She abandoned university in her twenties for the adventure of the dude ranch and the logging camp. She has no experience withoffenders, apart from three decades of marriage to an RCMP officer, who carries home the dander and DNA of the lawless. She tells the interview board that she raised six kids with no help, little money, a new town every few years. They turned out pretty good, the kids. That’s what she tells the interviewers. They hire her.

And so begins a great flourishing in her life. Having fled the prison of home, where children corral her and the RCMP officer, now retired, sits silent, she invests her freedom in actual prisoners. Later you spot the irony in that. And in the fact that your father put people in jail while your mother kept them out.

***

What is my name? she asks that day, after twenty-five years at the halfway house. You kids have moved away. The RCMP officer has died. Now she will die. Three months is all it will take. A precipitous decline.

Not her first.

Decades earlier, in her thirties as best you can determine, she descended into some kind of state. What state, no one will say. You are a family that reveres words—you read books, recite poems, hold spelling bees—yet you do not speak of such things. Your parents, in fact, do not speak to each other. At all. Ever. You have no memory of them exchanging words except for your father’s last days in hospital, when their talking rocked you harder than his dying. The rare time one needs something from the other, like money to pay the plumber, one of you kids relays the message and returns with cash or cheque.

For a long time you consider it normal, this silence between them. Maybe, as a family, you prize words so much that you fear letting them go.

All you know of that early time, before you were born, is that she sinks so low she has to go to an institution. Maybe more than one. Who is she during those locked-up years? Does she know? Does she have to ask, What is my name?

All you know is that in time she comes home. Resumes her post at the stove, at the clothesline, in the marital bed. Bears three more children, one of them you.

***

Years later, in a kind of miracle, she has a career. She is a director, in charge. She buys a new car and sports a new look: jeans, a cowboy belt, a bristled brush cut. She swaggers a little when she walks.

The staff call her Marj, short for Marjorie. The offenders call her Ma Peck. You call the offenders the guys, because when you show up at her office looking for a ride, that’s what they seem like to you: guys. Long, greasy hair. Creased cheeks stippled with acne. Faded jeans, packs of smokes, skittering eyes. It is the late seventies. It is Cape Breton. They are older than the boys who rule the school bus and snub you in class, but otherwise the same. Guys.

She calls them the residents, because they deserve respect. They’ve had unspeakable lives. They deserve attention, and time, and words. She gives them all that, gives them every scrap she has. Maybe because she, too, has experienced prison. She makes them feel heard, in some cases for the first time in their lives. A few of them tell you this at her funeral.

They call her Ma, but you are her child. You know things the guys do not.

You know she can make a dollar do the work of five. She can bake a sweet pie from sour rhubarb. She can rewire a radio, reupholster a chair, sew curtains and blouses and bell bottoms. She can swing a scythe, move a piano, build cabinets, force an unwilling child into the snow. She knows how to get a grant and sweet-talk a board. How to shame a girl for being clumsy and soft. She knows how to till and plant a garden, how to make jam, how to go back to university. She knows what size garbage bag will hold your stories and poems, your cartoons and art. She knows how to pretend. How to cover for missed birthdays and school pickups. How to disguise it as teasing when she calls you fat and homely. How to hide her love for women, the ones she says are just friends. How to write in secret: long letters to the women, and poems of aching sadness, which you discover after she is gone.

She is tall, your mother. A former athlete. You call her mom. She calls you daughter; also a saucy brat, a no-necked Russian shot-putter, a lardass. Her most memorable words to you come one day when you are twenty and in her car, red-faced from some argument or another. It was never my job to love you, she says. It was my job to make you independent.

***

Years later come the other words, to her staff: What is my name?

In three months, she is dead from the tumour in her brain. You take turns with your siblings to nurse her so she can die at home. You lead her on walks; she grips your arm. You listen to her paranoia: you are stealing her money, letting neighbours log her forest. You build her ice cream sundaes. You field her calls, read her mail aloud. When words desert her, you play the Emmylou Harris CD that makes her head sway with pleasure. You give her scotch, though it’s not advisable.

At the end, she is caged inside a coma. You sit by her bed and hold the hand you have never held before. You remind her of who she is. Of all she accomplished, including making you independent, because by God you are.

It’s her decline that lets you touch her. It’s safe now: she cannot know what you are doing, cannot mock you for it. You hold her hand and promise her you will do all the things she could not. That you will love people because she struggled to, that you will be your true self because she could not. That you will be gentle with people’s imperfections. That you will find the words for things and not hoard them; you will share them with the ones who need to hear.

You will fail in all these promises. You will break them over and over. But you will try. It was the end of her life, after all; surely that has to mean something. Yet the significance eludes you: edging near then slipping past, an escaped thought your words can’t catch, a line that some days pulls you down and others lets you go.