Martha Brooks - Letters To Brian: A Year Of Living And Remembrance

A YEAR OF LIVING AND REMEMBRANCE

by Martha Brooks

Turnstone Press
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206-100 Arthur Street
Winnipeg, MB
R3B 1H3 Canada
www.TurnstonePress.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any meansgraphic, electronic or mechanicalwithout the prior written permission of the publisher. Any request to photocopy any part of this book shall be directed in writing to Access Copyright, Toronto.

Turnstone Press gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba Arts Council, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, and the Province of Manitoba through the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Book Publisher Marketing Assistance Program.

Photo pages ii and 207 by Maureen Brooks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Brooks, Martha, 1944-, author

Letters to Brian : a year of living and remembrance / Martha Brooks.

ISBN 978-0-88801-521-1 (pbk.)

1. Brooks, Martha, 1944- --Marriage. 2. Brooks, Brian, 1943-2012-

Death and burial. 3. Authors, Canadian (English)--20th century--Biography.

4. Grief. 5. Loss (Psychology). I. Title.

PS8553.R663Z47 2015 C818.5403 C2014-907888-9

somehow sweetly alive
these ghosts that i inhale
the moon and i survive
while the dearly dead prevail

The Wind Song
Patricia Barber

... contentedly inseparable

My husband, Brian, about a year before his devastating diagnosis of brain cancer, read aloud to me an excerpt, published in The Atlantic, from A Widows Story , a memoir by the American author Joyce Carol Oates. She and her husband Raymond Smith seemed to have been an extraordinarily close couple and, as Brian observed, They sound like us. We were at the family cottage on Pelican Lake at the time contentedly inseparable our own long marriage began in 1967. Unaware of what was to come, we had nothing more spectacular on our mutual bucket list than many more summers there, joined at the hip.

Brians diagnosis came on Remembrance Day, 2011, and through the last year of his life, he and I, together with our daughter, Kirsten, who had just turned thirty-nine, treated his disease not as a death sentence, which it surely was, but as an opportunity to tighten our bond and appreciate whatever time would be given. By the spring of 2012, Brian was well enough to welcome the miracle of another season at the family cottageour Eden placeand thats where he and I spent the next six months.

I kept a journal of the time from when he was first diagnosed, and all through that summer and into the falla scattering of entries recording an ever more excruciating awareness of the fragility of his situation. After his death on November 27, 2012, at 9:27 A.M., I found myself turning more and more to its pages for solace and shelter. After all, I was and am a writer, fully equipped to wrap my heart and mind around griefand to use those words as a way into the hard but necessary work of grieving.

That was all well and good for a while, but a month after his death, I picked up my pen and surprised myself by writing, My darling Brian. The words that followed flowed into a letter to him. And while, in my sorrow, I realized that my handsome husband would never again appear in the doorway, all six-foot-six of him, I also realized that he could be a kind of long-distance lover. Here he was, the man of my heart and best friend, with whom I could share thoughts as we had always done. I just never expected to hear back! Yet, and here is the surprising thing, what should have been a one-way communication quickly led to the synchronous and the miraculous in a kind of call-and-response between us that allowed me, ultimately, to cleave to the mortal while still carrying his love around like a lucky charm.

Letters to Brian , the book, concludes at the first anniversary of his death. However, I continue to heal by staying connected to him. I summer in the valley we both loved. And as I write this, mid-August 2014, I still, almost every day, pick up a pen to tell him how much I love him and give him news from home. Not to do so would be to close myself off from the longest and most profound relationship of my life.

Several decades ago, when we were a young and carefree married couple, we were robbed. Painters had come into our apartment and one of them, a profusely perspiring glassy-eyed guy our age, helped himself to Brians wallet. We didnt realize it had gone missing until later that evening when city police arrived at our door. The thief had tried to buy gas with Brians credit card, making the fatal mistake of forging his signature: Brain Brooks.

Its been two months less a day since Brians diagnosis: inoperable glioblastoma. As I write this he is up at the dining room table grumbling about our finances. Over the time when he moved from bouts of crying and wild optimism to a full-blown steroid-induced psychosis that landed him, over Christmas, on the psych ward, we cut up his credit cards. Today we purchased another pair of eyeglasses at Costconothing like the round ones hed wanted over a month ago to make him look like Steve Jobs, and they would have been flattering had we found them, hang the cost. His most recent pair got tossed, inadvertently, into the trash at the hospital sometime over the past three weeks. Everyone there turned the place upside down trying to find themto no avail.

Today, he is upset, and I dont blame him, to have to spend more money on new glasses. Were spending money like drunken sailors! he said.

So were back to a saner place that includes frugality. But now he doesnt understand why he cant drive the car. When we explain that he has a brain tumour with its accompanying brain injury, he still doesnt get that thats why he shouldnt be behind the wheel. I have stopped driving. Grief and its accompanying trauma are bad seatmates. Someday Ill drive again, but for now Im a danger to myself and everyone else on the road.

And I have not wanted to writewriting being as natural to a writer as breathing. Through many dark days where two months feels like two years, breathing is all I can do, one breath at a time through an endless series of shocks to the spirit, body and psyche.

In spite of the fact that the tumour is in his speech centre (his difficulty with word finding was the first thing that gave his condition away), he speaks fairly well now and even (very slowly) reads. He was abruptly taken off everything when his mind collapsed, but the radiation in combination with the chemo drugs and the steroids, according to his oncologist, seem to have kicked the crap out of the tumour, and hes stable. For this miracle I am grateful. We have entered a period of grace, a flow to be regarded with gingerly respect. I am a bright woman. I know there is no road map for this stuff. As a writer I deal with ambiguities. Our life has been torn asunder and glued back together. It looks suspiciously like our old life, but Id be a fool to think that it is.