Connaught Laboratories - What disturbs our blood: a sons quest to redeem the past

This book is dedicated to my family,
with love and respect.

what disturbs our blood
Is but its longing for the tomb.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS ,
The Wheel

The man you know, assured and kind,
Wearing fame like an old tweed suit
You would not think he has an incurable
Sickness upon his mind.

Finely that tongue, for the listening people,
Articulates love, enlivens clay;
While under his valued skin there crawls
An outlaw and a cripple.

Unenviable the renown he bears
When alls awry within? But a soul
Divinely sick may be immunized
From the scourge of common cares.

A woman weeps, a friends betrayed,
Civilization plays with fire
His grief or guilt is easily purged
In a rush of words to the head.

The newly dead, and their waxwork faces
With the look of things that could never have lived,
Hell use to prime his cold, strange heart
And prompt the immortal phrases.

Before you condemn this eminent freak
As an outrage upon mankind,
Reflect: something there is in him
That must for ever seek
To share the condition it glorifies,
To shed the skin that keeps it apart,
To bury its grace in a human bed
And it walks on knives, on knives.

CECIL DAY LEWIS , Almost Human

8.

15.

22.

28.

We have rated the powers of children too low and that there is no knowing what they cannot be given credit for.

SIGMUND FREUD

O n a bleak November day in 1953, my mother, a thwarted artist turned reluctant housewife, snapped the cold shutter of her camera and captured the image of my three-year-old self, wrapped in a hand-me-down corduroy coat with velvet collar. My charismatic, witty mother was a shape-shifter; I was an emotional weatherman, my head tilted like a radar dish, hyperattuned to her moods. Some believe all writers write for their mothers.

Decades passed before I began to plumb the meaning of the worried yet curious expression of the boy in the photograph, haunted by what he knows and is coming to know. Why did the nightmares of my childhoodslow suffocations, falling trees, flashing knivesroutinely rumble through my unconscious like clues to an unsolved murder? What was I trying to figure out? What could I possibly make of the electrical storms that raged in my head? Even as a toddler, was I sensing that the gothic three-storey house where I slept was built by my long dead grandfather, a driven, eminent doctor of whom no one spoke? Was I already interpreting the silences that buffered a family history I was made to feel I must never question?

My father, too, was a fiercely dedicated doctor, and as I grew up, he acted as if his three children lived in another city. The only time he hugged me was after he suffered a breakdown in his fifties, at the peak of his professional success. Naturally I did not know how to respond to the sudden gesture. He made two suicide attempts and was fated to spend the last twenty years of his life alone in front of the television, neutralized by psychiatric drugs, quietly consumed by his regret for the past and his dread of the future.

My inability to feel like anything other than a spectator in my own life finally pushed me at the age of thirty-three into the hands of a psychotherapist. He knew that if I didnt pierce the mystery of my silently disintegrating father, I was doomed to re-enact the buried generational drama that was already undercutting my natural passions with an invisible hand.

And so I plunged into the hall of mirrors that is this book: men pushed by troubled and withholding fathers and differently troubled and withholding mothers into extraordinary accomplishments in the world that in the end they can no longer sustain. My recurring dreams, like cave paintings, guided me to the Pandoras box of repressed secrets, for of course there were more than one. I learned that the only way out of the haunted house of my childhood was to return to it, to struggle year by year to inhabit the alien skins of my father and grandfather.

In city archives, I was amazed to discover that my fathers father was a remarkable man of science, an innovator and visionary who transformed the Canadian system of public health between the world wars, a heroic figure who eradicated the disease of diphtheria and made insulin available to the masses, a dynamo who travelled the world for the Rockefeller Foundation, bringing Canadas paragon of preventive medicine to the international community. His singular achievements saved countless lives and earned universal praiseuntil that summer day of horror and shame I was never meant to know about; the day that explained why the memory of such a man could be erased; the day that finally explained his son, my father, to me.

Comfort comes from validation: From the very beginning, the dark dreams and intuitions of the quizzical three-year-old boy in hand-me-down clothes, framed by his mothers distancing eye, embodied an uncanny form of knowing and, ultimately, healing. Truth will out, and there is no knowing what a child cannot be given credit for.

Those who know ghosts tell us that they long to be released from their ghost life and led to rest as ancestors. As ancestors, they live forth in the present generation, while as ghosts they are compelled to haunt the present generation with their shadow life.

H ANS L OEWALD ,
On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis

M y story opens in the haunted house of my birth. Three storeys tall, nearly a century old, the place stands silent in my memory, as lean and austere as the midnight hands of a grandfather clock. Erected by my paternal grandparents at the outbreak of the Great War, the timbered beams, grey stuccoed walls, dormered windows, and chimneyed roof cast the sombre shadows of a past that holds me still. Night after night, my adult dreams still pull me down, back through its darkening staircases and corridors, nudging open the door of the nursery where I slept as a child.

Like my father before me, I was conceived in the second floor master bedroom. In my case, it was on a bleak January night in 1950, in the perfect middle of the century, in the perfect middle of the city of Toronto, the economic engine of English Canada. I arrived nine months later, a celiac baby afflicted with poor digestion; whatever I was asked to swallow, I spat out. Like all infants, I was an open vessel, exquisitely attuned with innocent intuition. From the start, I knew in my bones that 186 Balmoral Avenue was inhospitable to children.

In her bed at the Toronto Western Hospital, my mother, Janet, exhausted by the ceaseless agitations of my twenty-one-month-old sister, Shelagh, sank into a postpartum depression, overwhelmed by the prospect of suckling a second bundle of raw infantile need. On the second day of my life, I was surrendered to Mothercraft, a child-care agency whose name emitted ominous overtones of sorcery. While my mother recovered, I spent the next two weeks of my existence in a grand, buff-brick mansion at 49 Clarendon Avenue, a two-minute stroll from the house on Balmoral, where I was rocked in the starchy arms of a succession of nurses. Occupying an impressive two-acre, stone-gated estate, Burnside was once owned by a granddaughter of Timothy Eaton, the bewhiskered Northern Irish patriarch of the department store empire, who virtually gave away her property to Mothercraft some years after she lost her sole offspring on the