Deacon - Naked imperfection: a memoir

naked

imperfection

also by gillian deacon

Theres Lead in Your Lipstick

Green for Life

for grant, the rock.

and for deb, the angel.

Cancer connects us to one another because having cancer is an embodiment of the existential paradox that we all experience: we feel that we are immortal, yet we know that we will die.

Alice Stewart Trillin, Of Dragons and Garden

Peas, New England Journal of Medicine, 1981

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack in everything

Thats how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen, Anthem

my mother begins most days with a list

P ENNED IN HER TIDY, looping hand, often on the back of a used envelope or a section of pulpy grey cardboard cut from a cereal box bound for the recycling bin, her list lays out the stepping stones of a master plan for the day ahead: appointments, tasks, calls to place, errands to run. Or for the meal ahead: multiple courses, laid out in mouth-watering detail, along with sidebar lists of ingredients to purchase and schedules for timely assembly.

A plan, it seemed to my watchful young eye, shows us the way forward, lights the path. A plan helps us be prepared and efficient. Without a plan, we are lostor worse, drifting.

Though it was never committed to paper in list form, I had a master plan. It went something like this: Get a job that made a difference. Marry a man who made a difference. Have some kids who would grow up to make a difference. And save the planet in the process. And I almost pulled it off. There have been many jobs; in each one I chipped away like a warbler at suet, pecking at the monumental need for health and environmental education, connecting readers and television audiences to their own relationship with the natural world. There has been just one husband, whose bottomless commitment to social reform and environmental activism is matched only by his generous heart and dazzling creativity. There are three children, who melt my heart anew each day with their sturdy courage, sunny attitudes, and fiery passion for what they know is right. And then there was the cancer diagnosis. The point at which the compulsion to redress every planetary wrong fell away. The incident that yanked me out of the reverie of a tidier future and thrust me into the unambitious and naked imperfection of right now.

dented cup

A WOMAN I DONT RECOGNIZE approaches me at the party. She wears her blond hair braided into coils on the top of her head like a Swiss milkmaid. She looks like her name should be Heidi. Hi, Gill? I wanted to say hello. My names Heidi. She explains that she was an assistant editor at the womens magazine where I had written a monthly Green-Your-Life column before I got cancer, featuring chirpy friendly tips for the woman who wants to have it all and save the earth while shes at it. We had emailed a few exchanges over editing points, but never met. I just had to come over and see how you were doing, after being sick. How are you feeling? I was so stunned to hear what had happened to you. Heidi is thin and pretty, her skin is like springtime. Her hands look too delicate to haul milk pails up the Alps. She touches my forearm with her long, gentle fingers. Its just that you were so perfect. I always thought that I wasnt doing enough compared to you, for the planet and for my health. I mean it just didnt make sense to me that you could get sick. It still doesnt! She shakes her head a little, lifts her hand from my arm and pitches it upwards, a gesture of befuddlement.

A roar of laughter erupts from across the room; beside me, a woman in a red and white sweater bites into a flaky canap, balances her drink awkwardly as she wipes the corners of her mouth with a paper napkin. The other party guests are, naturally, oblivious to our conversation. Instinctively I wanted someone to hear this exchange, to witness this transaction, the bestowing, from one woman to another, of the much-coveted laurel of perfection. But no one else heard.

There it was, the label Id worked so long and hard to deserve. Perfect. Everything under control. But instead of feeling like a reward for all the health- and earth-minded sacrifices Id made, the very notion of impeccability seemed ridiculous. Hearing it that day, over the din of cocktail chatter, the word sounded tinny and hollow, a dented pewter cup posing as gilded chalice. Her words told me two things: first, that my performance as an accomplished environmental journalist who had all the answers for how to save the world and myself along with it had fooled Heidi as well as me; second, that whatever delusions she held about my impenetrability had passed. I smiled, enjoying the camaraderie of the uncertain.

born first

T HE LIVING ROOM in my childhood home was properthe kind of space a child entered cautiously, never when carrying food or art supplies. Behind the floral chintz chesterfield (my mother said couch was a word to describe basement furniture), a large picture window looked out onto the front yard, bordered by a willow tree on the right and a large jack pine on the left, just beside the driveway. I mostly remember the view out that window being about a dozen different shades of green. Kimbark Boulevard had no sidewalks; like all roads in the North Toronto neighbourhood where I grew up, it simply petered out into light gravel that eventually ran into the grass of each front yard. Painted white rocks bordered the house on the opposite corner from ours, a decorative trim stitched along its periphery. Dotted every four feet or so along the lawns edge, the rocks were an excellent skipping opportunity on my walk home from schooluntil the day I tripped on one and landed newlyminted-adult-front-teeth-first on the next. That might have been the sole occasion on which anyone in my family cursed the lack of neighbourhood sidewalks. Otherwise, the absence of a three-foot strip of concrete abutting every lot made that small section of the city seem more like an enchanted village, a tree-studded nook in the middle of an urban grid. Huge trees dominated the landscape; lots were divided by hedgerows, not by fences. Every lawn wore a majestic arrangement of leaves and branches like a brooch: droopy willow boughs floated above garden rockery, thick spruce and statuesque firs guarded every front door on the block. Trees emblazoned property fronts as predictably as a driveway or a front stoop. I was four and a half years old the day I stood in the centre of that living room, leaned against the tree-trunk leg of a strict babysitter, and watched my parents car emerge from the woodsy surroundings and pull into the driveway. My mother had been gone for a couple of daysI think thats why I paid such attention to her return. I can still conjure the distinct sense of unease I felt as I looked through the window. The interior of our house was warm, quiet, safe; outside it was cold, mid-November. I watched my father pull his coat closed against the chill as he stepped out of the car and stood beside the jack pine, pipe clenched between his teeth on the left side. (It was 1970; fathers smoked on their way home from the maternity ward.) Instead of coming straight up the stone walkway to the house, he crossed in front of the car to help my mother. Together, they lifted a small bundle from the back seat. I can still see it in slow motion. Football-sized cloth package, held gingerly and gazed at. What was that I read in their eyesreverence? Awe? Joy? The profound delight that had once been reserved for me. The mutation of love into this divided state, rapid and invisible as cell division, fascinated me as I stared through the double-pane windows. I wasnt afraid, or even upset. But I was profoundly aware of the Change that had just pulled into the drivewayaware that life as I knew it was over. This was bigand irreversible. I was pretty sure I wanted whatever was coming, but the significance and permanence of this novelty item hit me like a medicine ball. My mother wore her wavy, raven hair just above shoulder length at the beginning of the 1970s, held back from her face with a stylish hairband, usually the same colour as her outfit. She liked to match. As I watched her belly swell under her A-line bold print dresses, I must have been regaled with that age-old positive spin campaign about the excitement that was to come, about the joys of having a little sibling to play with. Eventually I would indeed hold him and coo over him like a good big sister, and twenty-odd years later he would be the dude of honour at my wedding, my favourite person on earth. But in my final moments as an only child, alone in that tidy living room, I felt an overwhelming shift in my world view. In that moment, I grew older, more responsible, less carefree. When the front door opened, letting in a whisper of Novembers chill, I became a first-born. First-borns are beneficiary to the full force of lifes longing for itself, as Kahlil Gibran called the yearning that brings a young couple into parenthood: the desire to repeat our best qualities and reinvent our weaknesses, to bestow new hope unto the world. We are the only ones in the birth order pattern to enjoy our parents undivided devotion, for whatever length of time before the first sibling arrives. I had nearly five years worth. My every move was documented, appraised, measured. A small off-white envelope holds the trimmings from my first haircut. Spiral-bound albums store a record of my first word, first friend, every birthday party guest list, prize ribbons no matter how small the raceeven my first bus pass.