She’d had to arrange her treatment by herself, and now she would see it through on her own: the operation, and then the several further trips south for the radiation treatment that were then customary. I try to imagine what she felt when she arrived at the airport in Vancouver that first time, see her hire a taxi to go to the hotel she’d booked, and I try to imagine what went through her mind as she walked into the hospital with her suitcase, and approached the information desk in the hospital lobby to announce who she was, and what she was there to have done to her.
The follow-up radiation treatments likewise, a process that leaves people poisoned and exhausted for weeks afterward: the same flights on the plane alone, the same terrified entry into the hospital lobby. Each time she must have imagined what should have happened: a car ride across town with her husband holding her hand and her children to care for her while she convalesced.
In the fall of 1962, I took off to Europe with a one-way boat ticket in my pocket and $300 in American Express traveller’s cheques. My urge to get out of town had acted like a giant slingshot, and it sent me 9500 kilometres before I felt the slightest tug in the other direction. I might not have felt any tug at all, but I was in mid-Atlantic when the Cuban Missile Crisis peaked, and it scared the hell out of me. My travelling companions and I spent most of the crisis in the ship’s radio room, watching the captain agonize about whether he ought to turn the ship toward the south Atlantic. I spent several days in that radio room thinking about all the things I was going to miss if the Russians and the Americans blew up the world, and somewhere in the top ten, but not in the top five, was my mother.
When I arrived in London, there was a letter from her worrying that I was okay. I answered the letter, but I wrote just one more letter to her in the next eight months, even though I had to be bailed out of money trouble twice, once by my father and the second time, on the sly, by her. No doubt I missed one of her radiation treatments, and yeah, yeah, kids are always self-centred.
When I returned from Europe, my always-uneasy relationship with my father bloomed into open hostility. Since he’d rescued me when I was in Europe, in his mind that meant that I owed him. He announced that I’d had my fun, and now it was time for me to get serious: come to work for him, get on with my life as a businessman, his assistant CEO, like my older brother.
If I was ever tempted by that, I don’t remember it. But I was tempted by other things—money, cars, the usual things that come with money. When I decided that I needed a car, my mother stepped in.
“No,” she said. “You don’t want a car. If you need one, you can use mine. Owning a car will trap you, and soon you’ll be working for your father, and all those plans you have for your life will go up in smoke. And you don’t have to pay your father back. I will, if it comes to that. You go out and do something with that brain of yours. Be yourself.”
I did exactly what she said, and the battles with my father escalated, occasionally into physical confrontations. As the fights grew more intense, my mother interceded more frequently, and more openly on my side, even when I was just being a jerk. I had no clear idea how I was supposed to “be myself,” but I learned that if I got in my father’s face, I was able to improvise, and the results were dramatic. So when he said yes, I said no. If he said the sky was blue, I countered that it was green, or grey, or black. If I didn’t know who I was, at least I discovered that it was something to not be him, and the more I wasn’t him, the more exhilarating life became.
My mother let me know, never quite directly, that she approved, and I was having too much fun to think about her motives. At one level, I trusted her, so she must have had good reasons. At another, our clandestine alliance served my half-cooked agenda, and I wasn’t so dumb that I didn’t see that it served some needs she had. When she argued with my father, it usually took the heat off me, at least until the next confrontation. Their arguments escalated, as mine did with my father, although theirs never quite got to physical violence. Some of the arguments centred around me, but not all, and maybe not even most. They were at war and I’d chosen my side in it.
There is injury in life, and then there is harm. They’re different, and the distinction is important. The injury my mother suffered from the mastectomy was real and substantial. It was a radical mastectomy, of a kind not much perpetrated anymore, a vicious intrusion into a woman’s body that is both physically traumatic and permanently disfiguring. But it was an injury that successfully healed and because it permitted her to survive another 40 years, she accepted it.
Rita Surry, which is who she had to become in those three years, not the Rita Fawcett she’d grown used to being, or, still more tertiarily, my mother, was a robust woman, and she learned to live with all the physical consequences of what was done to save her life, even finding it a source of entertainment. Reconstructive surgery wasn’t really an option then, and I’m not sure she’d have availed herself of it had it been. Careful as she was about her appearance and grooming, she was not a vain person, and she didn’t for a moment want to accept that she was a victim, or remain one. She showed me the prosthetic breast that provided the appearance of physical symmetry. She referred to it, always with a laugh, as her “fake boob.” For laughs—although not in public—she sometimes would pull it out and throw it at family members. She threw it into my first wife’s lap the first time I brought her home for Christmas, in order, she explained, “to make her feel part of the family.”
But the harm done to her by cancer and its cure was another matter, and I think she sustained more harm than anyone understood, particularly when it came to her relationship with my father. Yes, she survived. So did the marriage, sort of. She survived in no small part because she was as robust emotionally as she was physically, and because in this situation, and through most of her life, she was utterly, coldly competent whenever the shit hit the fan.
“You do what you have to when there’s trouble,” she told me one time when she was in her seventies and I was mired in one of my domestic catastrophes. “You deal with the trouble in front of you, and then you can indulge your feelings. You do it in this order because there are kids depending on you, and because you have to take care of them no matter what you’re feeling. You can deal with your feelings later, when you have time. They’re a luxury, and they don’t help anyone, including you. They’re real enough, but they’re not what moves the mountains.”
She said this without bravado, and over the years I’d seen her practise it often enough that I accepted it—and more important— tried to do the same thing myself, sometimes successfully. My father, for all his ambition and foresight, offered nothing I wanted to emulate. He might have been tough on the street or at his business desk, but he was a man who vanished whenever domestic life got rough. If he responded, it was usually to lose his temper, and when that happened, it was time to get under the nearest table. He was always ready to talk at us, but he wasn’t comfortable with the give-and-take of conversation, not with anyone. If it wasn’t about him or his ideas or his products, he just wasn’t very interested. If it was about you, well, he could offer himself as a model, or give advice or lend you money, generally with so many strings attached to it that it didn’t feel like generosity or help. Then he’d order you to do things his way if you didn’t want him thinking you were an idiot. He couldn’t collaborate with anyone unless there was advantage to him, and even then, it had to be him in control, front and centre.
These are, I now realize, fairly exact enumerations of my mother’s chronic complaints about him, and the primary source of the loneliness that troubled her. The loneliness made her miserable, but she wasn’t destroyed by it. Misery and happiness can and do coexist, and for the years of that crisis, she had a lot to live for: four children, three young grandchildren, a community of people she liked, and a landscape she loved. And so the misery and pain inflicted on her coexisted with the small, intense moments of happiness you could always read in her as near-equal tributaries of her life, like the Nechako and Fraser rivers that met at Prince George. The Nechako in those days was blue and sparkling, the Fraser muddy and fouled with upstream debris from the wild MacGregor River basin, the distant Rockies, and