Recently, I was going through the last few bins from our recent move, deciding what to keep, what to toss, and how to store what I am keeping. One of the bins I went through is a catch-all bin where I packed unsorted stuff that my wife and I knew was important to keep, even though it was mostly stuff we would almost never look at: folders with important papers, documents from my parents’ estates, tax records, educational certificates–stuff like that. It is the kind of stuff you need to keep, but you pretty much never look at it.
Among these things was an old shoebox filled with a treasure-trove of keepsakes from my mother’s childhood. It had been among my parents’ papers that I inherited upon their deaths 14 years ago, and for whatever reason, I have never gone through it until now. There were old family photos, report cards from when she was a child and teen in school through the 1930s and 1940s, and letters she wrote to her father (one from when she was in second grade), and his replies. One that was particularly touching to me was one she wrote when she was in second grade. This has been a touching insight into my Mom’s childhood, a part of her life I knew little about, and I have been spending an evening getting to know my Mom all over again.
She never talked much about her childhood, as there was tragedy, a strained relationship between her and her mother, and tough times growing up through the Depression. My Mom was not a planned pregnancy, and she happened to have been born exactly nine months after her parents got married, in a small conservative town, in 1928; so you can imagine the chin-wagging that went on in that little town behind my grandmother’s back. According to my Mom, that is the reason that her relationship with her mother was often strained. Her father also traveled a lot for work, and she was much older than her two younger siblings, so a lot of adult responsibilities got dumped on her early on.
My grandfather died when my Mom was a teenager, in 1946. He was 47 years old. My Mom would have been 17 going on 18. I have seen his grave in the town of Banff, Alberta, where the family was living at the time. The family moved around somewhat, due to my grandfather’s work as a civil engineer, developing the early road infrastructure in western Canada, particularly through the Rocky Mountains. While his government job insulated the family somewhat from the worst effects of the Great Depression, it was still a tough time. Insights I’ve gained from the letters colour in the background of who my Mom was, her anxieties, and why she was the way she was when I knew her, decades later.
My Mom was born in the small town of Deloraine, Manitoba, and I now have come to know, from report cards I found in this box, that the family also lived in Regina, Saskatchewan for a while, before ending up in Revelstoke, British Columbia, and eventually Banff, where Mom graduated from secondary school. I knew about Revelstoke, as Mom had shown me her childhood home one time several years ago when we were passing through, and she often talked about her time in Banff. The Canadian Prairies and Rockies were her childhood homes.
Moving around a lot, with a father who frequently traveled for work that she missed, Mom had a tough time making friends, and she was quite introverted–a trait I relate strongly to, as I am also very introverted. That is how she was as an adult when I knew her. I remember that she had her close circle of people, especially her younger sister, but she was otherwise aloof, and did not make friends easily. She was never an outwardly warm person. I had a hard time with this as a younger child and teen and we had a sometimes volatile relationship; but, into my adult years, I came to understand her and empathize with her more, and we became much closer, finding a kinship in our shared introversion and jaded outlook on the world. When she died, I felt like I got ripped off; denied a closer relationship that was finally developing. While my Dad and I had always had a close relationship, my Mom’s death, in many ways, hit me much harder.
My grandfather died from untreated diabetes. Before anyone says, “They didn’t have insulin way back then!” yes, they did. Insulin has been around and saving lives since 1921. I found a picture of her with her father when she was a teen. He did not look well, and I think this picture was probably taken not long before his death. The few times my Mom talked at any length about her father and his death, I remember an undercurrent of regret and resentment that he died when she was so young. She made a point one time, to derisively mention how he died, specifically saying it was “untreated diabetes”.
What little I know about my Mom’s home early life, immediately after her father’s death, comes from one of my cousins that I recently reconnected with. Her father, my Mom’s younger brother, shared stories from their childhood a bit more than my Mom did, and being much younger than my Mom, he spent most of his adolescence without his father. I do know that things got rough for the family, and they moved to Victoria, British Columbia from Banff–an arduous and expensive journey at that time. There wasn’t the social safety net then that there is now, my grandmother had to go to work right away, and the options for her were limited. She ultimately ended up becoming a Christian Science nurse (I believe she was a medical nurse at one point before meeting up with Christian Science), working at Wayside House, a Christian Science “nursing” facility in Victoria. My Mom was being heavily parentified, and had been for most of her life, and she left home as soon as she could, so Victoria was not her home for long. She went back to Manitoba to live with an aunt, and she attended university there, where she met my father. She always spoke fondly of her aunt. She did not have a good relationship with her mother, and that carried down through to the relationship my grandmother had with my father, my brother, and me. My earliest memories of my grandmother date to the early 1970s, and she was still working at Wayside House at that time, so she was a fixture there for at least around 30 years.
Image credit: Emerging Gently.
Now, to what brings me to the crux of this post: one item I found in that box, and it is the one item I will not keep. It is a copy of Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures that belonged to my grandfather. Given that my Mom would be 95 years old if she was still alive now, this book is well over 100 years old; probably more like 120 years old. It is well-worn. My grandfather, to his detriment (and that of his family as well), was a deeply earnest adherent of Christian Science. It ultimately killed him, and left my grandmother to raise three children, although my Mom left home only a few years after his death. Her younger siblings however, were left to grow up without their father. My grandmother never remarried until several decades later, when she was in her mid-seventies.
This book, and the Christian Science death cult that it represents, robbed my mother, my aunt and my uncle, of their father. It robbed my grandmother of her husband and support. Insulin could have saved his life, but he chose Christian Science, which does fuck-all to treat diabetes. Christian Science has been tearing through my family for many years. It later condemned my aunt, my Mom’s younger sister, to an excruciating death from cancer at a relatively early age, that was completely left untreated until it was far too late, with pain abatement only coming in the last few months or so of her life when she went into hospice. I was the last one in my family to leave that death cult, after my parents departed by dying.
Like me, my Mom sometimes harboured doubts about Christian Science; even if she didn’t talk about it directly. With her, you had to read between the lines to see how she really felt. Her tone of voice often said more than her words. Little snippets of conversations that I remember, indicate to me that, at least on some level, she may have viewed Christian Science as somewhat “crazy”, at least some of the time. One conversation I remember well was when we were talking about my uncle, her younger brother, and how he left Christian Science as soon as he left home and joined the air force when he was old enough. She said that he thought Christian Science was “crazy and kooky”. The tone of voice that she used when she said this made me wonder if she maybe felt the same way at least a little bit.
Yet, Mom stuck with Christian Science and married my Dad, who she met in Sunday School. Between my parents, my Dad was definitely the more earnest believer. I think Mom went along for the ride a lot of the time. Maybe like me, she hoped it would work, and probably thought it did work once in a while, but deep down she probably knew otherwise. Maybe it was, like me, where she saw the people she loved and respected the most, being the most earnest adherents, and she did not want to be separate from them. I know she went to doctors sometimes, quietly on the side. It is frowned upon in Christian Science culture to go to the doctor, so those who do, do so quietly on the down-low. However in the end, she chose Christian Science, and the excruciatingly painful death that it brought–ironically, in the very same Christian Science “nursing” facility in Victoria that her mother worked in. You can read about that in this post. I will never find it in my heart to forgive Christian Science for what it has done to my family. Christian Science has cut a swath of painful death through my family, and I hate it.
Sometime soon, I will be taking this little book of death for a ride up into the bush to a recreation site with a fire ring. Just me, the book, some fire-starter, and a lighter; oh yes, and I will bring a large container of water to properly douse the fire when it has done its work. I will burn this book and watch the smoke rise to the sky with a mixture of mostly joy, with a bit of sadness. After all, for better or worse, this is a memento of my Mom’s childhood, a touchstone to her father, a man I never knew. Just because something is old, does not mean it deserves any reverence or respect. I hate that book. As far as I am concerned, it is the source of Christian Science on the maternal side of my family and the source of too much pain and suffering. It deserves the fate that it will receive.
Emerging Gently 