I - Minimize
My brother is not home. He and his wife have flown to Mexico. I can’t say I blame them considering it is late November and already a snowstorm has hit the city of Winnipeg. He has left me his 4X4 so that I can visit my parents. I love the truck. I feel empowered plowing through snow drifts, skidding down the long lane he lives at the end of, and knowing I will be ok on the highway in the blowing snow.
I’m actually here to visit my 89 year old father who will be having the battery replaced on his pace maker. He asked me over the phone, “Sandra, how does a person die when the heart keeps ticking?” I don’t really know the answer.
I don’t want him to die. I want to him to live long enough to understand that when he dies there will be no hell.
When I die, I will just die. It will be The End, perhaps written in curling cursive like at the end of an old black white vaudeville movie.
My brother and sister-in-law designed, with the help of an architect, the home. They had their sons help out with the project. It is an elaborate timber home and all the artifacts from their years of travel and Mennonite service are tastefully hung or placed around the house. Their bedroom has an on-suite bathroom, one I have not dared to enter until today.
“Make yourself at home Sandra,” my sister-in-law tells me. “You can stay in our bed and use the tub in the bathroom.” I refuse the bed for so many reasons but the bathtub has been calling me for years. The tub has lost some of its luster. The drain doesn’t drain, the fixtures are loose but still its deep and the window along side it overlooks the large yard, which overlooks the Red River.
The water pressure is low. It will take a while to fill up the large bath. On audible, Peter Walker reads from his book Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving through my thin phone speakers. I haven’t been able to listen to much of the book in one sitting. I figure this will be a good place to do so. The tub fills, I step in, realizing it could be a little hotter but when I reach for the hot water tap all I get is tepid. Ugg. “Chapter 5 - What if I was never hit?…It appears to me that just as many children acquire c-ptsd from emotionally traumatizing families as from physically traumatizing ones.” I shiver.
A couple of years ago, my 86 year old mother gave me a simple Sobey’s cloth bag. Inside was a wide green binder with her Hilroy scribblers from the late 60’s and early 70’s —my childhood. She’d held on to them for years and used them to write her memoir. I tried to point out, “Mom relying on your journal is not really reliable. Just because you wrote it down doesn’t mean it actually happened that way.”
She laughed and said, “It’s my story, Sandy.” Fair enough. Over the years I’ve only kept the digital selfies where I look good.
Besides her journals, I pulled out two notebooks of my own and my earliest journal. She had never told me she kept them. I felt immediate shame knowing she might have read them over.
When I came home I pour over my own journals.
My 12 year old handwriting is inconsistent, slanting one way one day, the other way the next. I see my younger self, pulling the journal out from under Cory Ten Boom’s story of smuggling bibles. There are snippets of complaints about my friend group, and the boys we all want to have notice us. In one entry I write, I don’t know why I just really really really want a boy to like me. There are pages and pages written in devotion to Randy and Ken who never know I exist. But then it gets heavier in between the lines about the boys or volleyball. There are desperate supplications,
Jesus please forgive me for being mean to Darlene,
I was going to witness to Lori and Bev (who I deemed unsaved) but I just couldn’t do it. Next time I will. I promise.
“Lord, if you want any of us to come home just go ahead, we are ready.”
I tried every night to be ready. It was exhausting. It was traumatic.
Gradually the chilling waters bring me back to the present. I grab a towel, shut off the phone and hustle out of the cold bathroom and shut off Peter Walker for another day.
