You Are Not Forgotten
I’ve been a closet poet for decades.
Writing poetry feels to me like a dangerous, delicious pleasure, an indulgent but necessary form of creative expression, a dirty little secret, and one I would’ve happily kept to myself, were it not for the big cardboard box sitting under my desk, haunting me. That box contains the only evidence of the thirty years my aunt spent living in a notorious residential hospital.
In the 1960s Canadian writer, journalist and broadcaster, Pierre Berton, opened a national conversation about the mistreatment of disabled adults through his exposure of an institution known as, The Asylum for Idiots, (later, Huronia “home” for the developmentally delayed.) Despite Berton’s CBC documentary coverage, Huronia and its “overflow” sister institutions, Cedar Springs near Blenheim, and the Oxford Regional Centre (ORC) in Woodstock, where my aunt lived, continued to operate until March 31, 2009. In 2013, a multi-million-dollar class action lawsuit was settled against the Ontario government by former residents and their survivors. The government made a public apology. By then, my aunt had died.
I was left with more than grief.
Before she died, my aunt gave written consent for me to receive copies of her official records which include medical, psychosocial and day logs. This paperwork, rare primary sources, chronicles an hour-by-hour life within the institution from the perspective of those in power, and paints a chilling picture. These records sat in the box under my desk for years while I tried to figure out what to responsibly do with them. I could not bring myself to shred them, to erase a life that had already been lived in the shadows, without control over mind or body. Finally, I decided to turn something ugly into something meaningful by writing poems, and in a sense give my aunt, who was rarely permitted to speak for herself, the final word.
Placed as a teenager, Barbara spent many years first at Cedar Springs (originally named the Ontario Hospital School for Retarded Children, and later the Southwestern Regional Centre), and then at the Oxford Regional Centre. These were places I visited. My family remained involved in my aunt’s life to every extent possible—permission from administrators was required for visits, day trips, holidays home. Like thousands of other disabled people in the 1960s, my aunt had been made a Crown Ward, a legal requirement that had her parents relinquish guardianship if they wanted her to access care. A decision my grandmother told me she’d regret until the day she died.
Over the years, with the box tucked away under my desk, I carried on publishing novels all the while writing poems. I saw myself as a lapidarist of sorts, working to form gemstones from the wreckage of my aunt’s institutionalized life.
In the beginning, I thought a great deal about which form would best tell her story and about the ethics of using her records for a project with my name on it. But my aunt had left the documents to me, and I felt a duty to do something with them. I considered writing personal essays (too neat and tidy, too clinical somehow) or a novelized version of events (approximate, metaphorically meaningful but not always literally so.) I toyed with the idea of a hybrid project, combining creative non-fiction and poetry. In the end, the records themselves offered the clearest “voice,” and poetry offered the greatest capacity to show with equal clarity what little agency a patient in such a place had, and how my aunt attempted to express hers.
My aunt was routinely evaluated. She was seen as defective, of poor character, treatment resistant. I have known patients whose greatest flaw was nothing more than having been born to the wrong family, in a society that pathologizes disability and difference, and measures softness as semi-precious. The least valuable. Worthless. Interestingly, the rarest gemstone and mineral on earth, Painite, was first discovered in 1951, the year my aunt was born.
The more poetry I wrote based on the documents in the box, the more it became evident to me that I should not limit the collection to “found” poems. Instead, I needed to give my aunt room to speak, and break her out of the institution, in a literary sense. I sought an opportunity to work with a senior poet whom I respected, by applying to the University of Guelph’s creative writing MFA program. I didn’t need a second graduate degree, (does anyone?) nor could I afford one, but I told myself that should I receive a scholarship, I would attend. An MFA would also be a great way to improve my pedagogy. It was in the programme that Dionne Brand suggested to me if I were going to take on this collection with full honesty, I needed to implicate myself in the work.
What did that mean, exactly?
Implicate myself?
It was strange, three novels and one novella under my belt, to be sitting in seminars with a cohort of aspiring writers, all of them green with ambition, an excess of confidence, and dreams of literary glory. I’d been publishing for years. I knew better than to measure success by anything other than risks taken, hours spent developing a writing practice, and the alchemy that sometimes results from surrendering to the creative process. My dreams as a poet were modest: to feel uncertainty as a writer again, to be enchanted by the form. But the programme also required us to workshop and that meant sharing my poems with classmates. As a creative writing instructor, I was accustomed to being the on leading classes, offering constructive feedback to help students improve. Now, I would be the student whose work would be commented upon. There would be no more hiding that I was a poet. I would have to go public.
It’s critical that established writers deliberately take themselves out of their comfort zones and re-experience what it feels like to be a novice. Discomfort fires the synapses, sparks imagination. Humbles, which is necessary for innovation. So, I entered that MFA program with the help of a scholarship and was able to remain there because of being awarded a SSHRC grant. I was bent on playing, experimenting, “marinating in poetry” to use the expression I heard Kevin Connelly use during one of his classes. Years later, I would receive a mentorship micro grant from The Writers’ Union of Canada to work with another poet I admire, Maureen Hynes.
Coming out as a poet was disconcerting. The critical voices in my head began to whisper, then shout: Who are you to think you can do this? Stick to your lane. You haven’t paid your dues yet! Serious poets don’t appear out of thin air, do they? I felt most like an imposter on the day it occurred to me that I’d approached my collection as a novelist approaches a novel, with a book-length project in mind. Was I doing it all wrong? By stepping out of my private poetry zone, the writing experience felt vulnerable in ways it never had with fiction. What else would I be willing to expose, along with my aunt’s life?
Still, I was committed. If I were going to share my aunt’s hidden world, then it was only fair I also share something of mine. I had to be willing to excavate and turn over the facets of my own shadow life. In the end, This Report Is Strictly Confidential would become more than an act of love and commemoration, inspired by real life events. It would be part exposé, part memoir, as much about my life as my aunt’s.
I began to think about Barbara beyond the walls of her institution, about our relationship, which led quickly to our common heart—her mother, my grandmother, who was the closest person to me after my own mother. A second parent, and a soft place to land. We’d lost her to breast cancer at the age of sixty-nine, when my aunt was still at the ORC in Woodstock, and I was in my late 20s. All colour and brilliance seemed to have disappeared from my days then. The next poems I wrote would explore the space left by that opaque loss.
There are always shadow lives and secrets if we are telling the truth: I dug around in closets—literally and metaphorically, and found family artifacts, paintings my aunt had made in later life, her vintage costume brooch collection that sparkles the full spectrum of white light—and a stack of handwritten letters. These were from my grandmother who had written to my aunt each week, for thirty years. I had in my possession the letters that were sent during the final year of my grandmother’s life, when she knew she would be leaving behind a dependent daughter.
Growing up, my grandmother’s letter writing had always appeared to me to be devotional, each letter a prayer. Be safe, she might’ve thought as her pen moved across the page. You are not forgotten. I can still see her sitting in the den in her reclining chair, with an antique sewing table beside her, and a cup of black tea on a coaster, jotting down quotidian details from her week, then doodling a little drawing on the page before folding it into an envelope to post. Those weekly missives were like an umbilical cord linking mother and daughter, a lifeline for my aunt, and perhaps for my grandmother too, though I know there were times when writing was also a chore. When she was too sick from chemo to hold a pen, my grandmother would dictate and have someone else print her words. Sometimes it was another family member, a volunteer from the VON, or a neighbour.
After graduating the MFA program, I began to write poems about the untold parts of my life: my sense of Jewishness and the father who refuses to me, although we live in the same city. I wrote about resistance and resilience, questioned dominant medical/psychiatric and societal belief about (intellectual) disability. I wrote the hard, hard experience of critical illness, watching someone wrestle with mortality. Then, suddenly in 2017, like my grandmother, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. The final section of my linked collection was born.
The common standard for rating a gemstone’s hardness is the Mohs scale, named for a German mineralogist named Friedrich Mohs. Hardness in gemstones, as with human beings, is not the only determination for durability. A gemstone’s toughness is also considered. What about a poem? What about love?
My aunt and I remained close until she died at age sixty. Her autism had finally been recognized, and she l1ived her last eighteen years with greater independence than she’d known, in a Muki Baum group home in Toronto. When I was a child, we drew in her colouring books and tried on her cherished vintage crown collection, which is now in my possession. We hung out in her room whenever she was home and played Elvis and Bing Crosby records on her turntable. We argued. We sang and danced and laughed. In some ways, my aunt and I related more as siblings than anything else. We once took a road trip to PEI together in my grandfather’s van, shared family holidays, long-weekend visits, extended weeks over the summers. Decade after decade, I was witness to her ever-changing diagnoses with each new trend in psychiatry. As a teenager, I was trained on how to administer her insulin. I fed her sips of orange juice if she slipped into a diabetic coma, which happened all too frequently. As a young adult, I attended decision-making meetings about her care with my grandmother. Later, after my grandmother had died, I attended with my mother. In many ways, being a witness to my aunt’s life is nothing new.
At last, I have done something meaningful with the papers in the cardboard box under my desk. I can set my aunt free now, and I am free to return to the safety of fiction. Except there can be no return. I have been changed by writing this collection of poems. What was inspired by the life of a real person and forged out of my determination to give her the respect she deserved, took me into parts of myself I hadn’t explored, to new creative places. Made me more honest and dragged my poet self out into the open. What about those voices whispering and shouting that I don’t belong?
Poetry belongs to no one, and to everyone. Every serious writer is, at heart, a poet first. I believe that. It’s all about reverence for language, how it sounds to the ear, how it moves across the page and touches the soul, the beauty and the terror and the love that words convey. There are poets on my bookshelves that I now dip into for inspiration with the next collection in mind. I am bruting again, the initial shaping of a rough gemstone.
My hope is that my aunt would approve of this collection, my fellow novelists will forgive me for straddling the aisle, and that the polished poets of Canada will accept me standing in their long line. Whatever the case, I have implicated myself. I have reached for honesty and set an unflinching gaze upon a few dimly lit corners of the human condition, to give voice to the things that can’t be said. What else is there?
I intend to shred my aunt’s papers, work against the notion of writing silos. Barbara’s tenacious personality, and her affinity for wearing brilliant, sparkling tiaras to supper will continue to inspire me as it did when I wrote the character of Mrs. Moffatt into my first novel, Ten Good Seconds of Silence. Like that character, my aunt was the queen of her hospital ward, and of our family. A queen, with a bejewelled crown.
Photo by frank mckenna on Unsplash.