Peel Memorial
Dearest Marg,
Thought I would write to you so I could talk without being overheard. I hope on Saturday you will try and be here when I wake up if they let you, as you are all I am interested in and my family. Please keep the visitors down a little if you can for a day or so after. My thoughts are all mixed up about many things. I hope and pray I will be able to have my health. Perhaps you may have to delay things with Donald for a while once again. Honey, thanks for your kindness, you really give me a lift.
Love Jack
My mother passed away in November 2018. This past winter, I finally felt strong enough to go through her personal papers. I hesitated because she was a complicated person and our relationship was often strained. Who knows what I might find? I was also coping with some profound personal issues and was happy to set this one aside for the moment. I knew I would turn to it eventually, though, because I suspected there would be issues I needed to confront. I was hoping the truth might set me free.
I found this small, handwritten note in May, tucked into an envelope addressed to Margie. The writing looked oddly familiar even though I knew it wasn’t my mother’s or mine. Gradually, as I deciphered one word after another, I came to realize my father was writing to my mother from the hospital, just a day or two before the surgery that confirmed his cancer of the pancreas. He died a short time later in April 1970. I was eight.
I fought back tears. The magnitude of the timing hit me as though I’d crashed into a brick wall. My father was worried about the looming potential of a terminal diagnosis. And I already knew the outcome. Poor dad.
I’m astonished by all the little miracles that prevented the note from being lost or destroyed. My mother moved at least 10 times that I can remember over the span of nearly 50 years. Did she make a deliberate effort to keep the note every time she packed and unpacked her household contents? In 2016, after I had to take over her affairs, a caregiver went through her things in Ontario and then shipped them off to me in New Brunswick. I moved twice and brought her stuff with me. Somehow, the little note survived, to be discovered by my son and I when I finally got around to her papers. Clearly, the universe saved it for me.
I never really knew my father, but I see so much of myself in his note. He doesn’t want to be overheard, is only interested in his family, and wants visitors kept at bay. I’m a private person too. I know that’s a strange thing to say because I blog about my life, but writing gives me a measure of anonymity and control. I choose what I want to reveal. I say very little when I’m with someone I don’t know well. A one-to-one conversation with a stranger would exhaust me and leave me feeling over-exposed.
When he writes, “My thoughts are all mixed up about many things,” I can also relate. Writing helps me organize my thoughts. Sometimes, I don’t know how I feel about something until I write about it. I’m often surprised to discover I’m very angry or sad. I must make order with words. That’s what I’m doing right now. My father felt the same way.
I know how it must feel to be an adoptee reunited with a birth mother. When you recognize so many of your own character traits in another person, you see your whole life from a different perspective.
I found my father, briefly, and then lost him all over again.