The Sad Truth About Happiness Read online

  I have always thought of myself as a lucky person, raised in good fortune, with little need of the consolations of hope. I was lucky to have loving and steady parents. I have always had close friends. I made my way through university with good grades and had even had it suggested by several of my instructors that I might profitably stay on to do graduate work. (One professor was impressed by my paper on the perpetration of myths of masculinity in Mordecai Richler’s novels, and talked me into submitting it to a critical journal where it was printed in a thicket of others of its ilk—self-conscious, clever bordering on arch, wider in ambition than in scope.) I had my new job, a wonderful apartment, a genial roommate, books, interests, all the ingredients of happiness. Maybe, it occurred to me to ask myself, I was happy but didn’t know enough of sorrow to be certain.

  Threshold

  I do of course know something of sorrow. Luba’s younger sister, Rachel, was my best friend from the day we first met on the sidewalk halfway between her family’s apartment above a string of stores on Dunbar and my childhood house on West 16th Avenue. That was a year before we started school together—same class, same day. Rachel died at age fifteen from leukemia when she and I were in grade 10 and Luba, who is older by a year and a half, was in grade 11. During the last few months that Rachel was alive, Luba and I spent increasing amounts of time together, first at the cancer clinic and then at the hospice where Rachel was cared for at the end. We went to school less and less often until, by the middle of May, we weren’t going at all. Luba’s parents were past caring about her schoolwork, and my parents were committed to letting their daughters make their own important decisions, so no one interfered with our constant attendance on Rachel.

  The principal of our high school, Ms. Sydney McArthur, telephoned my parents and Luba’s at home toward the end of June, a few days after Rachel died. She passed on her condolences and instructed them to ensure that Luba and I came to her office together the next day at noon. We went unwillingly, full of fury at each other, shocked at the loss of beautiful Rachel, and resentful at being recalled like children to a school that we both felt we had outgrown. We sat brimming with our grievances in the hard wooden chairs in front of Ms. McArthur’s desk.

  Ms. McArthur was a woman of normal height, but she managed always to impart an impression of great stature and authority. Her spine was permanently riveted upright, and the set of her head called to mind the antique concepts of carriage, deportment and bearing. She was able to transmit highly detailed, unmistakable messages by elevating a single arched eyebrow or increasing the depth of indentation of the two lines that ran between her mouth and nose. She fixed her dark eyes on us as we slumped in our chairs, and sat still, silently regarding us for a full minute. I began to feel uncertain, conscious that I was not as in command of the feelings surging inside me as I had thought. I shifted in my chair and straightened my shoulders. Luba, whose arms were folded to her chest, held fast to her set expression and position.

  When Ms. McArthur finally spoke, she told us that she had conferred with one of the physicians at the hospice, a close friend of hers, and that they had worked together to prepare a project for the two of us to complete in lieu of our final exams, which we had, unfortunately, missed along with several weeks of classes. If we passed it, and if we fulfilled certain other conditions, she would be willing to consider exercising the discretion invested in her by the school board to allow us to move up into the next grade. The project, she told us, would test what ability we had to pay attention, and would measure the extent to which we were able to absorb and learn from the world, and put what we had learned to practical use. Part one of the task that had been set for us, a kind of exam, was to be taken then and there, in her office. She would be back in two hours, and we were free to confer on our answers. Ms. McArthur handed us a single sheet of typed questions that it appeared we were meant to share, then turned and left the room.

  Luba and I, who had privately resigned ourselves to summer school, turned with reluctance and some curiosity to the task we had been set. The questions were peculiar but designed to be relevant to our recent experience. We were asked, given certain stated assumptions, to calculate drug dosages and blood counts. We were to detail the respective roles of doctors and nurses, and to name and describe the tasks of other medical workers. We were to list and describe in detail the stages of sickness and death that we had observed, to illustrate at least four different approaches to pain relief, and to suggest no fewer than ten ways of coping with grief. Finally, on a large sheet of blank paper, we were to sketch our original design for a hospice, with each room and its function and equipment neatly labeled.

  We were too surprised and cowed by Ms. McArthur’s peremptory tone to protest. We worked together wretchedly, grudgingly, each of us willing the two hours to be over so that we could escape. After Ms. McArthur had collected our responses, however, she told us that she had conferred with our parents and had secured their consent to the rest of the assignment that she had devised for us. Luba and I were to work together to organize a memorial ceremony at the school for Rachel, write Rachel’s obituary for the school yearbook, and work as volunteers for the summer at the children’s hospital. That is how Luba and I ended up running an art and crafts program for children who came to the hospital, either as patients or as visitors, both that summer and the next. This gave us more time than we needed to work things out between us.

  In the last weeks of Rachel’s life, we had become jealous of Rachel’s waning attention and energy and, increasingly, sneakily competitive in our efforts to entertain and distract her. We tried to hide our conflicts and disagreements from Rachel, but I am certain now that we can’t have fooled her for an instant. How awful it must have been for her to see her only sister and her best friend squabbling over her, like pilgrims over sacred relics, fighting to be most of use, most essential, most dedicated, most appreciated, most loved. Despite our efforts to ease her pain, I wonder whether in the end we only made it worse.

  Rachel hated all the ugliness of dying. The loss of her long, dark, curling hair and her thick eyebrows. The yellowish tinge that her skin took on starting around her eyes and spreading all the way to her long toes. For a while, steroids puffed her face out into a parody, a Cabbage Patch doll of a face. When she gave those up, her bones rose relentlessly to the surface of her skin as if they couldn’t wait for her to die. She had been a beautiful girl. After April 28, her fifteenth birthday, she refused to comb her thinning hair or even look in the mirror anymore. She stopped insisting on her favorite T-shirts and sweaters and succumbed to the blue hospice gowns. She refused to totter around the corridors with us, or let us curl up on the bed with her to watch St. Elsewhere, her favorite television program. She wouldn’t have the television on at all. She didn’t laugh or smile or talk to us. She glared furiously at the nurses and doctors and her visitors. Only her mother could soften her, sitting by her bedside stroking cream into the scaling skin of her feet and hands and legs.

  The day that Rachel died, she had a panic attack. Luba, who was with her when she began to shake and gasp for breath, ran to the nursing station and demanded that they increase her dosage of morphine. The nurses were, however, slow to agree to give her more of the drug until enough time had passed for the most recent dose to take effect. I arrived while all this was going on, ran into Rachel’s room, and saw right away that Rachel was frightened—and who could blame her?

  I grabbed Luba’s arm to get her attention. “She doesn’t need any more drugs,” I told her. “It’s not the pain. She’s terrified. Can’t you see? She’s frightened of what’s going to happen.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Luba hissed at me, shaking away my hand. “You have no idea what she’s feeling. I’m her sister, not you. The pain is killing her. She can’t stand it any more. She needs something to help her rest.”

  We started to argue. In a moment we were shouting at each other, and we continued to shout while the hospice staff gathered. They simply stood
there without intervening. They had undoubtedly seen it before: friends and family trying to control the illness by controlling the details. Luba and I wound up spending that afternoon loathing each other still, but sitting on either side of Rachel, each of us holding one of her hands, trying to talk over her head about normal, everyday things—school, friends, hair, television programs, music. Although Luba kept up her part of the conversation, huge tears, thick and slow as raw honey gathered on her lower lashes until they were heavy enough to fall, then dropped onto Rachel’s blanket, where they ran together and created an ugly dark patch on the light blue fabric. I was obdurately proud of my resolution not to cry in front of Rachel. I told myself that it would be selfish to let Rachel see me grieve, that it would lead her to imagine that I was not still hoping for her to recover. I bit my tongue and the insides of my cheeks hard—more than once I tasted blood—but I didn’t allow myself even a single tear.

  In the evening, about an hour after her parents had arrived at the hospital from the dry-cleaning business they ran together, the nurses adjusted Rachel’s intravenous line and she fell into a drugged and anxious sleep that she never woke up from. That’s what I remember of Rachel, although I wish I didn’t—the bitter argument over her wasting, passive body. She was so thin by then, stick bones thinly covered by dry, peeling skin, with deep bruises, red and yellow, all over her long arms and legs. When I drew near her from my chair beside the wall, I could detect a change in her breath. For weeks, her breath had smelled like mildew and damp earth. Now, it smelled sharp, medicinal, bitter, like frozen poisonous berries.

  I sat with Rachel’s family and listened to her struggle her way through an increasingly irregular sequence of shuddering breaths. They sounded as if they contained long, complicated messages, like Morse code. She dragged gasps of air into her lungs by force, by will, and held on to them for longer and longer stretches, until, finally, close to midnight, she stopped trying. We kept the lights on in her room, and sat quietly, the four of us, for a long time after her rough, raw breathing fell into a silence that went on and on and on. I didn’t experience what I had been told I might feel, a sense of release, of relief. Instead, I went cold with fear for Rachel, who was going into darkness forever. A chill rattled through me. My jaw clenched, my muscles tightened, and I shook and ached all over, in my joints, in my skin, in my nails and hair and core. The loss of Rachel seemed bottomless and pitiless and utterly without meaning, without any possibility of redemption or significance.

  A very young, dark-skinned doctor came into the room. He wore a white scrub coat and glossy black loafers, and he held a clipboard and chart loosely, like a prop, in his hand. He looked Arab or Iranian. He glided to the bed in his soft polished shoes, imperturbable, unhurried. He pressed his long, fine fingers against the chalky skin of Rachel’s neck and then placed the palms of his hands together and stood beside her with his head bowed, not praying, but respectful, allowing the silence to gather and thicken. I wanted to rise and lean into him. His shoulder looked in that moment like the one place in the world where I most longed to rest my head. But I remained sitting straight in my chair beside the wall, balancing my heavy, buzzing skull on my stiff neck, a spectator to the frozen, timeless tableau of doctor, family, and surrendered child.

  In addition to this, my greatest loss, I have had my heart seriously shattered twice. Once, at age twenty-one, by my boyfriend for three of my university years, Chris Andrew Tolnoy, who I met in a first-year biology lab. Chris wrote me a letter during the summer holidays between our third and fourth years to tell me that he had fallen in love with an Austrian girl named Kirsten, whom he had met while traveling in Greece.

  Chris grew up in Montreal speaking Hungarian at home, French in the streets, and English at school. He was studying modern languages in university: Russian, Italian, Spanish, Greek and Hebrew. He had already learned French and Latin in high school. Chris achieved everything he set out to do. He bicycled across the Rockies to a job in Calgary and back again the summer after high school. A year later, his leg was badly broken when another competitor in a mountain bike race crashed into him, and he used the weeks that he was laid up to teach himself to play a fourth-hand violin by listening to tapes of Cape Breton fiddlers. Whenever my car, an ’82 Toyota that had cost me $700, broke down, which it did frequently, he would find the parts at a junk dealer and make the repairs himself. He left me with the illusion that men are capable of doing everything.

  A few years ago, when I was twenty-eight, Geoffrey Morrison, whom I had agreed to marry (despite what I came to see afterward were serious doubts), asked for his mother’s ring back two months after our engagement, saying that he wanted to take it to a jeweler to have it cleaned. The next day, without any word to me about the matter, he moved to Ottawa where he had accepted a job as executive assistant to a Conservative member of Parliament, and he refused to take my calls or reply to the letters and e-mails I sent. After a month of sobbing on my bed, I bought two dozen long-stemmed red roses, left them on newspaper out in the sun on the balcony until the petals were tea-brown and the leaves bitter black, then wrapped them up carefully in white tissue paper and had them delivered to him at work. I longed to do worse, to telephone the press or his party with some truths I knew about Geoffrey. That he had admitted to me that he had smoked dope all through high school, and, by grade 12, was dealing it too. That he once confused two similar names and thus voted by mistake for the Communist Party candidate for city mayor. That his fear of acquiring a pot belly caused him to turn sideways, inhale deeply, and conduct a full-body inspection whenever he passed a full-length mirror. But, so far, my only other act of vengeance has been to take delight in the fact that his M.P. has been a dud, a solid underachiever.

  I think now that I decided to marry Geoffrey, who I never trusted enough really to love, because he was tall, blond, imperious, and self-assured. He looked like a spy or a concert pianist, especially when he wore a black turtleneck, which he did often. I understood that he had enough force of personality to keep a marriage together through sickness and health and the rest of it, even if my commitment or feelings were to vacillate. He had fine, golden hair all over his body, and the thick thighs and forearms of a rower. When we made love, he liked me to resist him. He would seize my wrists and hold my hands above my head and push against and into me until my entire body felt abraded and possessed. His kisses were weak and superficial, though, almost sisterly. I sometimes think now that this should have tipped me off to the flaws in his character.

  Since Geoffrey, I had gone out with different men and had been in two tentative relationships, each lasting a few months, but nothing had taken root, and this nothingness was beginning to make me feel like an emotional shadow person, incapable perhaps of forming new serious attachments, my heart as purposeless and absurd as a red balloon slowly releasing its helium the day after a party. One evening in the middle of September, my sister Janet noticed that I had tears in my eyes after I had been tumbling on the carpet with her four-year-old twins, Thomas and Claudia.

  “What’s the matter, Maggie? They can’t have hurt you, can they?” She gazed at me with the kind of concern that she had only begun to demonstrate since she had started taking her little pills.

  “No. No. It’s nothing.” My next words spilled out before I could stop them. “It’s just that no one ever touches me any more.”

  When I left Janet’s house a short while later, she pressed a small plastic bag into my hands, the kind that zips up with a sliding plastic fastener. “Just in case,” she said conspiratorially. I opened the bag a few days later when I rediscovered it at the bottom of my purse. Inside, wrapped in a tissue, were three octagonal, unnaturally bright yellow pills with the letter P stamped on them. Janet had given me a gift from her small precious store of Pacicalm, which I knew her cautious physician doled out to her as if they were as addictive as heroin, which in a way they were, of course.

  You might think that there would be a lot of physical contact in
my work. But the bulky equipment and the solemn implications of being tested for a fatal illness diffuse what might otherwise be a very intimate encounter. Many women scarcely register me as another human instead of a medical device or perhaps a cyborg in a white lab coat. And I am very respectful of my patients’ dignity and privacy. I am careful to drape the areas I am not directly examining with sheets and gowns, and I wear latex gloves when I arrange the breasts on the plates. I maintain eye contact with those who appear to want it, although many don’t seem to. I strive for a point of perfect balance between being caring and attentive on the one hand and keeping the procedures professional and impersonal on the other. A few of the women are up-to-date on the latest research and ask intelligent questions, most of which I am required by our rules to leave to the referring physician to answer. Some patients want to talk about nothing in particular—the weather, traffic, recent pieces of news. At least once every day, sometimes more often, a woman breaks into tears. After a few days or weeks of waiting for her appointment, she is convinced that she knows already what might be revealed.