by Dagne Forrest
I
I wake to the delicate sound of freezing rain, the most innocuous sound imaginable, like an endless, slow cascade of tiny plastic needles or beads. If I look outside, the trees will be heavy with the accumulating ice, the sky absent behind a shroud of grey. My family will say things like, “It doesn’t look that bad.” I will remind them of how devastating the building ice is for the trees. I know how that invisible accumulation feels, moment by moment.
The grasses down in the field will mimic frozen waves, the pond will lie silent under a thickened layer of snow and ice scribed by some hurrying creature in the night. Birdsong and the regular soundtrack of the wood and the valley will be on pause all day and into evening. Every living thing seemingly gone to ground.
When evening returns, somewhere beyond the gauze of cloud cover, the moon will continue to wax and wane in reflected light. The trees will bend under the temporary mantle of ice that will gradually melt, but I will only grow more hollowed out.
I want to believe this is a process that we’ll recover from, that my son’s sense of well-being will emerge from deep hibernation. It’s been nearly two years. It’s becoming harder to believe.
II
The day our youngest child was born, the doctor on call at the hospital detected a murmur when listening to his heart. We were greeted with kind but unasked for assurances from friends and family, all of whom knew someone who had been born with a small hole in the heart that had simply healed over time. Not so in our son’s case. Instead, we found ourselves handing over our gorgeous infant son to a man we had only met once before, to discuss putting him to sleep for a major heart repair at nine months of age. The precise amount of time we had spent anticipating his arrival replayed in anticipating the unthinkable.
The morning of his surgery returns in spasms, both diffuse and unvarying. The murmur of other parents talking to their children, all waiting for surgeries of various types that day. The softness of the yellow and white striped hospital pyjamas on my son’s sweet, plump frame. How wide his eyes were as he looked around. The molded white hip cast worn by a little girl cuddled by her father. The colourful riot of Smarties on the surgical cap of the man who took our son for that long journey down the hall, away from us.
When I think about fear conceptually, it’s odd how my mind is still tugged back to a toothless memory from my own childhood and not to handing over my nine-month old son to an anaesthesiologist on the morning of his first open heart surgery. A surgery with a ten to fifteen per cent mortality rate.
When I was nine or ten, my class made a trip to the Olympic Stadium just a few years after the 1976 Montreal Olympics. We toured the aquatic centre and I can still feel a small frisson of the fear that I experienced as I looked into a deep blue diving tank, a crazily small, dark square off to the side of the main pool. This wasn’t the standard pool of the Olympic divers who climbed up to a cement platform and elegantly entered the water like human darts. This was a deep square column the colour of night. The tank was intended — I assume — for scuba divers. I did some research recently, and I can find no record of any such tank when I look at the plans for the original aquatic centre built for those Olympics. I cannot find a diving tank like that built for any Olympics. Did the tank even exist? I remember the impossibly dark water with intense clarity.
Having just read the biography of a cave diver, my mind is thrilled and repelled by the idea of exploring dark spaces deep underwater. The book brought this childhood “memory” back in full force for examining. It seems faintly ridiculous that this remembered (imagined?) dive tank, with its four straight walls and entirely knowable volume of space, has been my mental shorthand for fear. Yet for a long time, before I knew the pain of relationships and parenthood, this was my placeholder for something really scary, evoking the fear that grew in me the day I stood close to its edge.
Dark water has always aroused a primeval fear that I have zero control over. But now I can understand the fear and why it exists. My fear of dark water mirrors the overwhelm I can experience considering the vastness of space. Both cast shadows over the insignificant scale of a human body, both can be truly hostile to life. In reality, the truly scary stuff is inside me already. The truly scary stuff is what we must live through.
III
In the heat of summer, on the eve of his second open heart surgery at sixteen, I noticed that the young plum tree outside my son’s window had suddenly died. Some blight had withered most of the tree’s branches, seemingly overnight. At first, I was terrified, but then I saw the tree’s swift demise as a gift. The tree had taken the blow we feared the universe might deal us and spared our young man.
And now that our son has come through safely, though hardly unscathed, I no longer know what the tree symbolizes. As the end of the year groans in our direction, I will the tree to reanimate, to prove to me its capacity to recover. Pointless when we’re dropping like a stone into winter.
Some days I look at my son and the marks of what he’s experienced crush me. Other days I think I’m okay. The longer I do this — mothering, surviving — the more I can show up without preparing or understanding. Though just surviving starts to tell on me, like the weather rinsed bones I find on the trail in the old orchard.
When things become too much, I collar the dog, sprint for the trees, don’t look back. I convince myself that this is a larger unmooring, not just twenty minutes to myself. Sometimes I’m rewarded with concrete skies and scarecrow trees. When the land is so obtusely lacking in colour or texture, it can be hard to get past grey. But then, all it takes is an earnest breeze, a flash of rain, and I’m transfixed by the constellations of water droplets in the naked trees awaiting gravity’s insistence.
IV
Gravity, of course, is at the root of what scares most humans when it comes to heights. Humans like me. Finding myself on a multi-storey escalator that thrusts its way through empty space, I’m likely to drop into a partial crouch to wait out the terror. Sometimes that knee-dropping is in mind only, but it’s no less real and debilitating.
At a recent family dinner, I learned that my grandfather, Ed, avoided heights for fear the urge to jump would overtake him. The edge of a great height far too powerful in its call. How did I never know this about him when I am living with a genetic trait he bequeathed?
Though my fear is less about jumping and more about falling. My fear is about being pushed to the edge and over. Every time I’m faced with a space that has a ridiculously low barrier or handrail, my mind jumps to the violence of a bump or a shove — a heated argument inadvertently transformed by a push, or the building of pressure with nowhere else to go.
My immediate family has learned to live with my fear, a rare visible weakness in a mother who has otherwise led the charge in so much of what we do. For my youngest child, who has been through so much, he welcomes a chance to focus on my frailties instead of his.
Taking a break after our latest medical visit, we head to a shopping centre and find ourselves on exactly the kind of escalator that I loathe. I step on first and my son is at my back, quietly encouraging me, his attention especially sweet as he usually lives to surprise me, jumping out from hidden corners, pretending to be a zombie. Instead of riding the escalator back down after we’re done in the store, he gently steers me to an elevator we can take to the ground floor. I follow. Following is what I do these days.
V
When our son was little, the revolving doors of tests, procedures, and surgeries became somehow routine. His cardiologist would decide it was time to add or dilate a stent in his pulmonary arteries. Some weeks or months later, these procedures would just happen. Surgeries were just dates in our family agenda, somewhere we had to be, nothing to dwell on, what good would that do?
We tried to normalize the medical side of life as much as possible. Visits to the hospital were always upbeat and filled with banter, friendly chats with the nurses and the cardiologist.
And we were blessed with a hiatus from the ages of five to twelve, when we only needed to make annual visits to the cardiologist for checkups. Into those years we packed as much reading, exploring, and creating as we could with both of our children, and we became accustomed to forgetting about medical stuff.
At twelve, our son’s pulmonary arteries needed attention on both sides. It was time to return to the cath lab for the first time in seven years. Twelve is considered the age of consent at a children’s hospital and suddenly it was our son having all of the risks explained to him while we listened and watched. This boy, naturally full of curiosity and philosophical questions, was the one signing forms. The scary ride we’d always taken for him was suddenly laid bare. He would think long and deeply about what he heard.
The night before his procedure, I took him to play laser tag and we ran around in a heightened state, just as if our lives depended on it. We had the most intense fun he could imagine, and cackled gleefully when a visibly pregnant woman was “shot” by one of the other players — who could be so lame and choose such an easy target? That night he kissed his cats goodbye and told them there was a chance he might not see them again.
The next morning his dad and I went through all of the preparatory phases with him as we always did, staying close. And then he was the strongest of all, walking into the cath lab and climbing onto the table. The anaesthesiology team allowed me to accompany him and I stroked his hair while they gave him some gas. He drifted off talking about our dog.
It took him a couple of weeks to find his equilibrium after that procedure, but he put it behind him and re-entered his life. For us, it felt like a bullet he had dodged.
VI
A cheery soul from the day he was born, an irritability and edge started to emerge that we weren’t really prepared for when he started kindergarten. One moment he’d be a delight and the next something would set him off and he would pull my hair with surprising strength. Although he seemed to genuinely enjoy his short afternoons at school, he developed a need to control my approach to him in the schoolyard. If I failed — and it was easy to fail — he fell to pieces.
I spent long hours researching online to find papers and evidence to show to his doctors when the cracks started to show. I couldn’t believe that undergoing general anaesthesia seven or eight times before the age of five would have no effect on brain development, and of course, his desire to have some control in his life was obvious.
When we visit our old neighbourhood and walk the school route, he still talks about the earring he yanked from my ear and threw into the trees one afternoon when he was four or five. It sounds worse than it was. It was a simple hooked earring, like a fish hook without the painful barb. It slipped clean out of my ear with a swipe of his small fist,; hardly felt, but fully registered. Open-mouthed astonishment the only response I could muster, like a fish.
Sometimes I think he would set about digging to find the earring if I didn’t laugh it off and remind him how very long ago that was. I don’t want his one persistent memory of that corner of our old neighbourhood to be something that makes him feel badly. Something that wasn’t and isn’t his fault. Although his anxiety often rules his life and our relationship, he has the most tender heart and our bond is so close from all that we’ve been through together.
VII
We always knew that his second open heart surgery would arrive someday. The need for it created the day of his first such surgery when his pulmonary valve had to be sacrificed. It is possible to grow up, nearly to adulthood, without such a valve, but eventually the lack takes a toll on the heart. Our son’s right ventricle was showing evidence of being overworked and when he was fourteen we learned it was time for a new valve.
Unlike all previous procedures and surgeries, this one involved two failed attempts and a broken promise around participating in a special study for a custom- made valve that stretched out into a period of active waiting over two years.
The failed attempts came at the start of this process and were just a few months apart. If either had succeeded, he would have had a new valve in the cath lab, with the quick recovery that follows. The broken promise, made by a cardiologist at another hospital who didn’t know our son well, resulted in a full year of constant, anxious waiting for him, at the end of which we learned that the study had yet to even receive approval. In spite of sharing the reality of our son’s deep anxiety at the start of the process, and underscoring emphatically that he could not undergo extended uncertainty, we’d been lied to because he looked like a perfect candidate for this doctor’s pet study.
When that impossible news came, our son decided in what seemed just a few moments that he wanted open heart surgery from the surgeon who first operated on him as a baby. His worst fear had suddenly become his safety mechanism. He could ask for surgery and run towards something that terrified him, something that would upend anyone else’s sense of safety and wellbeing.
VIII
Two years into this process we were finally preparing for the long-awaited valve. Open heart surgery was scarier and riskier and much tougher to recover from, but the waiting would be over. Our son would have the valve his heart needed, and he could get on with his life.
The initial recovery was horribly difficult for him, but it played out over mere days. Days when he was stuck in the prison of various face masks because his lungs were severely collapsed following surgery. Once we got through the hell of those first days, his motivation to get moving and out the of ICU took hold and his path to going home was fast and unwavering. His long-hidden social nature emerged and he made friends with every nurse and doctor, cracking jokes and hosting an impromptu party of sorts in our room up on the ward to mark his last day. We went home full of hope, thrilled to have surgery behind him and us.
In the back of my mind though, I knew that two years spent in deep anxious worry might well have created damage that could not be undone. As his physical recovery progressed, our son’s mood spiralled downwards and by the middle of the fall we were looking at anxiety coupled with deep depression.
IX
Winter where we live has a way of putting everything on hold for long spells. This particular winter more than usual. One evening recently, large wet snowflakes fell for hours, overnight and well into morning, plastering every surface with a thick layer like cotton batting. The temperature plummeted and fixed these quilted layers in place.
Many days later, driving to a psychiatry appointment with my son, we noticed road signs and traffic lights still shrouded in white. Telephone poles were sleeved in snow, the signage at the entrance to stores effaced entirely as though the snow came with the intent to blot out all human communication.
A shop we know well wore uncanny ghosting against the bold white lettering above its entrance. The brick corner of its facade was entirely padded over. Something about the soft embrace of the snow against the cold ragged brick made me wish I could stand, unnoticed (and, for that matter, unnoticing) and still under a layer of ice crystals. A willing suspension of being until spring seemed the best possible thing I could imagine.
I had been so focused on addressing my son’s depression, it had been easy to miss how much my own mood had shifted into a numbed state.
X
Somehow, we kept moving all fall and winter, doing all that we could to support him. A mix of medication, therapy, seeing through his part-time course load back at school, lining up visits with friends, trading cat pictures with his adult sister and her partner who live in England, and more, all in an attempt to pull him forwards and equip him (and us) for living as well as possible with anxiety. At many points it felt like we were stuck in deep snow, getting nowhere in slow motion. I would find myself resigned, my thoughts flat like hammered tin.
One evening I was certain it would be a solo trip out for board game night at our local library — something we’d initiated together — my son very much in flight from one of his bad days. Deflated by a recent run of the same, I made my way to the door, trying to hide my chagrin from his older sister who was just in from work. She was in a perceptive state, picked up on my mood, and seemed to know the cause. I brushed off her concern, but she didn’t buy my weak attempt at reassurance.
Wasting no time, she marched into her brother’s room with a perfectly calibrated “Really?” At least, that’s how I imagine she handled the conversation. Still resigned, I’d headed on out the door. And that was all my youngest needed. He swung open the passenger side door as I was preparing to go, asking if he could join me.
Later, as I sat next to him, a game with friends underway, I was reminded of the fact that this wasn’t the first time my children had resolved what felt like an impossible knot to me without my participation and it didn’t need to be the last. In recent years, together they had come up with solutions for my youngest to use, particularly when I’d had enough, slid into extreme frustration, and threw up my hands. Times like those made them allies and I knew that was good even when everything else felt heavy.
XI
It warmed up very quickly following the latest ice storm. My walks in the woods and across the fields punctuated by chunks of ice noisily slipping from the trees. On the first day I turned to look several times, instinctively expecting to see an animal in the trees until my brain fully registered the reason for the frequent rustling and crashing.
Two days later as I headed down the hill, another large piece of ice came loose from a birch tree and I couldn’t help but internalize that sudden letting go, the ice shifting from a glassy, almost protective coating following every notch and curve of the tree’s trunk and branches to a loose carapace to be shed without hesitation.
It’s been hard to decide if it’s needing to let go or the feeling of having been in freefall for so long that’s been so hard for me. But as the air begins to warm, the sense of things dropping away is a little less scary, a little more natural.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dagne Forrest lives and works in a small town just west of Canada’s capital. She shares her life with several other humans, an athletic labrador retriever who suffers from separation anxiety, three cats, and a small flock of chickens. Her work has appeared in K’in Literary Journal, PrimeNumber Magazine, and Not Very Quiet.