When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress (13 page)

Betty found a way out of her relationship with her husband by falling in love with his department head at the college and relocating with him to British Columbia. It was mostly here that Barbara Ellen grew up, although there were moves back and forth between Eastern and Western Canada, and between the United States and Canada.

Betty’s fourth marriage also failed, but over the years she found a truer sense of herself as a person, as a woman and as an activist.

Barbara Ellen was a sensitive child with health problems. At the age of four, she began to have vomiting spells that nobody seemed able to diagnose. These bouts recurred intermittently over the years, and Betty feels now they were related to stresses in her daughter’s life. As a young adult, Barbara became addicted to narcotic painkillers and tranquilizers that she would inject into her body. Right up to the time of her diagnosis with breast cancer, she was fighting her addiction to drugs. With no experience of stability, she was unable to establish an intimate, ongoing relationship with a man: she went from one relationship to another. Julian was born when Barbara Ellen was twenty-five, but when she married shortly afterwards, it was not to her child’s father. “That marriage didn’t last long,” says Betty. “Martin was not able to cope with being married and having a little stepson.”

Barbara was highly intelligent, sensitive and creative. A dancer, at one point she operated a ballet school for children. She was taking care of Julian and doing some teaching of dance classes in Vancouver when she discovered her cancer.

“She told me she had had this mammogram, and they just wanted to do a mastectomy. She wasn’t willing to accept that. Barbara had a keen intellect. She researched all the material on the kind of cancer she had and investigated the treatment outcomes among her age group in the U.S. and Canada. She didn’t like the way it looked. ‘I am not going
to go through all that,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to be sick, I don’t want to be mutilated, I don’t want all this chemo stuff. I’m going to treat it holistically and do the best I can with it.’ She asked that John and I support her decision and try not to interfere.”

“How was that for you?”

“It was horrible. Immediately, I wanted to do something. I tried to pressure her to look at some other options, and then she was just very, very angry and adamant and yelled at me—she’d never yelled at me before. She was angry with me the whole last, I would say, six months of her life. Before, she wouldn’t stay mad; when she was angry with me, she would just say, ‘Okay, Mom, you want to think that, you think that,’ and she’d slam her door or something, but that would be it.”

“That’s not exactly an expression of anger—mostly of defeat and frustration.”

“She was always hurt by me for some reason, and I don’t know why. I think I was a terrible parent for this child. My personality was hurtful to her.”

“You’re full of tears here. Are you still feeling guilt about it?”

“Maybe not so much guilt as a feeling that why couldn’t they have given her to someone else who could have dealt with her. She was an extraordinary child in her sensitivity to the world, her understanding of the world, in her gentleness with the world.”

“Gentleness … what was she like as a child?”

“She was very precocious. Wherever I took her, people were impressed with her demeanour and level of—I don’t want to say that she acted adult—but at her level of comprehension of the adult world.”

“How about emotionally?”

“Emotionally? She was a very loving and affectionate child. She was quite gentle and was always very loved by everyone, was always the teacher’s pet. Other kids didn’t seem to resent it, though.”

“Do you have any sense at all that anybody ever tried to abuse her?”

“There was one incident. We had been to Louisiana visiting my mother and sister. My sister had these four boys. One boy was a year older than Barbara and bigger. Barbara would have been about twelve. She didn’t tell me about this. It wasn’t until we got back to California that she told Margaret, her sister. Margaret came and told me that this cousin tried to get on top of Barbara. They were the only two at home.
Barbara was very angry about it. I remember asking Margaret, ‘Why didn’t she come tell me?’ and she said, ‘She thought because Doris is your sister that it would cause a big ruckus between you two.’”

Betty and I then talked about Barbara’s illness and death. At the time Barbara was diagnosed with cancer, Betty was running in a provincial election for the Green Party. She resigned her candidacy to spend time with her ailing daughter. I asked if she had found that difficult.

“It wasn’t that hard. My feeling was that we needed each other. But there was something in my personality that Barbara always found irritating. My voice was too loud for her, my actions too flamboyant. I was too much for her more delicate constitution—that’s the only way I can describe it. I’m too loud and too definite in my opinions and too aggressive in my actions. She had the opposite personality of liking to think about things and being quiet and trying to have a more holistic view of other people’s personalities.”

“It sounds like she thought you were more judgmental than she wanted you to be.”

“She always accused me of being judgmental. I stayed awhile and she told me to go. She would always tell me when she was tired of me and she needed to rest because she found me tiring.”

“This is in the last months?”

“Yes.”

“Why do you think that is? You can’t be tiring. There’s no such thing as a tiring person.”

“My personality would tire her after a while—it was too intense.”

“When does one get tired?”

“When you’ve been working. So you think it was work for her to be with me.”

“She had to work too hard around you.”

“Aha …”

“Now you’re wondering why I’m saying that. You’d be very unusual to be open to hearing this, but your whole life has been a search for truth. I know and understand that. Look, Barbara came along in your life when there was just no stability at all.”

“That’s right.”

“You were going through the end stages of your relationship with John when you got pregnant with her, and you felt totally alone. You
didn’t feel partnered and you began to realize that while this guy was interesting intellectually, emotionally you were quite alone. Your way of leaving the relationship was to get involved with Wally. Then you make this flight to Western Canada with the kids in tow. What ends up happening is that John gets custody of everybody except Barbara Ellen. She had an awfully huge void to fill in your life all of a sudden, right from the beginning of her life.

“The nature of stress is not always the usual stuff that people think of. It’s not the external stress of war or money loss or somebody dying, it is actually the internal stress of having to adjust oneself to somebody else. Cancer and ALS and MS and rheumatoid arthritis and all these other conditions, it seems to me, happen to people who have a poor sense of themselves as independent persons. On the emotional level, that is—they can be highly accomplished in the arts or intellectually—but on an emotional level they have a poorly differentiated sense of self. They live in reaction to others without ever really sensing who they themselves are.

“Barbara’s going from one man to the other shows she hadn’t enough of a sense of self to hold on to. As soon as one relationship is over, she had to get into another in order to feel okay about herself. The addictions enter into this as well.

“She comes along in your life when you are particularly emotionally needy and exhausted. I think her precocious intellectual development is what happens to bright and sensitive kids when the emotional environment isn’t able to hold them enough; they develop this very powerful intellect that holds them instead. Hence their intellectual maturity and their ability to relate to adults. People would tell me as a child how mature I was. I always thought I was, because in that mode you can seem highly mature. But then when I look at myself emotionally, I’ve been very immature. I’m fifty-eight now and still trying to grow up.”

“This is very interesting.”

“What doesn’t develop in one area will overdevelop in another, if the kid has the brains for it. Barbara develops a huge intellect in order to feel comfortable. I believe that’s because you were not able to give her the emotional sustenance that she needed when she was small.”

“I don’t think so either.”

“When the parent can’t put in the work to maintain the relationship, then the child has to. She does so by being a good girl. She does it by being precocious, by being intellectually mature. When she reaches the age of abstract thought, around age thirteen or fourteen, when these connections in the brain actually happen, all of a sudden she becomes your intellectual sounding board. The relationship is based not on her needs but more on yours. With the incident of that boy trying to climb on her, she protects you from her emotional pain by not telling you. She doesn’t let you know about it. She is taking care of you.

“She wants to keep peace in the family. That’s not the child’s role. The child’s role is to go to her mother and say, ‘This bastard tried to climb on top of me! To hell with whether there is peace or not!’ I know that’s what you would’ve wanted her to do. None of this is deliberate. It all goes back to your own experience as a child.

“I’ve had very similar interactions with my eldest son as you describe with Barbara. He said to me at one point, ‘Dad, I don’t know where you end and I begin.’ That’s just how it is. I’ve always said that I’m not worried my kids will be angry with me, I’m worried they won’t be angry enough.

“What you were finally seeing in Barbara’s last six months of life is that she was beginning to set boundaries. She was saying no, and the anger that she had repressed was coming out.”

“Right …”

“This is how I perceive it. The people that I see with cancers and all these conditions have difficulty saying no and expressing anger. They tend to repress their anger or, at the very best, express it sarcastically, but never directly. It all comes from the early need to build the relationship with the parent, to work at the relationship.

“I think for Barbara it was a lot of work to maintain the relationship with you. I recall just very gingerly raising the issue. She indicated to me that there was something going on, but she also didn’t want to talk very much. She was very much pulled into herself—I was a total stranger to her. She wasn’t about to open up to me.”

“It wasn’t easy for her to open up. In the last months she would actually ask for me to come and smoke a joint with her, so then we could be relaxed and talk,” Betty says.

“How was that?”

“It was good because she would talk about herself. She would say, ‘I feel that I don’t know what cancer is, but it’s here and it seems like it’s been visited on me.’ She said, ‘I’ve invited the cancer into my body.’ I remember being horrified and saying, ‘Barbara, I don’t understand that.’ She said, ‘Well, it’s because I experience it as part of my own life and that you’re a part of this too, Mom. You have your own part of my cancer.’

“You know something else, Gabor—she saw somebody the night before she died. She said there was a man who’d come to take her, and she told him she wasn’t ready. The next night, she said to me, ‘That man—I want him to come.’ I said, ‘What man? Do you want me to call the doctor?’ She said, ‘No, the man who came for me and I told him I wasn’t ready.’ She said that she was ready now.

“I had told her a few hours before that if she was tired of being sick, she didn’t have to hold on any longer. I’d said, ‘Okay,’ and it was then she told me this about the man. She told me that she was ready for him now, and she died at eight that morning. Have you ever read any Kubler-Ross stuff? You know where she says about escorts … people who come for us as we die. It was so weird. It really made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.”

“Why is that weird for you?”

“Well, do you mean there really is an angel of death?”

“Does it have to be like that? The mind has an experience, and we translate it into an image. There is a deeper sense of something that’s happening, but the mind can only experience it in terms of thoughts and images.”

Betty had one final question. “Why can’t parents see their children’s pain?”

“I’ve had to ask myself the same thing. It’s because we haven’t seen our own. When I read your book,
Clayoquot
, I saw the evidence in your writing that you hadn’t recognized your own pain yet. It would not be possible for you to clearly see Barbara’s, either.

“If you think of it only in terms of you and Barbara, you’re going to feel more guilt—you may accuse yourself of things that wouldn’t be fair to you. The fact is, you are the product of a certain upbringing and a certain kind of life. Your life has always been about trying to find yourself and about trying to find truth in the world. It’s been a real
struggle. It’s amazing what you’ve done, coming from the background that you described. Still, are you sure you want to hear this?”

“Please, continue.”

“You dedicate
Clayoquot
to Barbara Ellen but also to your ‘wonderful mother.’ Your mother may well have been wonderful, but when you write this, you are not fully aware of how angry you are with your own mother and how hurt you were by her. ‘My mother was warm and loving, but I always knew she favoured my brother and sister. She was so full of love that some of it slopped over to me.’ How does that actually feel to a child—whose perspective is this?”

“I never felt unloved.”

“Of course you didn’t feel unloved, and I’m not saying your mother didn’t love you. But partially you didn’t feel unloved because you shut off your pain around it. You write, ‘After I grew up I once confronted my mother with my secret knowledge, and she was hurt and astonished and insisted that if she paid more attention to the other two, it was because they needed her more than I did, that I was always more emotionally independent.’ That was your particular ruse to make it look like you are emotionally independent, to protect your mother and to avoid your hurt feelings. That was suppressing your own pain.