Secret Histories
As it is when someone you loves dies, I have been unconsciously thinking about the many layers we all hide behind our smiles and “I’m fine.” Kelley’s death is still sinking in, and as I learn more about how she came not to be with us anymore, this thing of good people suffering quietly both saddens and angers me.
In 2003, I received a call from my sister telling me that my Auntie Maureen had died. My disbelief was so deep that I had to ask Lisa to repeat my aunt’s name. The sick irony of that night is that I had just come out of seeing the film Final Destination, a tedious crapfest about gruesome ways to die. I spent the next week at home in tearful grief and guilt.
My Auntie Maureen, like Kelley, was almost saintly for her generosity, good spirits, and lack of pretentiousness. On my very first trip to London in 1999, she was one of the very first people I sought out. She lived on an housing estate in Kilburn Park in a relatively small apartment that she kept well stocked with food for her grandchildren and adult children. I had not known her well; she’d moved to England in the 60s, and all I really remembered of her were embodied in the elaborate gifts she’d shipped to Barbados for her sisters and my gran-gran in big barrels: sweet smelling body powders, sheets, clutch purses and pretty dresses. There was also a month-long visit to my father’s house in Brooklyn shortly before my second year at college, but Maureen’s soft-spokeness was usurped by the brashness of her sister, Marlene, who though funny, was also unnecessarily cutting.
The first time I sat in Auntie Maureen’s London flat, I was instantly enveloped in love. I was her family and that was that. She made me one of the best cups of teas I’ve ever had in my life: milky, rich and sweet. And she allowed me to ask her a thousand questions about her past. The answers that she did not want to give, she would shake her head and say, “you know, that is really not that important.” Her rebuffs never stung because she delivered them without venom. I spent that first December night in Kilburn Park not wanting to go back to my sublet in Brixton. After that, I claimed her as one of my favourite people in the world. One of my heroes. One of my mothers. Other trips to the U.K. found us on Kilburn High Road in a KFC eating salty chicken and cracking up about how bad we were being.
As it turns out, Auntie Maureen had a secret. She had lots of secrets. But the one I wished she’d shared with me and with her extended family was about her having cancer. My Auntie Maria, her favourite sister, noticed Maureen clutching her stomach while she was on a visit to Barbados. In hindsight, Auntie Maria said, Maureen was already well aware of what was going on; she’d lied and said that, when she return to England she will be going in for kidney stone surgery, or some such thing. It was a tremendous shock for all of us, then, when she died a few months later. Her children, perhaps out of fear of being blamed for what had happened, kept tight-lipped about her cause of death for some time after that.
This kind of stoic guarding of vital details is infuriating, and I believe on some levels, incredibly selfish. It also speaks to one of the worse behavioral traits in human beings: emotional martyrdom. “I can bear this alone. I don’t want your pity. I don’t want you to worry about me.” But whoever said we were offering pity? What about us offering love, empathy? We undervalue the power of genuine support — giving and receiving — entirely too much. Yes I understand, too, in that hiding their pain they feel they are protecting us, shielding us from seeing a visible decline, barring us from fear; but they are also putting up barriers to our ability to show them how much we appreciate their presence, in health and in decline.
For my part, I am guilty of emotional martyrdom myself, but I am learning that not all secrets are worth holding on to, especially the ones that hurt. One of the most powerful cinematic images I have ever seen comes from the film In the Mood for Love, where the lead actor, crushing under the weight of a missed love he can barely speak of, goes to a tree and in the hollowness of its trunk speaks his heart. If only we can unburden ourselves in this way with the ones we love most.
• photo courtesy of Violator3