I was in dangerous personal territory, in fraught border country in which my parents were sliding into neediness and I was rising in power, yet losing my own life.
All Things Consoled is esteemed Canadian novelist Elizabeth Hay's account of taking on the role as her parents' primary family contact as they reached their final years. Complicating this always demanding function is the difficult relationship that Hay had with her parents, and as she recounts incidents from throughout her life to illustrate lingering resentments or character quirks, Hay deftly assembles a work that serves as a moving memoir of herself and her family. On the one hand, Hay does a nice job of capturing the challenges of the lingering end-of-life years (in which both of her suffering parents wished for “the Dutch passport”), and on the other, I was glad to see that she had enough time with both of them to come to a place of peace and forgiveness. With Hay's thoughtful and polished prose, this was a satisfying read; a fascinating and fitting tribute to complex people.
At the lake, inside the dark cabin that was steeped in my parents' lives, I felt permeated by their presence even though they were absent. That a peaceful place should be so full of tension, that their influence should be so potent, that I could not prevent myself from taking on certain of their characteristics and that these same characteristics expanded inside me until I was bloated with impatience, hard with gassy vile severity.Hay's father, Gordon, was an educator – he went from teacher to principal to professor over his career – and despite having been raised a peace-loving Quaker, he had a hair-trigger and could snap violently with both his students and his own children. Hay's mother, Jean, was a penny-pinching homemaker (not above serving moldy or wormy food) who discovered painting in middle age, and who always took her husband's side over her children. Not only did Elizabeth resent that her mother refused to see how much her father's constant teasing and painful finger jabs bothered her (“He's only ribbing you, lighten up”), but Jean could never see how her own (often unvoiced but suspected) criticism burdened her daughter; Hay did a wonderful job of illustrating the lifelong family dynamics that were looming over this relationship as she finally convinced her parents to leave the family home and move into care a six minute walk from her own house in another city. How hurtful must it have been for Elizabeth to discover that among the possessions that her parents left behind for disposal were her own seven novels, all personally inscribed to the parents who never once told her they were proud of her? (When a friend once asked Hay's father if he was proud of what his daughter has accomplished, he testily responded, “Well, is she proud of me?” Her mother buried one of her novels in the yard "out of shame".)
The issue that finally forced the relocation was Hay's mother's descent into dementia (and at the same time, her father's physical inability to deal with his wife's declining mental and physical states). As a lover of words and phrasing, Hay delighted in and collected her mother's increasingly peculiar ways of expressing herself, concluding, “Her turns of phrase rather confirmed my view that poetry issues from the holes in our heads, that whatever faculty produces the startling contractions and coinages and leaps in logic that we call poetry is also available at an unconscious and uncontrollable level to someone suffering from dementia.” Now, as my own mother-in-law has Alzheimer's without ever once coming out with a poetic construction, perhaps Jean's words came from the same creative spring as her painting talent rather than pointing to something universal as Hay suggests, but it was this mental quirk that led to the book's title:
I got her to sit on the chesterfield and sat down beside her and put my arms around her again, and she was like an ancient child weeping – lost and weeping. “Where am I?”Hay is honest about her own bitterness and the longheld resentments that she refused to let go of, and she doesn't whitewash how taxing these final years with her parents nearby were for her. As her three siblings all lived far away, convincing her parents to move to Ottawa did invite the burden squarely onto her own shoulders, but as Hay writes, “Yes, I volunteered to take it on, but there was never a moment when I didn't wish to be let off the hook.” (And that's something important for me to remember as my kind-hearted sister-in-law has taken on the care of her parents – including the Mom with Alzheimer's – within a shared home.) Yet still, there was an opportunity for a melting of the icewaters: Hay eventually discovered that just starting off a visit with a kiss to her father's bald head was enough to soften him, as though all he ever wanted was forgiveness for his failings. Even so, as Gordon lay dying and Hay's brother leaned in to assure him that the kids would take good care of Mom when he was gone, their father roared back to life with, “But what about me?” Ultimately, because of their time together in those last years, Hay developed a stronger relationship with each of her parents and grew to appreciate what they meant to each other:
I told her where she was. “Where did you think you were?”
“Oh, I'm in many places. Where I am keeps changing.”
We walked to the elevator and she said, “I've got some of my wits. But not all.”
And then there was the day she said, “I've had a good life, all things consoled.”
Will I go to my grave thinking my mother should have married another man? Someone more attuned to the creative life, who could have cooked for himself and put in his own eye drops? Who didn't fly off the handle at the drop of a hat? Not anymore. Not after seeing how woven into each other, body and soul, the two of them were.What must have been a therapeutic experience for Elizabeth Hay to write makes for an engaging and enlightening read; I am enlarged by having read her story.
