She Would Have Been An Artist

She would have been an artist if her family hadn’t run out of money and stopped 
sending the kids to expensive private schools.  Instead, my Oma satisfied her 
cravings for beauty by buying and selling antiques.   Tchotchkes.  She curated a 
home that was museum quality.  And entertained a large and worldly 
demographic of guests. 

She was 58 when I was born.   

A favourite memory of her was the summer dusk we gazed at thousands of 
Monarch butterflies resting on the row of trees down to the lake.  They covered 
the trees, lush like orange and black leaves.   On our way back up the driveway to 
the Farm, we stopped in front of a Monarch laying on the ground, disabled and 
left with only one single wing.  My Oma must have known saving it was hopeless, 
but she took it gently in her cupped hands anyway and carried it to a beautiful 
spot where it could expire.   I was 4 and the sky was purple.     

It's Fall 2002.  My mom and Oma and I sit waiting for our food in a restaurant in 
Montreal.  I’m 27, and my Oma is 87.  She has Alzheimer’s and I have recently 
been diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder.   We have both been put on the same anti
psychotic, Risperdal, which is something I find manically hilarious.  My mom 
listens in wonder, or in horror, and humour…surreal… to a conversation about 
beauty and antiques that is pathologized by our relative illnesses.   She is the 
primary caregiver for both of us. 

I can neither recall, nor imagine our “conversation”.  My mom is the keeper of 
that knowledge and I rely on her extensive journals to once again record our lives. 
It’s 2003.  The year that they all die; 6 family members and 3 close family friends.  

We lose generations, but before that our family will be torn apart.  
The first two deaths are devastating. Young women, in their early 30’s; one 
murdered by her husband, one eaten away by melanoma.  That was the Spring 
and Summer.  In September a friend’s young mother dies of breast cancer.  Then 
it is November and my Opa’s younger brother dies.   

I am not at the hospital when my Oma dies.  Waiting for my mom and my aunt to 
turn away to pick a Ferrero Rocher out of the box, the light goes out of her eyes.  
When I get the call, I immediately phone my dad who is at-that-moment leaving 
the funeral of my Opa’s younger brother.  My Oma dies 3 days after her 
troublesome brother-in-law.  They are the last of a generation.  

I move from my Spring and Summer mania, into a depression.   I just stop smoking 
because it no longer gives me any pleasure, and what is the point of dragging 
myself out of bed to go light up on the balcony anymore?  My depression lingers 
until my Oma’s older brother dies; January 4, 2004.    I am hospitalized 3 days 
later.  I do not attend his funeral.     

I am kept on the ward for 1 week and but released; the shortest amount of time 
one can stay there after having been admitted.    

Then it is Igor’s birthday, February 14th.  (Igor died in 1980.)  His mother, my 
Oma’s eldest sister, dies on February 15th.  We weep because we have lost 
another generation.  Except their sister, my Auntie Betha, who wails in dementia
stricken ruminations; “Why have they all left me?? Why have they abandoned 
me??!!??” 

Next, it is 3rd cousin Yvonne’s turn to have Pancreatic Cancer.  Yvonne was a 
Survivor from Budapest, who came to live with my Opa’s brother and his family 
after the War.   She was adopted as someone much more intimate than a 3rd 
cousin.  She was a stylish and hilarious constant in our lives.  She dies in early July.   

At the end of that month my best friend’s dad, a life long ardent non-smoker, dies 
of Lung Cancer. 

That’s 9. 

But we laughed.   We laughed through it all.   There was nothing else to do.  I 
would go from appointment to appointment with my psychiatric team and would 
be greeted with a “So, who died this time?”.  Boy did we laugh that year.  It was 
all black humour; it got us through.   

Back in the Fall of 2002, at that dinner at the B and M with my mom and my Oma; 
incipient paranoias collide and give birth to a full blown psychosis.     

My Oma is afraid people are coming into her apartment to steal things.  She 
thinks people are spying on her through the peephole in her front door; she plugs 
that up with tissues.   She hides cooking oil and flour in her bedroom closet and 
buys frozen vegetables over and over and stuffs them in her freezer.    

At the B and M we talk about her antiques, her treasures, her tchotchkes.  What 
to do with them, she has so many.   They are valuable and we should get in an 
appraiser, so we do.  At the appraisal my cousin Yvonne comes because she has 
arranged it for us.  (Yvonne is also savvy in the business of beautiful things.)  The 
appraisal lasts for hours, and I take copious but disorganized notes.  Manic notes.  
When discussions wind down, I am left with a warning.  “Do not let dealers into 
your house, because they might be thieves scoping out what you have and will 
come back later and steal from you.”  My manic mind carefully tucks away that 
new element of paranoia.   

It is about a month later, I walk into an antique store on Sherbrooke Street and 
discover an art deco evening bag similar to the ones that my Oma has in her 
collections of beautiful things.  I tell the woman behind the counter that my Oma 
has such treasures.  This woman answers in a Slavic accent.  She says she would 
be interested in seeing what we have.  I take the element of paranoia out of my 
manic mind, turn heel and run out of the store.  A man looks at me from across 
the street.   I remember having seen the same man on the street before I went 
into the Slavic woman’s antique store.  Now he is looking at me, like he knows 
me.   And he is walking down the street parallel to me, keeping pace, and keeping 
an eye on me.

  
I KNOW he is Russian Mafia, and the Slavic Woman has tipped him off that I am in 
possession of valuable antiques.   I can no longer go home, because I am putting 
my family in danger.   So, I run to the bus, to a metro stop, to a metro train, and 
hop to another train and another train and another train, until I am exhausted.  
But I know if I go home, I will put my family in danger.  I decide to head to my best 
friend’s house.  (The one whose father will die in July of Lung Cancer).  I know she 
has nothing of beauteous value in her home.   I can land safely there without 
putting her in danger. 

She opens the door, and I say “boy have I got a story to tell you!”.  And then it 
evaporates, all the links in my head, the web I had created that supported the fact 
that the Russian Mafia was chasing me, dissolve.  And I very much mean the word 
“dissolve”.  I am left with rushing adrenaline and fragments of the most exciting 
story ever that no longer make sense.  

The veil has lifted.