Bird-Bent Grass Venema Read online

  Bird-Bent Grass

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  Life Writing Series

  In the Life Writing Series, Wilfrid Laurier University Press publishes

  life writing and new life-writing criticism and theory in order to

  promote autobiographical accounts, diaries, letters, memoirs, and

  testimonials written and/or told by women and men whose politi-

  cal, literary, or philosophical purposes are central to their lives. The

  Series features accounts written in English, or translated into English

  from French or the languages of the First Nations, or any of the

  languages of immigration to Canada.

  The audience for the series includes scholars, youth, and avid general

  readers both in Canada and abroad. The Series hopes to continue its

  work as a leading publisher of life writing of all kinds, as an imprint

  that aims for scholarly excellence and representing lived experience

  as tools for both historical and autobiographical research.

  We publish original life writing that represents the widest range of

  experiences of lives lived with integrity. Life Writing also publishes

  original theoretical investigations about life writing, as long as they

  are not limited to one author or text.

  Series Editor

  Marlene Kadar

  Humanities, York University

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  Bird-Bent Grass

  A Memoir, in Pieces

  K AT H L E E N V E N E M A

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  WILFRID LAURIER

  UNIVERSITY PRESS

  Wilfrid Laurier University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. This work was supported by the Research Support Fund.

  an Ontario government agency

  un organisme du gouvernement de l’Ontario

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Venema, Kathleen Rebecca, 1960–, author

  Bird-bent grass : a memoir, in pieces / Kathleen Venema.

  (Life writing series)

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-1-77112-290-0 (softcover)

  1. Venema, Kathleen Rebecca, 1960–. 2. Venema–de Jong, Geeske. 3. Alzheimer’s disease—Patients—Biography. 4. Alzheimer’s disease—Patients—Family relationships.

  5. Mothers and daughters—Canada—Biography. I. Title. II. Series: Life writing series RC523.2.V46 2018 362.1968’3110092 C2017-905061-3

  Cover images from the author’s personal collection (envelope) and iStock/Nicoolay (bird).

  Cover and interior design by Chris Rowat Design.

  © 2018 Wilfrid Laurier University Press

  Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

  www.wlupress.wlu.ca

  This book is printed on FSC® certified paper and is certified Ecologo. It contains post-consumer fibre, is processed chlorine free, and is manufactured using biogas energy.

  Printed in Canada

  Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit http://www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll-free to 1-800-893-5777.

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  In memory of the incomparable

  Harry (Hendrik Thomas) Neudoerffer Venema and

  Geeske (Grace) Venema–de Jong

  And with gratitude for those who remain, especially

  Douwe (David) Venema,

  Nakato Rose Ssendawula, and

  Gareth Neufeld

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  What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?

  —Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

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  Contents

  you come home. we need to talk 1

  1 perfect correspondence 5

  2 crosswords 61

  3 post secret 133

  4 new meadow 201

  5 holy shipwreck 259

  postscript: waiting for you here 321

  notes 335

  acknowledgements 339

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  you come home. we need to talk

  Late September 1988, Kampala’s all brash sunlight, smells of

  smoke and diesel, moves fast, frenetic by contrast with our

  sedate village home. I’ve lived in Uganda for the past twenty-five

  months as a volunteer for the Mennonite Central Committee

  (MCC) and I’ve spent eight of those months struggling with

  a condition that won’t be diagnosed conclusively for another

  seven years. Dr. B, my aging, cryptic British physician, has

  helped me research symptoms that he suspects mark the onset

  of a chronic illness. So I’m surprised when he extends my

  appointment to ask whether, once I’m “finished with the Men-

  nonites,” I could imagine joining the staff of the International

  School. Dr. B explains that he’s on the Board of Governors,

  they’re always looking for good teachers, and he knows that

  in another year my MCC term will end.

  I’m flattered. Even in my unpredictable physical condition,

  Dr. B considers me a viable candidate for his elite institution.

  I tell him I’ll think about it, though I have no intention of

  saying yes. I’m engaged in an increasingly affectionate cor-

  respondence with a handsome young (Mennonite) man in

  Canada whom I’m eager to see again in person. Besides which,

  I miss my family terribly. My mother’s already counting the

  months till I’ll be home. In the letter I send my parents a few

  days later—the seventy-second letter I’ve written them since

  1

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  reaching Uganda—I report positive medical developments:

  “Good news on the headache front. Dr. B says they’re caused

  by sinus congestion from my cold. He gave me antibiotics,

  something stinky for steam inhalations, and an offer to teach

  at the International School when I’m ‘finished with the Men-

  nonites.’ ‘Doc,’ I almost said, ‘I’m kind of hoping I won’t ever

  be finished with the Mennonites!’”

  My mother’s response arrived in her eighty-first letter. “Job

  offers are always nice,” she wrote. “Affirmation of yourself as

  a productive, worthwhile human being is great, and at the

  International School yet!? It’s wonderful. but. You make sure

  you come home. We need to talk, right? And talk and talk and

  talk. ” She underlined the words.

  Talk, ongoing and extended, musing, meditative, playful

  and philosophical, had until then defined my relationship

  with my mother and would do so for another fifteen years.

  But in the fall of 2003—just months after my marriage to an

  even more wonderful (Mennonite) man—it became impos-

  sible not to know that my mother was exhibiting symptoms

  of dementia. It wasn’t a surprise by the time Mom’s GP diag-

  nosed Alzheimer’s in July 2005, but no less devastating for not

  being a surprise. My mother identified herself with her mind.

  She knew how Alzheimer’s stories end.

  I tell an Alzheimer’s story in this memoir and I tell a story

  about my life as it’s been intertwined with my mother’s, this

  mostly unknown Canadian immigrant whose spirit was qui-

  etly distorted by a sexual predator when she was just a child,

  and distorted again by the immigration experience that per-

  manently split her life in two; a mostly unknown dreamer,

  who brought to the work of mothering a weirdly charming

  awkwardness, sparkling intellect, a spirit of often accidental

  whimsy, a passionate desire to bring about “a better world,”

  eerie intuition, and radiating empathy that she packed into

  gloriously dazzling smiles. This is the mother with whom I’ve

  navigated distance, time, and, more recently, Alzheimer’s,

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  y o u c o m e h o m e . w e n e e d t o t a l k 3

  and our stories emerge from several sources, including the

  two-hundred-plus let
ters we sent one another while I lived in

  Uganda; the Friday-afternoon conversations we began record-

  ing in 2008; journal entries; email updates; and excerpts from

  the blog my husband and I began when our baby nephew was

  diagnosed with cancer.

  During the years I lived at Ndejje, my Mom and I both

  wrote more than we’d ever written before and more than

  either of us has written since. Mom’s half of the correspon-

  dence doubles as the only sustained record of her life and

  (practically miraculously) documents three years of her intel-

  lectual prime, a decade before Alzheimer’s began its insidi-

  ous work. Ironically, minus Alzheimer’s, I might never have

  returned to our Ugandan letters. Minus Alzheimer’s, I likely

  wouldn’t have spent five years of Friday afternoons in long

  conversations with my mother. Minus Alzheimer’s, I almost

  certainly wouldn’t have written a story about her life. But

  the world plus Alzheimer’s requires new navigational forms.

  Memories distort in the world plus Alzheimer’s, and with

  memories, language, and with language, precision. Conversa-

  tions morph to encompass spaces fissured by forgetting, lin-

  ear time eludes the record, and paranoia lurks. In the world

  plus Alzheimer’s, the work of maintaining relationships—and

  constructing an intergenerational memoir—folds intricately,

  repeatedly, unpredictably, inside and out.

  And rich parallels suggest themselves, between navigating

  Alzheimer’s and negotiating the challenges of living cross-

  culturally, especially immediately after a civil war. In the

  three years I lived at Ndejje, I didn’t ever perfect meaningful

  connection across linguistic and cultural barriers, and I was

  never entirely comfortable tossing hard-won, handwritten

  accounts of my life into the unpredictably roiling sea I called

  the Black Hole of International Post. But the lively record of

  those challenges corresponds in unexpected ways with the

  non-linearity of even healthy memories and the fracturing

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  effects that Alzheimer’s has on its sufferers’ closest relation-

  ships. So I weave my diverse materials discontinuously, quilt-

  ing as much as I’m weaving, in order to capture some of the

  disorientation of staying connected to my mother over dis-

  tance and time and dementia.

  Early in my life at Ndejje, I saw a sight I’d often see again and

  thrill to every time, a brilliant tiny meadow bird perched on

  a blade of elephant grass. I loved the simultaneous serenity

  and tension, the compact bundle of bird bones imminently

  launched into soaring flight, the robust grass bent under its

  weight, capable, in an instant, of miraculous restoration. I hope

  that when you read about my mother and me, you’ll experi-

  ence the best of this tension, the powerful, delicate, resilient,

  ephemeral, fleeting business of being alive and loving others

  in the long or very short time they’re ours to hold.

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  O N E

  perfect

  correspondence

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  perfect correspondence (1)

  Friday 30 September 2011. My mother is having a very bad

  day, such a bad day that when I email my siblings afterward,

  I describe her condition as “the worst I’ve ever seen.” Despite

  the accelerating ravages of Alzheimer’s, my mother and I still

  spend most Friday afternoons in 2011 walking and talking,

  working on crossword puzzles, singing sometimes, and read-

  ing. On this afternoon, though, and for the first time, every one

  of Mom’s attempts to speak ends in nonsense, until—about

  twenty anguished minutes in—she announces clearly, “Well.

  That’s enough of that. Maybe we should go for a walk.” We’ve

  walked ten minutes against a surprisingly brittle wind when

  she turns to me and repeats a question she asked for the first

  time last week. “You’re my daughter,” she says, “right?” “I sure

  am, Mom,” I answer promptly, pleased when she laughs at my

  intonation and stopped short by her next question: “So, were

  you with us when we came to Canada?”

  My mother was sixteen in 1952 when she came to Canada

  from the Netherlands with her parents and eight of her nine

  siblings. She married six years later, after which my sister and

  I arrived in modestly quick succession, aware all our lives that

  we are Canadians, our parents are immigrants. I was almost

  fifty-one in September 2011, Sandy1 had just turned fifty-two, and we’d been picking up the first hints that our identity as

  “daughters” was slipping from Mom’s cognitive grasp. Several

  times that summer Mom had expressed amazement or puz-

  zlement or sheer disbelief at the claim that we—together or

  separately—were her daughters. “How old am I then?” she’d

  asked me on a number of occasions, “if you’re my daughter?”

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  “How can I have a daughter who’s so old?” she’d inquired of

  Sandy earlier in the spring. Sandy and I speculate that as Mom

  sinks deeper into memories of her younger self, the concept of

  “daughters” is increasingly limited to her recollections of “the

  little kids,” “the little girls.”

  But “Was I with them when they came to Canada?” More

  than any of dementia’s intrusions up to that point, my moth-

  er’s question unnerves me. “Coming to Canada” has func-

  tioned all her life as the dramatic hinge between a wide-open

  future and the permanent end of cherished dreams, a hinge

  so powerful that the question casts dementia’s erosions into

  stark relief: if my previously sacrosanct identity as daughter is

  mixed up now in my mother’s long memories of emigration

  trauma, we are further than I’d realized on the way to losing

  one another completely.

  My mother and I have been exceptionally close all of my life,

  defined by years of meandering, expansive, intimate, infor-

  mally cerebral talk. “You are just like your mother,” friends

  and family members tell me, disconcerted at the resemblances;

  even my professional choices inadvertently realize many of my

  mother’s best dreams. By the time my first sabbatical begins,

  I’ve had twenty-four months to process the Alzheimer’s diag-

  nosis and plan a project that commits my Friday afternoons

  and Mom’s to the work of keeping our conversations going

  for as long as we possibly can. And so we read out loud to

  one another on Friday afternoons for the next five years; we

  discuss the news and retell family stories; we play word games

  and sometimes I play my parents’ dreadful piano and we sing;

  sometimes we write letters and sometimes we read the letters

  we wrote in the late 1980s, when we were farther from one

  another than we’d ever been before.

  If immigration to Canada works as a hinge or fold or break

  in my mother’s life, the three years I spent in Uganda in my

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  p e r f e c t c o r r e s p o n d e n c e 9

  late twenties function decisively as a hinge in mine. From

  1986 to 1989, in the aftermath of a civil war, I lived and taught

  at Ndejje, a small town in south-central Uganda. Email was

  seven years in the future and unimaginable; while I lived in

  Africa, I wrote and received more than eight hundred letters,