Writer & Activist

I can tell you exactly how it feels.

I’m capable of enduring almost any level of physical and emotional pain. But when someone I love is hurting, that pain is transformed into something epic and primal; a meat hook that suspends me from my sternum.

The greatest fear in my life has come to pass, and I would give anything to change the circumstances. Marilou, my little sister, is once again fighting cancer, with lesions on multiple organs, her bones, and her brain.

How many ways can a heart break?

Although she is gifted at friendship, Marilou is a thoughtful, solitary, private person, and I try to respect that privacy. But I want you to know her, just a little, and to see her as I do.

We have always been close, more friends than siblings, which is the way of our family. As a child she was a fussy eater, but ravenous when I held her silver spoon in my own small hand. Times when I came home with bruised knuckles often correlated perfectly with her tendency to speak her mind to much bigger kids.

But truth be told, whether she was singing to aunts and uncles for spare change, or making Dad laugh so hard he couldn’t punish her, Marilou always knew how to slide past trouble. She seldom needed anyone’s help. When she was in full flight, her banner unfurled, I was relegated to the supporting cast. But, even as a kid, I knew that was the proper order of things. It seldom bothered me.

How could it? Something about that curly red hair, that impish-yet-cherubic face, always turned anger to laughter and frustration to good times.

As we grew, skinning our elbows and our hearts, we became closer. I kept her secrets. I was an assistant coach for her volleyball team, and chaperoned her junior high school dances, and never once told Dad that she was watering down his vodka. Gail never learned that Marilou was driving her car around the neighborhood even though she wasn’t yet legal. We comforted each other when our father died young. When we were split down the middle by a devastating two-faced betrayal, we shared a bottle of good wine and chose to rise above it.

But she has always been, and will always be, my little sister. And she’s always been a caring and loving friend. I hope that helps explain how gutted and empty I feel these past weeks.

Great pain extinguished my belief in a higher power, but there are greater things that I cannot see or hold. Like my love for my little sister.

And while I could write about sweet, soft lullabies, I will not. I want these words to be a brother’s anthem, a rousing chorus that rises and swells, and promises great deeds. Because, like our mother, Marilou can lick her weight in wildcats.

She carries a tattoo on her hip. The Japanese characters recall Budo — The Way of the Warrior. We shared years of training in Shotokan karate, and both hold black belts. We’re both fighters, in the best sense of the word. We face challenges bravely, muster calmness when our insides are roiling, have the ability to endure pain that might well break others.

I cannot fight this battle for her. But I can cook meals, hold her hand when she’s inserted into that cold MRI tunnel, and show her I love her with words and deeds. Everyone in my family is doing much more, and in this way she is blessed. Her people in Queensland and Tantallon have already shown support for her in a way that would touch the coldest heart, raising thousands to help support complementary treatments and compensate for lost wages. Marilou has been overwhelmed by their generosity, and each member of our family has been touched.

We will pay it forward.

I wake to grief every morning, and it threatens to consume me. But I also possess the heart of a warrior, so I gain strength in good times, in fond memories, and know we will make new, good memories in the coming months. Why, we’ll become a great-aunt and -uncle in just a few weeks, and my first-born niece will soon be married.

And in the meantime, we can remember the best times. The event itself has been lost to memory, but I remember Mom catching Marilou making serious mischief even though she was still in diapers.

Mom was furious, but she looked at her little angel, and couldn’t keep from grinning.

“Marilou, you’re awfully cute,” she said. “But you’re B-A-D!”

Marilou beamed. “That spells ‘sweet’, doesn’t it?”

In our house, it always has.

I grew up in a happy home, and the Christmases of my youth have crystallized into memories now held near and dear. Memories that can still keep me warm on cold winter nights.

My Mother was a devout Catholic, so the holidays were, first and foremost, a spiritual season filled with prayer and solemnity. My Father loved to have a good time with friends and relatives, so December was also a month of furious preparation and tradition.

The season began with my mother, who would trundle us off to Advent mass at St. Agnes every morning at 7am. As a nurse who worked the 3-11pm shift, she must have been exhausted, but our immortal souls were hanging in the balance, and she persevered, as if her will alone could keep us on the straight and narrow.

My hedonistic father, on the other hand, would be decorating every square inch of our house, and stocking his bar with every manner of libation, with a few bottles of Canadian Club held in reserve, for emergencies. With six brothers and sisters, I relished this family time, the beehive of activity uniting us in common purpose.

A New Home

When I was four, my family moved from a working-class to a middle-class neighborhood, and our home on Churchill Drive became a neighborhood focal point. We decorated more. We had more parties. We prayed like there was no tomorrow. As if our immortal souls were hanging in the balance.

In a way, it was funny, because we had less money than everyone around us, except maybe the MacLeods. We just had traditions that had to be observed, and so we worked hard to realize them. For me and my little sister, at the family’s tail end, it just meant following the crowd, and religiously saving our pennies, so we could buy a can of cherry pipe tobacco for Dad, and a small box of jams and preserves for Mom. (She loved simple things, like a cup of tea and toast with jam when she finished her nursing shift).

Mom would be tireless, baking every day in Advent: all manner of rich squares; shortbread (or Scotch) cookies; cherry, mincemeat, apple, and raisin pies; a cake or two; a dozen or so rabbit and chicken pies; and a half-dozen Acadian tourtiere.

To Catch a Thief

Our downstairs freezer would be brimming, and my siblings and I would sneak into the basement, dressed in black turtlenecks and balaclavas, to steal the precious treats under cover of darkness, doing our best Cary Grant imitation from To Catch a Thief.

Honestly, it’s surprising that most of us didn’t turn into hardened criminals, seeking out careers that would provide us with the rush we so obviously relished in childhood. Yes, we infuriated my Mom, but we also counted on the diffusion of responsibility. She understood that each of her offspring were guilty, and so we only received a one-seventh portion of her voluminous wrath.

As kids, it was the natural order of things. In trying to steal her desserts, we were balancing the household’s off-kilter ying and yang. Truth to tell, we all worked hard leading up to the holidays, and felt we deserved something for all the bustling and travail. Yes, we could eat the goodies on Christmas Eve, and at Christmas dinner, but most of the baking was intended for others: Our aunts, uncles, grandparents, family friends, and folks from Havre Boucher who shared our last names, and were related to us in ways we couldn’t comprehend (well, yes, she’s your father’s second cousin, once removed, but she’s also related to you through your mother on the Benoit side; your great-great grandmother and her great-great grandmother were half-sisters).

And if you were ever a kid, you may even be able to understand our tortured logic. I mean really, why was Mom so hell bent and determined to serve our very best to people we only saw once a year, when we were the ones she dragged to church everyday; and we were the ones who said the Rosary every night — even when she was at work!

To this day, I carry with me more than memories. I still prefer the taste of frozen cookies and squares.

The Village on the Mantel

While Mom was baking like a professional pastry chef, my father would decorate as if his very life depended upon it. Our house’s front face was draped in blue lights, which took the better part of a day to install, with me shivering like a kid at a Dracula movie as I held the ladder. Dad also planted spotlights in two trees, and planted another on the lawn, buried in the snow. All three shone on a traditional window display of Jesus, Mary and Joseph in a manger, which rested beneath this incredible silver tree decorated with blue bulbs that was the height of sophistication in 1967, and as ugly as sin just a year later.

We had another artificial tree in the basement rec-room, and Dad’s bar would be hung with flashing lights that, even in elementary school, I thought were tacky.

In our living room, we had yet another nativity scene, and our real tree. Dad always bought the cheapest one he could find, along with a few spare branches, and he would drill holes in the trunk and plug the bare spots in a brilliant deception that demonstrated his fine carpentry skills. We had a wreath on the door, copious displays with candles and spruce, and little Christmas elves peaking out from every house plant.

Dad’s carefully-constructed fake fireplace was adorned with an elaborate village featuring dozens of little cardboard houses, each lit by a tiny Christmas light, and surrounded by a thick cotton-wool snow. Eventually, we poked out every paper window in every home in the village — the church excepted, as none of us were willing to risk God’s vengeance, I suspect — thus ruining a lovely little collection. It still bothers me to this day. The village was finally moved downstairs to the dimly-lit rec-room, since none of my Dad’s drinking buddies would notice the imperfections after a few hefty ryes. I guess Mom finally gave it away; I wish that I still had it, for it would be the one family heirloom I would cherish.

Gordie Howe Skates

Finally, Christmas Eve would arrive, almost sneaking up on us. We’d hang socks — real socks in my youth, red Christmas socks that Mom made us a few years later — on the mantel. Santa would fill them with barley toys and ribbon candy, and a much needed supply of underwear and socks for the New Year.

And we received nice presents. It never occurred to us at the time how much my parents must have scraped and scrimped to build a neat, thoughtful pile for seven kids — with a few important things we needed, and a few delightful surprises, too. One year I received a pair of hockey skates with Gordie Howe’s name embossed on the blades and a Mastercraft 100 hockey stick. I deemed myself the luckiest kid on the face of the planet. Another year, it was an expensive hockey stick — a fibreglass-wrapped Victoriaville! — and Parker Brother’s Masterpiece, which we played into the wee hours during Christmas week.

Truth to tell, our haul didn’t compare with the other neighborhood kids, like the Grays, who would gets bikes, and train sets, and elaborate doll houses. It didn’t take us long to do the math, with the young believers concluding that Santa spent a set amount on every household, and it got divided up equally among all the kids therein. If you were an only child, you made out like a bandit. If you had six brothers and sisters, then you had to remember how lucky you were to live in such a lively, boisterous, happy home.

We were always in bed early on Christmas Eve, too excited to sleep, but eventually nodding off. Santa always came before midnight. As we got older, and subterfuge was no longer required, we’d have an early family party, head out to midnight mass, and then return home for rabbit pie, tourtiere, and cold beer and wine. We’d hit the hay sometime after 3:30am.

On reflection, it’s amusing because we were observing a traditional Acadian Christmas without any of us realizing that we were Acadians (until my sister became the family historian).

It was as though our Christmas traditions were bred in our bone, and we couldn’t help but love them.

Many years later, I still love them. And with the innocence that still resides in a small corner of my heart, I still miss them.

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My favorite Christmas photo. Nine nieces and nephews, circa 1994.