It’s easy to be mad at other drivers, righteously indignant for whatever your cause. To be mad at the losers, mad at the winners…mad, mad, mad.

But anger is depression’s dark red twin and like the red line on a car’s oil indicator, it’s a danger sign that something else is at work.

I’m not saying anger is wrong. If that’s the case, well, let’s just say that I’ve been wrong way more than I’d like to talk about. I don’t even want to begin to bear thinking about that. Instead, I’ll claim our family’s strongest trait (some families are known for particularly blonde hair, or a certain type of chin, but in our family, our strongest trait is good ol’ denial).

Let me explain. Like my recently deceased father, I too am an eternal optimist. But optimism, taken to its fullest conclusion along the old continuum, is nothing but denial dressed in drag. It is easier to pretend everything’s coming up shiny than to face the truth of whatever you don’t want to see…like sadnesss. Which brings us right back to depression and that terrible dash-smashing anger.

I remember my blessed counsellor Linda Varin (may a thousand angels accompany her forevermore). Eleven years ago, she sat, implacable yet compassionate, while I raged and spewed and wept in her living room. And then she gave me some homework:

“Each day, I want you to be as curious as a child and simply ask yourself, ‘What am I feeling right now?’ Keep asking and remain open to whatever comes up. Feel it.”

Bitch.

 

**

The elevator shuddered its way up to the third floor. The glass wall at the back of the elevator was split and shattered. I could only imagine what our mother would have said about the greasy call buttons. The doors shimmied open and I stepped into a too-warm hallway, the air thick with the smell of grease and potatoes. No one would know if I turned back. I could just get right back in that elevator. I kept walking down the dim hall.

I found her door. The brass-coloured peel-and-stick numbers weren’t sticking so well anymore. I felt a stupid relief when I saw that the last number had managed to hang on.

I lifted my hand to knock, pausing for a minute as I noticed how jaundiced my skin looked in the murky light. I saw Mom’s hands lying on the hospital blanket. As her liver cancer claimed her, Mom’s face had become a deep leathery-gold, like the colour of the fingers on a heavy smoker. Ironic, given that my mother had never smoked, drank or had much fun at all.

I knocked. No response. I tried again.

I heard my sister call from the other side of the door, “Just come in.”

I turned the knob, entered an empty beige space. The light was even worse than the hall and my eyes struggled to adjust to the gloom. The smell was familiar. It reeked of overflowing ashtrays combined with the burned smell of coffee that had sat on an element all day. It was the same fetid smell I encountered in every place my sister had lived.

Though this latest address was on a different side of Abbotsford, and still only a one-hour drive to Vancouver, I would have bet money she hadn’t made it to the city in years. She had lost her car, to debt? Insurance issues? I no longer remembered the story.
I hadn’t kept very good track of her lately. I knew she was always on one side of the Fraser River or the other; Abbotsford to the south or Mission on the north.

In between the evictions from basement suites, the midnight moves from lousy apartments and broken-down houses, they holed up in transition houses. Though the boyfriend’s names changed almost as often as the addresses, ultimately, they all tended toward violence.

I looked around. It was the classic cheap-rental apartment layout with the narrow galley kitchen to my left and the closed bathroom door on my right. I could see that the bedroom door in front of me was slightly ajar. It revealed a shadowed interior. I strained forward to see if there was any movement. Nothing.

The living room was visible through the kitchen pass-through. The television was muted, spreading its jittery jerking glow on the thin carpet. Weak light tried to filter past the edges of the blankets nailed in front of the sliding glass door. I stifled a laugh that threatened to start and not stop. Love what you’ve done with the place.

That left the bathroom. The winner! Door number three! She must be in the tiny bathroom.

I sidestepped into the kitchen. Like all of her other rentals that I had visited in the past, my sister had somehow managed to make it look like she’d always lived there. She had hung her black and white photographs and put up her paintings. I moved closer to my favourite painting. It hung over the sagging couch that faced the television.

Rhonda had done the self-portrait when Sean was probably a year old. She had been doing pretty well at that point. She had been enrolled in college art classes and seemed focused. I was sure Dad had paid for that too. How many courses had Mom and Dad covered for her during all those years of hoping she would do something with her life? Always hoping that this one would be it, this would be the one that got her started.

The self-portrait was the largest painting, probably three feet across and at least four feet high. Rhonda was holding her baby boy so close, his round cheeks pressed into hers – those chewable pudgy cheeks that had smelled of rising dough. I loved how beautifully Rhonda had painted her own eyes, like A&W root beer, glowing a sweet sugary brown.

I stepped quietly into the kitchen to see the dishes neatly stacked in the rack, the mugs on their hooks and the precisely folded dishrag. Then I saw the sheet on the fridge labelled ‘Rules’. I started reading, ‘No shooting the BB gun in the apartment hall’. The bathroom door opened.

I did a quick sidestep from the kitchen in to the entry as Rhonda emerged from the bathroom, but, like a bad magic trick, another woman appeared behind her.

“Hi Sis. This is my best friend, Celine.”

Celine’s lank hair framed a face that spoke of a lifetime spent dying. Rhonda linked arms with Celine, snugged her close and lifting her chin toward me, she said, “This is my little sister.” Like Celine’s, my sister’s eyes had been replaced with glittering black mirrors. They faced me.

“Can you believe this is my little sister?” Rhonda laughed, but like her words, the sound seemed to be coming from a long distance, like a delayed connection on an overseas call. Rhonda gave her best friend’s arm another little squeeze.“Look…look at my big baby sister.”

Rhonda’s lipstick was smeared outside the lines of her lips.

I made a move toward the door, “Hi Celine. So nice to meet you and sorry to rush but I have to catch a ferry, my sister and I don’t have a lot of time.”

There, I’d set the boundary. Good girl. Hey Linda V! Look at me!

“Come on Rhonda. Let’s go get that coffee I promised you.”

I took in a deep breath of fresh air as we emerged from the apartment. I heard the muffled bass of some headbanger music coming through the patio doors of one of the ground floor apartments. The drizzling rain had stopped but the light was still slowed and misty, the air full of oxygen after the dead air of the apartment. We stepped around the puddles as we worked our way toward the van. I watched my 47-year old sister. She moved across the parking lot like a woman twice her age.

I pulled out, wondering if I’d see Sean again. He’d been in the parking lot when I arrived. I wanted to ask why he wasn’t in school and who the tough-looking older kids were. I knew I would keep asking questions once I started. I would ask my sister why a ten-year old was shooting a BB gun in the hall and why the hell she felt it was perfectly okay to leave her child in the care of someone so obviously messed up as Celine. But then, how was that any worse or better than leaving him in the care of his own mother? Clearly Celine and Rhonda were ingesting the same drug. Whatever the hell that was.

Rhonda leaned toward me. Her movement released cold smoke and a too-sweet top-note of a recent spritz of drugstore perfume.

Tabu? I cracked my window and tried to casually breathe through my mouth.

“How are you doing?” I groaned inwardly at my lame attempt at conversation. Great question.

But Rhonda tilted her head. She considered the question. Her every movement seemed an exaggeration. Leaning into her hands spread out on the dashboard, she gave her answer. “I’m doing great and so is my best friend.” She spoke each word like she was still stepping around those parking lot puddles. And though the slurring was still obvious, she managed to clearly enunciate the word ‘best’.

“Celine used to be a heroin addict.” Rhonda offered her best confidential-sister voice. “But…”she leaned back in her seat again, her hands falling into her lap, “…she’s all better now.”

Why the hell was she telling me this?

We pulled in to the Starbucks at West Oaks mall. The coffee shop sat like an island in the middle of the parking lot, the sidewalk tables around it filled with shoppers sheltered from the wet air.

I felt the mistake of it immediately. Rhonda walked across the parking lot like she was walking on ice, placing each foot cautiously like she could spill sideways at any minute. I watched the too-casual glances as the other patrons observed her passage toward them. I was fairly certain that my sister was not the Starbucks’ target demographic. I tried to ignore the glances that had morphed into outright stares as we approached the counter

“Pick what you like,” I said.

Rhonda’s smile twisted off her face. Now I could see her eyeliner was crooked too.

“You know I don’t have any money, right Coll?”

“It’s okay. I asked you for coffee.”

Rhonda’s anxiety shimmered like heat waves off the hood of a car.
“What would you like?”

She appeared paralyzed by the decision. The line grew behind us. Finally, she mumbled out a request for a hot chocolate and then turned to me with eyes that begged for approval. I thought of Maggie, panting and eager for me to rub her ears as reward after a perfect fetch.

After I dropped her back at her apartment I cranked up the rock ‘n roll and said out loud, “That went well.”

I meant it. It had been a successful visit.

Then I smashed my hand on the dash in time to the music, yelling the words as I drove too fast down the highway, once again unaware of my full-tilt manifestation of my familial trait.

I was early for the ferry to the Coast. I turned off the incessant beat and tried Linda’s excercise. I felt stupid as I whispered in the car, “How do I feel?”

I already knew the answer. I was fine. It had all gone really well. But Linda had convinced me to sit with this exercise and keep trying. And then the real answer came.

It was a tsunami of grief. It threatened to take me to a place where I wouldn’t return. But I did return and discovered there’s nothing quite like those kind of feelings to sweep a shore free of rocks. I was left on that fresh new beach, sputtering and free of lies to myself.

It seemed I was sad. Very sad. I was grieving the death of my sister who was, and is, still alive.

**

I now know that I use anger and denial to protect me from those dark waves of grief. But it turns out that I’m stronger than I’d thought. I can go into those dark places and emerge. It turns out that feeling the emotion is exactly what frees me. I don’t have to stonewall myself behind denial or anger. It’s okay to be sad.

The next time you’re whistling in the dark or smashing your steering wheel a little bit too hard, I dare you to be curious.

Ask why you’re really so angry? Trust me when I tell you it’s not really about that jerk who took your parking space.

Ask yourself this brave question, “What am I feeling?”

Keep asking. Sit with it.

Go on. I dare you. I double-dog dare you.