Holden and Jamie rewrite finished March 9, 2014

Story in zine by anonymous shrink about his relationship with two patients & their working relationship which he arranged & promoted. Takes place now in Vancouver, CAN.

Holden and Jamie

By Tremain Haynes

rewrite finished March 09, 2014 // 22,425 words

 

“Holden and Jamie” by Anonymous, first appeared in the February, 2012 issue of the British Columbia Psychiatric Quarterly.

I wrote this account of my work with Jamie Crow and Holden Manners because they were among my most interesting patients, from a psychiatric perspective. And, if I may be candid and use a layman's term, I will also state that they stand out as my favorites. The story of how the three of us interconnected is unorthodox. I have only waited for retirement age and financial security to make it known. I hope it will serve as a beacon or standard to young professionals if something like it occurs while treating their clients. And I’m sure practitioners of my generation will find their own parallels which they, too, may have held back. For anonymity and privacy I have changed the names and dates.

•* * * * * * * * *

Jamie:

Jamie Fredericks, born Jamie Crow, was one of my first patients after I got my licence to practice psychiatry. She brought a mountain of baggage. You could say I ‘cut my psychoanalytic teeth’ opening and closing the trunks of her past with her. An extended first chew of the apple she turned out to be. In 1975 I had just begun working in the field. I was a fresh faced innocent making new friends everywhere on the campus at the University of British Columbia. Along with Jamie also came my first professional disillusionment. It was over the limitations of psychiatry to help the mentally ill. Starting out, my own goals were tinged with a vague messianic hue. These ideas had been lodged in my head like a feather in a hatband since my youth and I looked forward to serving high standards. But Nick Fredericks flushed out this tincture of idealism by threatening my fledgling career when he said he would blackball me with slander and lies should I perchance decline to work with his lovely wife. He buttonholed me and said “You will take her on. Or just see what happens to your career.” He had tenure, prestige, and power; I had none.

The fact that such a dastardly act was even possible - before I had made one enemy or scored a single black mark against my name �" was a sickening realization. One look into Nick’s resolute eyes convinced me that he did not make idle threats. I looked twice at my own grasp of reality and found it wanting.

Abrasive, aggressive, authoritarian - in the halls of academe for this and other reasons Nick was The Ugly American. But we only whispered it watchfully, ‘Ugly American,’ behind his back. This grasping, obsessed little Hitler struck terror into everyone he perceived as a threat. When they drafted him to UBC’s English Department in the late ‘Sixties, he stood out as a young, promising, and erudite English professor. Nick, who hailed from Louisiana, had dropped his accent at Northern schools. But his speech was still stridently American in tone and so it remained. Yes, the world knows Fredericks was monumentally intelligent and his students worshiped him. That he loved his work, took it seriously, and brought brilliance and passion to his lectures was not in doubt. But the faculty he worked with, those who knew him, never wondered how low he would stoop for his own ends. Nick the Prick was another tag that followed him.

I don’t know why he chose me to treat his wife. As I said, I had no track record and it may have been just for convenience: I was there. I would learn that Nick never troubled much over the welfare of wives: his women existed for him. At first, Jamie was a challenge. She came to me a most reluctant patient, embarrassed to be talking to a shrink. She loved Nick and Nick loved her. Why did Nick want her to talk to me, she kept saying, half to herself? She did not need help, thank you very much! So it began.

Psychiatry only succeeds if we can bring emotion to the surface. We work hard to do that, often in dark mental recesses. Most patients repress emotion - that is one source of their trouble - and she was no different. Jamie had a textbook passive personality and in childhood she had mastered the art of checking her emotions. This came from growing up with a domineering father whose behavior was irrational and unpredictable. He was a cold man, frightened by his own shadow, and unresponsive to any display of feeling and emotion in those around him. And aggressive, narcissistic, monomaniac Nick had demonstrated that female assertiveness was unbecoming and intolerable. He had tried alcohol to control Jamie, to get the most out of her. At first it did make her amenable to his will. But all too quickly she liked it rather much and vodka became her li'l buddy. Then her loose tongued misbehaviour grew to embarrassing proportions. It interfered with his philandering and mischief. She was no longer just his wife but a tiresome problem. People talked and, worse, they laughed. It was undignified. Just ignoring it, which was often enough to make unpleasantness go away, would not be the ticket this time. They were married, and Jamie clung like the white flakes that powdered the shoulder pads of his shiny dark suits. Damn her for not being manlier!

At this point Jamie’s father, Ross, at last woke up. A retired plastic surgeon and widower, indifferent until something of his came under threat, what he saw finally outraged him. Jamie was no longer acting like his daughter and Ross knew who to blame. He had always loathed Fredericks and deplored Jamie’s choice of beau. A man twice divorced, with his favorite daughter! Despicable! Ross was one of few who stood up to his son in law. (Ross was a bit obtuse on the subject of human nature and human relations.) He was also one of the few people Nick treated with respect. (Ross was a relative with property and money.) Eventually he badgered Nick long enough that he found psychiatric help for Jamie. He might very well not have lifted a finger for her otherwise. Nick never stopped buying things so even with combined incomes their finances were underfunded. But never having spent anything on wives before, he was not about to change his habits and begin with my bills. The result was that he manoeuvred the old man into it.

Once we began psychoanalysis it became evident that Jamie had married Nick under the spell of his intellect, his silver tongue, and his academic gifts and prestige. She was always academically competitive (her only aggressive urge) and deferential towards scholastic brilliance. As Nick’s intellectual equal, surely their marriage was meant to be. But, in my opinion, her dream of a happy, enduring marriage relationship with an impossible man was always doomed. And a marriage based on wordy bookish one upsmanship in an academic hothouse was shakier still. Fault lines soon appeared.

Marguerite and Ross did not enlighten their daughters on the matter of love by their example. Out of love after six months of marriage, they had nothing to teach them on this complex and troublesome emotion. Ross never understood it. Marguerite started marriage a believer and a hopeful, bright, joyous woman. She brimmed with love for her children while they all lived at home. It was she who held them all together while he made a mess of everything. After they left, living alone with Ross �" a complete stranger �" she pined for the offsetting excitement of teenagers and company. Without affection she withered. Not yet old but no longer young, she must have asked herself, did I give it all away to a fool?

In appearance Jamie was a female version of Nick. They were both middle height and like him she also smoked. Ashes formed a fine dusty membrane over her clothing just as they did on his. Her fingertips were nicotine stained and her nails were a deep shade of brown mucous yellow. She only wore conservative cut wools and tweeds - dresses, skirts and blouses, and suits, never slacks. She preferred the English style, which on her read as dowdy. Her stockings always had gaping runs which allowed her hairy, pale skinned legs to show. Her sturdy shoes were scuffed at the toe and down at the heel. All her garments were spotted, faded, torn at the seams, and so threadbare that no thrift store would have taken them.  She had become what he’d wanted, a ragged slave living and working to feed the flames of his hydra headed desire. Sacrifice had achieved less than nothing: besides that he’d made her an alcoholic.

After Jamie and I had become solid friends, Jamie showed me a twenty year old photo of a young woman with a proud, confident smile and a clear complexion. It took a moment to recognize her. In youth she had been pleasing to look at. She wore lipstick and a fashionable bouffant that suited her face. Her plucked eyebrows looked animated. She had on her mother’s pearls with one of Marguerite’s tailored dignified Edward Chapman suits. A confident light shone in her young eyes. But it was hard to see that Jamie Crow in the pickled, bitter, guilt ridden Mrs. Fredericks. There she sat, wanting reassurance that her life was not over, this scared, middle age woman with hair that looked like a fright wig. She now had blotchy skin, a mousy moustache, and dark ringed eyes under brows that formed a distinct bridge over her nose.

In the photo she was a student at UBC; at the top of her class �" a place where she felt at home and worked with diligence to hold on to. She had earned a degree in English Lit. Faulkner was her favorite American writer and ‘Metaphor in As I Lay Dying’ became the subject of her graduate thesis. So it is not unthinkable that in later life, she may have thought back to the plot of the novel. I don’t think it is farfetched that Mrs. Fredericks might have identified with Addie Bundren. She would have found good reason to. I know for a fact that it was her favorite Faulkner and she reread it more than once. So, I wonder, did she ever see herself as Addie, dragged in her plank coffin from her cabin to Jefferson where she wanted to be buried? While they were married Nick pushed Jamie around, half comatose, in a coffin of liquor. Did she ever recognize her former self in Addie? There were other parallels. For instance, Jamie was the third of four Mrs. Fredericks’s. And Nick, while more confident and articulate, still made a perfect stand-in for the weak, dissimulating, self-centered Anse. And both husbands were southerners. When I think of their relationship I recall that closing line - terse, surprising, just perfect - “Meet Mrs. Bundren”. I always feel an urge to swap it for “Meet Mrs. Fredericks”. If I can see the sublime irony in the two relationships, Jamie could see it too. But I've never dared to raise the subject and I will not belabor my point. I don’t want to slight Jamie’s dignity.

Marguerite, Nick, Dante, and Ross:

Jamie judged her attempt to escape Ross’s domination, to find Jamie, to soar to freedom on the wings of a foolish marriage a humiliating calamity. What’s more, everyone but her mother had ‘told her so’. Jamie knew something else no one would have said to her face. It was that her mother had sacrificed all her potential to a small minded, unworthy man. This kind of thing was not so unusual. Women rarely had lives in those days. Marguerite had squeezed herself into an ill fitting corset of convention and middle class conformity and stood by as Ross’s personality tore them apart. Yes, she had been weak and trusted men. In her own marriage Jamie, too, found herself tightly corked and subdued by cunning strictures devised by Nick. She had had no prior experience with the beasts. With no basis for judging them she ought never to have looked for happiness among them. Men are egotistical and unstable, and one is more likely to find a hard one than a good one. But how can a pretty, honorable young scholar know all that vis-a-vis life before tasting the wine? She placed her material future and emotional well being in the hands of a conniving, wild manipulator. Now he was dead and gone. What had she done? Where was her pride? Her only successes in life were past tense: intellectual and small. It was difficult to find Jamie now in the debris.

“Where was I while Nick was beating Dante into a cynical, resentful loner with nothing but contempt for both of us?” she said. “I was nothing. A shell! Nick was merciless. He beat Dante while he was small and couldn’t retaliate. But when he got big and stood his ground, and said if he hit him again he would crack his head open �" I remember the words �" Dante said that, ‘I’ll crack your head open’ - Nick turned to psychological abuse, insults and terrible harsh criticism. Nick was an expert at that too, let me tell you.

“Dante couldn’t understand why I allowed Nick to hurt him. But alcohol crippled me; I was helpless. And I was afraid! Yes, we both were terrified of the b*****d. Both of us.

“Imagine a house filled with tension like that, always having to p***y foot around on tenterhooks. It was impossible to breathe at times! Doors slamming! Verbal explosions! The two of them at it, day and night. It was only a question of when, when would they kill each other. I was sure they would. Such hatred between them! It got so bad that I drank in my bedroom. It became my sanctuary, my refuge.”

“Why do you think Nick was that way?” I asked her. I already had my opinion.

“Nick was orphaned and adopted. That played a part in it. I don’t know. He was short, too, of course �" the Napoleon Complex bit definitely fits. And you know how he loved the spotlight. He love debate; he loved winning. More than winning, he loved defeating other people, watching them squirm and suffer. You saw it. When the spotlight began to fall on Dante, inevitably what with his being such a bright, pretty child, Nick got very jealous. Jealousy always made him ugly. He couldn’t stand not to be on top, not for a minute He became hideous, a seething, small but not insignificant and not harmless man. Nick’s face could take on a million characters, like Laughton’s. It was no use, him trying to hide his feelings. Every mood, everything showed. He stopped at nothing to keep Dante down. Aside from naming him when he couldn't convince me to kill him, and trying to turn him into a deformed and dim reflection of his own glory, Nick wanted nothing to do with Dante. It’s no wonder my son’s screwed up. It’s not hard to destroy a child, if that’s what you want. That’s what Nick wanted.”

She blamed herself as well as Nick for Dante’s childhood. When he became a man Dante kept his distance from Nick. Their loathing and distrust were palpable and he wouldn’t let Nick near his grandson after he was born. As a teenager he did his best to hurt both parents. Nick was impervious but Jamie cared a great deal; she appreciated his scepticism and shared his pain. After she got sober, Jamie tried to patiently patch up a maternal relationship with him and won back a measure of trust.

At first admitting helplessness was painful for her and it took a while before Jamie would go to an AA meeting. But when she did it became the foundation of a restored, more confident, and wiser woman. She took control; slipped; got back on board; slipped again; recovered again; and decisively fell no more. Soon she felt secure enough to forego meetings and carry on alone. (Jamie was not a ‘meeting person’, which made her like the majority of those who seek their help to abstain. AA provides support mechanisms that allow you to gain enough control to dominate your compulsion. After a while most move on and go it alone. For the rest AA is a demi-religion, with procedures and formulas, sayings and rules - a structure many members need to stay sober.)

Energy, confidence and resolve replaced alcohol. When she saw what a mistake her marriage had been, she separated and a year later she and Nick divorced. Though even in death the spider entranced her, his sticky web crumbled when he taunted her with the name of the next human host he pinned down in his fourth and final marriage. By then, with no option or income but dwindling and unpredictable academic work, she was already living with Ross.

Meanwhile Nick’s dark side �" Nick’s revenge! -  made everyone shudder. It had flowered like a fragrant, deadly red oleander in the wild, mixed back garden of Dante’s personality. Among other things, Dante was willful, stubborn, and deceitful with everyone: Jamie, Susanne, and even himself. He was a weakling pretending to be strong, a second rate Nick �" precisely as Nick intended. Overweight and in his late thirties, he did less and less to hide these things and got little respect. Lacking the funds to make repairs, things fell apart at home. If a personal computer let him down, instead of going to a shop to repair it or get advice he would buy a new one on credit. He'd hemmed himself in by poor conventional choices made in his hot blooded youth. His early marriage, a mediocre wife, three children, and a low level academic career were traps that took their toll.

Dante, much to his chagrin, found himself following Nick’s behavioral pattern: he took out his failures, disappointments, and frustrations on his son from the time Adam was a child. He imposed his own goals on his hockey loving little boy and treated him with the high handed intimidation that teachers were forbidden to use at Saint Anthony’s. Adam suffered Dante’s abuse when he fell short of his father’s academic standards. But Adam grew into a Twenty First Century teenager, a strapping athlete of a generation that recognized abuse as something sick and criminal and themselves as the victims. He did not understand the psychology behind it but he knew his dad’s rages were unfair and self serving. He stood up to Dante, answered back sharply, and would not put up with it. Like Dante, he also threatened to retaliate. This brought on similar monumental shouting matches and stand offs. They threw Dante’s family into turmoil. The saddest thing about it was that it was all about hubris. Finally one night Adam, who was taller than Dante, called him a pathetic b*****d, stomped out, and went off to smoke pot with friends who shared his plight. In his day Dante would never have done that. Jamie and everyone had dreaded that someone in their family might turn to the great anathema of drugs. They learned where he went and what he did the next day when Adam came home scruffy and unapologetic, his clothes reeking. By then it was too late - the worst had already happened. Anxiety levels rose accordingly, but not Adam’s. This act, childish and full of temperament, turned the tables in his favor for now they all were anxious for the teenager’s welfare and his future. Now they couldn’t do enough for him and fell all over themselves to help. Adam looked at them askance. Had they all gone mad? Was it an instance of ‘The sins of the father’ visited tenfold? Was Nick controlling them from the grave?

Such were among the highs and lows of life while raising a family in Ladner in 2004. Like his parents, Dante had become a private school teacher. His salary would not allow him to live in the working class style he felt entitled to. Such dreams were the stuff of social history as the middle class continued to melt away in the first decade of the new millennium. He could not even afford private school for his kids. Since Nick was no longer taking her income, Jamie now funnelled a large part of it towards their tuition. She insisted on it. Schooling, good private schooling, was the first component of a happy life. Though aware of their shortcomings, she loved her grandchildren. She would have laid down her life just as she laid down her money for them. She took their development into well functioning adults seriously, and would have been more involved except for having to remain separate. Susanne made her feel unwelcome. Jamie resented it, but she followed the rule: help, don’t interfere. Participation had to be on Susanne’s terms, Dante being largely his wife’s creature. (“Happy wife, happy life,” he said, abdicating with this absurd slogan.) They agreed with Jamie on the schooling issue and accepted her financial help. But noses were out of joint and their gratitude paltry. They thanked her only in a clipped fashion.

Her father went on record that he was happy to have her back in his big, wood framed Queen Anne. Implying affection as it did, this was quite an admission from a grizzled Scot like Ross Crow. Jamie was in a sense also happy that she was there - at least happier there than anywhere else. She felt more secure on her own, i.e. without Nick, but she could not afford to rent an apartment and help Dante, too. In her entire life she had never lived alone and still did not know that she would care to. She loved the old family manse and its memories - some of them. Jamie tried to ignore its shabby state of disrepair. The holes in the roof, the peeling paint were not her problem, she told herself. Ross - could she ever make him admit the need to address them - could afford to tackle the problems if they dealt with them one at a time.

He had stopped keeping up the house just before Marguerite died as she entered the last phase of her illness, two bedridden years shortly after Dante’s birth. During the entire time he flatly refused to even believe that she was sick and did nothing for her as a physician. She succumbed to cirrhosis in great pain while Ross stood by. For that Jamie never forgave him.

“He’s a stupid, stupid man!” she told me, this admission being the fruit of long, subtle coaxing. “And isn’t it just amazing how easy he recovered from his mistake? ‘Mistake’ is not the word but I don’t know what is. I swear when mother got too sick to be of any use to him, he just closed the door on her so he wouldn’t hear her call for help. Oh, he went through the motions, went around beating his breast for a few months afterwards �" ‘Woe is me! Mea culpa!’ But then he got right back in the swing like nothing had happened �" and he expected us to simply forgive him! Water under the bridge and all that s**t! That took some brass.”

She was embarrassed to own her dad but at least she had definitively expressed herself to me on the matter. It would require resentment the size of Stanley Park before she would ever tell him, however - or tell anyone else but me. If she did, I thought, it would come out incoherent and muffled, like a moan under three blankets. (And she wondered why people ignored her!) No, she would never more than mumble her sufferings through clenched teeth, in vague and qualifying terms. Jamie had too much Marguerite in her; she would rather suppress than be clear. But among her strong points she claimed other qualities from Marguerite. She was proud of traits like empathy, patience, courage, fortitude, and generosity. Her parents had both adored Jamie, but it was only Marguerite who praised her to the sky and told her she could be anything she wanted. They had a close relationship and Jamie spoke glowingly of her mother. She was also the only other one who found things to like in Nick.

“He loved her, too. Mom was the only one who treated him with respect.”

Thus she created a raft of problems, one after another. Her ability to carry so many at once, like an ever expanding sack of kindling across her sturdy back, astonished me. She plodded on in silence. If I had to liken her to an animal it would be to the slow moving desert tortoise. These ignored creatures achieve great age within a cumbersome shell while they bumble over parched, inhospitable terrain. They live on cacti and spend most of their lives in a burrow. What was Jamie’s element, I wondered? Not water �" she didn’t even like to wash �" hygiene was boring! It was air. From the start she knew she belonged in the airy fields of Academe. What she excelled in and loved was investigative research. It began with sleuthing through libraries and files and culminated in later years in combing the internet. (I admit this was not an airy working environment). A single woman in scholastic pursuits needing no partner - that was her airy métier.

Her bitterness increased after Nick’s death in 2002. For the first time in her life Jamie found herself unemployed with nothing to do. Cutbacks, they claimed. She spent the following weeks, months, and then years, supine and sober in a smoke filled bedroom devouring pack after pack. Alcohol did not even tempt her. She dwelt on failure and betrayal and passed most days alone. She had been demoted to editing student term papers for a pittance - editing was another forte. She also did a bit of ‘research’, and played innumerable games of laptop mah-jong. She kept up her self-respect but three years later her future was still unsettled. She felt like a has-been as she neared pension age. She had filed her applications; there was no point in not. Jamie tried to pass the buck but knew this depression was largely her doing. Unfortunately it was her nature to harbour resentment. And especially in idleness she clung and hearkened to it with tight lipped rage as if her indignation were the Old Testament and she a prophet. Every time I thought we had cleared away one or two grievances she would resurrect another. Observing Jamie at this reinforced the fact that psychiatry is not a panacea but a palliative. It allows patients a foothold towards recovery, but for various reasons, not always blameless, they slip.

Jamie had the invincible Crow constitution. Despite laziness, an unhealthy diet, and a gross smoker’s rattle that had settled in her chest, Jamie could live a hundred years. There is longevity in her genes. Ross’s sister was ninety five, healthy, and going strong. She still lived alone in her own home. And Ross had little physical wrong to complain of. He was in his mid-eighties and had been energetic and on his own, too, until macular degeneration in both eyes slowed him down. Then he fell at home and sustained minor hip injury. So shocked was he by this event that he tailspinned into sullenness and believed death was around the corner and ready to pounce. He began to harp on imminent departure with an irritating and growing conviction at every sneeze and sniffle.

Ross made a good living and saved his money. He was never much more than that, however, never what you would call a thinker, creative, or deep or remarkable in any way. He fitted uncomfortably into local society, which was never warm and welcoming anyway. Jamie expected nothing of him in either regard. But to take to his bed and let himself believe he was dying because of a trifling fall with almost no injury was a new low. And it infuriated Jamie that he let it excuse him from attending to the dilapidated condition of their house. It was becoming the neighborhood eyesore and an acute embarrassment. Some things posed a danger.

With care and planning Jamie proposed rebuilding the original eighty year old wooden back stairs off the kitchen. It was currently a treacherous, termite ridden route to the garden and everyone’s principle access to and from the house.

He replied “When I’m gone you’ll have all the money and you can fix it up any way you want. You won’t have to wait long.”

“This is the offhand, evasive way he talks,” she said “And it’s not true. Some repairs can’t wait. And when he does die we may sell it. We’ll have to, especially if we can’t agree on which one of us gets it. We’re already in arms over it and of course you already know I won’t get ‘all the money’! There are three of us. That’s more of his BS.”

She had two younger sisters. Kyle, the youngest, had a husband and three teenagers in Australia. She was a shrewd, grasping hornet who wanted it all. Willful and self-absorbed like Ross, she had the means and temperament to go to war for it. Tory, the middle sister, lived alone on Cortez Island in order to avoid contact with her father. Ross cared least for this middle child. He had not tried to understand her, and did not oppose her move there. Tory was strange; not all there, he said. She chose to be a shepherd and tend a flock of stray animals in a tiny, crowded trailer on a small patch of land with a minute vegetable garden. His ‘remittance daughter’, she managed on social assistance with a small additional stipend. Jamie browbeat Ross into giving it to her, a monthly cheque she wrote herself and Ross signed. Jamie was Tory’s closest friend but Tory liked her own company. She was shy and set in her ways which gave her a low tolerance for guests, who all had their own ways. Jamie, with her cigarettes and her absent mindedness could be annoying after an hour. Her rare, brief visits to Cortez were always abridged for one made-up reason or another. Jamie failed to understand. It felt like rejection.

“It’ll be a long time before he dies. When he does, there’ll be a two way battle royal, Tory abstaining. There’s nothing I can do. I’m dreading it. All I want is a fair, equal share. I’ll split it with Dante and take a long, long trip to Scotland and England. Maybe I’ll stay there.”

She was dreaming. There wouldn’t be that much money and she was too Canadian to leave.

When he fell Ross took to his bed in what had been the old panelled study on the main floor. He was refusing to do any of the mild physiotherapy prescribed to restore his mobility, which could have been easily fixed. Neither would he take any of the medications prescribed. It was strange that a doctor should have no faith in the efficacy of modern medicine. Had it been left up to him, Marguerite would have gotten no relief when she lay dying. But Jamie saw to it that she did. As a doctor he chose plastic surgery, a lucrative profession but a narrow and shallow range of competence. Ross became uncomfortable, irritable, and mum when asked for his opinion on medical questions outside of it.

The one tiny good to come of his fall, as far as Jamie was concerned, was that after it, insisting that he could no longer climb, she got the bright master bedroom. The only showering facility also being up there, a long climb away, the fall now provided a pretext for Ross to never shower again. This was to his satisfaction, too, for, as with medicine, he was no believer in the science of hygiene. Henceforth he would manage perfunctory ablutions in the powder room adjoining the study.

“It’s as if he planned the whole thing” she said. This came on a day when she was feeling acute indignation and frustration over a string of humiliations. “It all fell into place for him, everything just the way he wants it. He won’t leave the house and now he insists on a walker! And he expects me to take care of him. Me! I won’t though. I don’t mind cooking, once in a while. But three times a day? No thanks! And cleaning? It just isn’t me. I’m not a nurse. Mother wanted to be a nurse. She needed to express herself. But Dad wouldn’t hear of her working. He would have lost face.”

Along with Ross’s stony lethargy came further muscular atrophy and sclerotic stiffness. He stayed in bed as much as Jamie let him. When he felt more than the usual degree of boredom with this pointless existence, a vague now-and-then wish to be gone, or absent came over him.

“It’s not a death wish,” she explained. “A ‘death wish’ is a Romantic, literary concept. He could never get his head around something like that” she said. “It’s too deep for him! No. There’s no poetry in dad! He just wishes he were already dead or not here anymore �" that’s what it’s like. God, he’s lazy! That’s what I live with.”

Jamie couched her frustration over his stubbornness in words like these as I tried to bring her emotions into the light. They helped her gain a fuller understanding of her father and his state of mind. She thought she knew him well but with his new slight handicap he displayed other characteristics she found disheartening. She grew furious over wasting her time catering to a growing list of whims. No rational argument on the benefits of exercise altered his behavior, but she persisted. Neither argument nor debate, she was now lecturing to a selectively-hard-of-hearing father. Ross had never been reasonable, and both of them were unbending.

By 2004 my career had moved far along pretty much without blips. I was established; respected, and well paid - extremely busy �" overworked, really - at both VGH and St. Paul’s. I deemed myself entitled to frequent R and R with my partner, Damon. To our eternal grief, he had advanced lung cancer. During a remission or when he felt well enough, we compensated with either long weekends at our cottage or by travelling. We went first class all over the world and stayed in the best hotels where he could have every attention and comfort. Globetrotting was always our addiction, before and after he was diagnosed.

 

Holden:

Also in 2004, in the winter, by dint of an unrelated normal procedure I began to work with Holden Manners. The practice was the random assignment of new patients at the Outpatient Clinic at St. Paul’s Psychiatric. At his request his GP had referred him; his name came through the channel; and as I had a vacancy his paperwork fell on my desk. It was that simple; a happy, fateful fluke for us both.

Holden’s complaint was ‘depression’ - by far the most recurring symptom we face. We treat depression like every non-life-threatening psychiatric condition. We offer drug therapy to relieve anxiety so patients can express their feelings. In psychoanalysis, therapists become reflective surfaces. We give back to patients what they reveal about themselves in ways that help them see their lives from another perspective. We try to take them to the root of their difficulties, help them to modify their behavior when possible and live with the person they are. Before we can begin we must first earn trust.

Holden laid claim to ongoing cyclical depression. It had been treated without success with group therapy and drugs on and off over thirty years. Now the problem was back and it was my turn. For some reason none of his previous psychiatrists had tried one on one psychoanalysis.

I found him, at sixty, to be sensitive, observant, unorthodox, and worldly. He was also his own favorite laughing stock. The world is always shy of people who know themselves and can laugh at their shortcomings: from the outset we connected. He was stimulating to listen to, and he found me approachable and perceptive. Holden made it clear without saying it outright that conformity and conservatism were not to his liking and that his own views were contrarian. He spoke in the language of his generation and his experience. As a well read individual, in his brief silences before answering a question you could see his mind selecting, stringing and arranging his words and phrases. He loved using or placing them in unexpected places and ways and when he did I was always taken by it. He was articulate, a fascinating raconteur and, more to his credit, a self-made individual. Unlike many patients, he was capable and unafraid of explaining himself, bright and open.

He said “It’s too late now to worry about what anyone else thinks of me and what I did and didn’t do. I try not to be too harsh or too forgiving about the past.”

He often misunderstood his motivations but that, of course, was his reason for being there. Though in excellent health, Holden heard the clock growing louder. He was much more afraid of living too long than afraid of dying. He said he wanted help so he could enjoy the good years left to him as much as he had the others. It was up to me to ask the right questions and phrase them just so.

From day one he referred to himself as a loser. But he said it with a smile, as though the station was a noble brotherhood, not the highest or the lowest, and he did not hold it too much against himself. As he went deeper, I found a complex, enigmatic man - not a loser, but someone who had never engaged. Why? There had to be a link but the reason for this disconnection evaded me. He kept donning new personas all of which suited him at first, then did not. I did not understand but I was taken up by the pursuit.

A six pack, a bottle of wine, a few sips of gin, or a few glasses of scotch plus BC Bud from morning to night: he call that his maintenance level. When he partied, he indulged a bit more. He did not see alcohol as the problem yet. This was not unusual.

“I usually pass out early at my own parties. But my guests carry on without me. They’re used to it. Playing host is hard work and I get tired. Getting old” he said. For Holden this routine was the norm. He was not working much and could sleep it off. He admitted he didn’t like the situation and would have preferred to have something else to do besides drink and toke. It was boring him.

“Sometimes when I’m by myself I get this panic in my chest. It’s like emptiness. It just kind of sweeps over me and then it goes. This is new but it’s getting more frequent. I hate it.” he said. I could sense the urgency coming around again.

These are not easy fires to control or put out and they still raged and blocked the way to change. Much of his frustration, what he called failure, was thriving in this dark fertile mud of dependency. But what was the cause of it over three decades? He told me how much worse his life had been before, while he was still on hard drugs. Long before we met he had, on his own, whittled it down to alcohol and pot, but only after first being busted. This proved that he had self control but crisis was needed to trigger it.

When I meet a patient capable of modifying his own behavior, I must wonder if he is in fact dependent in the physical or psychological sense, or both. After all these years I’m still not sure there is a distinction. In the end it did not matter whether his was a physical or psychological addiction, or both. After two months of fleshing out his story, gaps and questions remaining, I believed I could help him.

Though reluctant to say the word, after dancing all around it for that long he finally said

“I guess I’m an alcoholic.”

I did not wait to pounce. “Holden,” I said, “I can do little more for you now unless you help yourself. You have to face it: you need help. AA is the first and best alternative to addiction and I suggest you go to them and try to quit. If you can do that, I think we can go far.”

He had only been waiting to hear me say it. Over the previous year he’d quit several times on his own but couldn’t stay sober. Holden was stronger than he took credit for but did not know how to shed those last two compulsions. He needed tough, experienced support. Holden had a friend in AA delighted to sponsor him, as they always are. After two more weeks of dithering she chaperoned him to his first meeting. There would be no looking back. He had desperately wanted to make changes and he didn’t need to know where they might lead. He was weary - of himself and of repeating the past. But with no idea what he wanted other than an end to passing out, to hangovers, to drinking alone, and to desperation, AA was the first step.

“It’s so strange,” he said looking back later. “I’m getting pleasure from sobriety now, after always looking to booze for it. I never expected sobriety could be so pleasant. It’s like childhood. You can’t go back but it looks like I’ve stumbled upon some kind of lost innocence. Well, maybe not innocence, but, you know. . .”

His energy returned just as Jamie’s had in her turn a few years earlier. It was unlike anything he’d known. This wasn’t youth but it would last longer. And another reason to ask how it had enslaved him- physical or mental: once he joined AA and simultaneously gave up pot and booze, he never craved a drink or toked again. He experienced none of the physical symptoms of withdrawal. After thirty years of substance abuse he became a born again teetotaller and then asked why he had ever followed that road in the first place.

A good question and I let him try to answer it. To start he looked for it in his teenage years. The first one he came up with was

“Peer pressure!”

It sounded as though he had pulled something out of a hat. But it didn’t satisfy him long. It was too easy and he didn’t trust it. He thought harder, and looked further back. He remembered that in fact he had not been a follower but a leader, exerting pressure on others to drink with him. It had begun with the fact that his parents, who did not ‘drink’ and almost never opened it, kept liquor - a stock of it, for guests, in the dining room buffet. This was a widespread practice in the ‘Fifties inspired by a recommendation to housewives that appeared in Good Housekeeping.

“I was alone in the house most afternoons. I got bored and I guess I became curious about their stash. Boredom! I was there. It was there. And I couldn’t leave it alone. I remember the springy tight sound of the cabinet door opening �" impossible to do it silently no matter how hard I tried. I must have thought that it was wrong or why did I try so hard not to make a sound? I mean, I was alone. I guess that was part of it. I helped myself to sips, little tastes. That was how it started. I must have been ten. It’s strange because for the longest time I didn’t even like it. But I kept going back, as if I had an obligation to like it, you know? I got my friends, a little younger, to sip with me once. A sip, I said. A tiny little sip. I gave it to them in mom’s delicate little heirloom liqueurs. Cherry Heering, I think I gave them �" I thought they’d like the deep, deep purple red. But they hated the taste and I could never get them to do it after that. I went back to sipping alone. I never got high. Christ I was innocent. I had some slight notion that if you drank enough it would change your mood �" make you silly or something - but I had no idea what ‘high’ was. So I still don’t see the appeal of it. What was it? The colors? The aromas? Fruitiness? The social thing? The fact that they kept it in a cabinet? When I learned mixology �" what a joke! - I diluted it with juice. Then I didn’t mind the taste. I even started to like it. So it wasn’t peer pressure at all. Not with booze anyway. I guess I still don’t know why I did it, do I?

“Now cigarettes, that was peer pressure. My friends smoked. I wanted to fit in. Magazine ads. James Dean. Movies. TV. It looked so cool. Really, tobacco was another thing. Still it took me a long time to learn to like them.”

How much he ever really needed these things is now anyone’s guess. But habit is another thing. They form very early. And show me the line between habit and addiction. By twenty every party required a major alcohol component for Holden. By sixty, when he was in AA and could talk about himself to me with a degree of acceptance and some understanding, such moments were at once moments of revelation and self-confession.

He channeled his freshly revived joie de vivre into journaling, an activity AA encourages. It’s a productive way to keep track of progress, ‘a day at a time,’ and divert the mind from the urge to drink. New AA members commonly fall back before they see that moderate drinking is impossible and slip no more. But Holden did not experience sobriety this way; his path from temperance onward was straight. He was finished with it from meeting one.

Before I met Holden he had lived in a ground level garden suite on Kits Point. He paid a nominal amount and did a few household services in lieu of what would otherwise have been high market rent. Prior to that, he had lived for two years with his father in Hamilton, returning there after his mother died. His father was in his late eighties and needed a caregiver in order to stay in his home. Holden, who had done this work for years, slipped right into the part. But when his father died and he came back, after being away so long, it was impossible to find enough private care giving work to support him. Jobs came and went - never steady, or easy, or satisfying, and never enough hours. He had no certification, having entered the field ‘unofficially’ through a ‘side door’. He did it by following the course of various other ‘careers’, housekeeping being the last, that fed off each other in a way that led to it.

He spoke touchingly about care giving �" the dream and the reality. He used words tinged with an air of general frustration and disappointment older men like him experience. Some of it applies to what I do.

“You know, you start out just wanting to help people. Right? You think care giving is a good and honorable way to do it, a decent way to live and make a fair living. And I thought if I could do it outside the restricting conventional rigmarole, privately, in the cash economy, so much the better. And it turned out I could because there was a call for it and I had the talent and the skills. Actually that’s the only way I would have done it; I wouldn’t have gone back to school for certification �" too complicated and too long. I don’t like school. So I’m not qualified to look after anyone who needs constant medical attention. I’m just a housekeeper companion type care giver. There are loads of reasonably healthy old people who only need that level of care. So, anyway, I thought, I’ll just go and make some poor suffering soul’s life easier. I’ll make a living and the other guy will be taken care of. Everyone will feel good. I’ll be doing something good for someone in need, right? Ha! If only!

“Living with my Dad was a care giver’s dream. He was the perfect patient. He never complained. No, you know �" personality? Is that the word? Too much of that, like with Ross, that stubborn lump, can be a pain. My Dad was grateful for everything I did. We could talk rationally, whatever came up, and deal with anything there and then and be done with it. I love solving problems; not sweeping them under the carpet like Jamie does. If there’s a dark side to care giving, it’s family! The patient and their family usually want different things. The caregiver can’t make either one happy.

“That’s what soured everything between me and Mitch Fenton: it was his witch of a wife. Sherrill! She had to have everything her way. She didn’t care what he wanted. It was all her - Sherrill, Sherrill, Sherrill! She fired me three times before it finally ended. Well, I told you that. I’m sorry for repeating myself. An emotional rollercoaster is what it was; and poor Mitch, trembling with Parkinson’s, hardly able to make himself understood, caught in the middle. “Speak up, Mitch!” She used to shout that at him when he couldn’t make his tongue work. It was just awful. Oh, how I hated her for that! I suffered over leaving him in her hands. I still wonder what happened to him. We got along great without her there but, no, she just couldn’t leave us alone!

“I play shrink a lot. Guess you didn’t know that, did you? I mean I try and interpret what my employers are saying. They speak in tongues. Only they don’t respect me like they would you. Of course, I don’t need to tell you how much I know about married people and family relations. You already know. Nothing! By the time you get the full job description down pat, the ‘joy’, the satisfaction, the ‘spiritual reward’ has turned to you-know-what and it’s just work; hard work.”

For such a drawn out process Holden’s psychoanalysis was progressing well. I could almost imagine the day when I would rub my hands and call him one of my success stories. But then a long lost friend rose up like a ghost and the ground shifted. This was Dal, the disaster prone son of Corinne, the mother of all sorts of bad things. Her mishaps were the spawn of indifference and sloth. She had an irrational preference for taking the intoxicated view of reality. The story of Dal, Corinne, and Kelvin verifies that what he had told me about himself was true: at times Holden had been led by his peers. In this instance, when he met a group of new American expats in Kits in the ‘Seventies, he let them take him to his bottom. There he found life altering situations that branched like a river into tributaries that were still flowing when we met.

“It all started so innocently,” he said. “I was cruising in a gay club downtown, Faces. It was 1973; spring, a slow weeknight, late, a half hour or so to closing. The place was almost empty. I was ready to go when I saw this fresh faced curly haired red head, a stranger. He was in a green plaid shirt, sitting alone. I thought, what the -. I proposed we leave together. We drove back over the bridge in his powder blue VW bug to his place �" how deserted the bridge was. Just meeting someone with a car was a novelty.

“We weren’t a good fit, sexually. We didn’t make out. We were both disappointed. But in the morning we toked up and I discovered that after being in Canada for two days he already had better drugs than I did. (He got it from his landlord.) He had some to sell so I brought friends around to score. He had street smarts but he wasn’t all that bright, or funny �" though he tried - maybe a little too hard? He was a party animal and he wanted to be the center of attention. As long as he had what we wanted, he was, too. Isn’t it weird how when you get what you want, you don’t want it? It gets boring like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Then you want more, or you want something else. He was that way. Restless I guess that was it.

“That boy was Kelvin. He became a big player in our lives. Kelvin was very outgoing. I mean, in a word, a s**t. He turned out to be a major, major s**t. My Canadian friends were s***s, too, and a good fit - they hit it off. I’m not a s**t. I’m a prude, as you know. But I never minded that. He was on the lam, it turned out; skipped on his bail. The police were looking for him in the States so he came here. They wanted him for major drug peddling. And here he was, right back at it. Kelvin was Kelvin; he never changed his MO. He had no other talents. He never had a ‘job’ �" lucky him! Loved screwing the System every chance he got. They all did. A few days later, one by one, his friends started showing up. Scoundrels, every one! Except for Dal, of course. But what fun! We lived like there was no tomorrow, no consequences. That lasted a while. The rest is ‘Seventies folklore. Almost all of them died of AIDS long ago.

“You know, it strikes me as odd, but, thinking back, at first I felt something like I do now - quitting booze and dope and turning off it like this. I don’t want to be around people who are into those scenes any more. When I met Kelvin and those people I was a druggie, like them, but a Canadian druggie in a Canadian skin. I didn’t realize how different that made me until they showed up. I looked down on them - my drug brothers. I had no allegiance at all on that level. To me they were barbarian invaders. I was very suspicious of them. In some cases, rightly so. But that passed as I got more into the drugs. I lost my little twinge of paranoia along with my energy, my motivation and any trace of ambition, which wasn’t much as I recall. Maybe I’m a chameleon; I wear the colors around me.”

He met Dal and Corinne a few days later. Dal, a winsome hippy boy of five with waist length blond hair that had never been cut, was Corinne’s chief attraction. He was a bright child with few noticeable inhibitions and she used his charm as a lure, dragging him along wherever she went, her ‘ball ‘n chain’.

“Ball ‘n chain! A nice thing for a child to hear!” he said, reacting to it now as he did not at the time.

“Dal said, ‘What’s a ball ‘n chain, mom?’ the first time she said it. And she went into great detail for him �" not for his benefit but to get a laugh out of her other listeners. Us! It was heartless. And the worst of it is, we all laughed! God, we were as bad as her.”

Before they got to know her better Corinne gave the impression that she preferred the company of gay men. For the first two years, until they got landed, she and Dal lived with Kelvin in Kits. They fit in fine with the gay company that congregated around him, which included Holden and his friends. The new arrivals were people Kelvin and Corinne had known and lived with down south. Immediately, through Kelvin’s Kitsilano network all of them met the drug dealing lynchpins here. Some of the pharmaceuticals had different names but it was the same stuff. With every delicious slow poison so ready to hand, Corinne stayed put until her friends hinted that she had become a big fat troublesome nuisance.

**(If I sound a little too omniscient as I relate this story, I’m just summarizing my two patients and filling in the blanks with my own analysis based on what they told me.)**

Not one of this large crowd of quasi adults (Holden’s words), gave Dal the attention a six year old needs to grow into a well adjusted adult. That is admittedly a great deal and a strain even on loving parents. But in Kits no one even tried and everyone bad mouthed Dal's mother for neglect. So he grew up �" or grew stunted �" with these rogues. Dal was a handful, at the stage of constantly wanting answers when they arrived in Vancouver. For a while Corinne called him ‘Damn’ instead of Dal and then she nicknamed him E-D or ‘Ed’ for ‘energy drain’. The latter caught on. Once he understood it, it was a humiliation he could not forget or forgive a cruel and heartless taunt. But the overgrown children living around him were preoccupied with messing up their own shrunken lives and paid no attention to Dal’s setbacks.

Under this malignant spell Holden became addicted to downers. He started dealing them, and then through carelessness got himself busted. This slap in the face woke him up and made him see that he stood at the edge of a precipice. The devil-may-care and f**k-the-system attitude of his American friends did not suit him. It took a year to wean him off pharmaceuticals and a lot longer to turn his life around. For years afterwards he evaded the justice system under an assumed name.

Holden blamed himself for being weak and blind but he didn’t see his barbarian friends as inherently evil. He didn't care why they were here, if they were mere fools going about their business, as they seemed to be. The fact was, he no longer needed them and he moved on. But there was no escape for Dal and they spared him nothing. He was young and malleable, a charming, loveable blank slate. Growing up insecure around such people, hearing only their ego-inflating delusions and watching them act out were destructive. It twisted Dal's values, dreams, and potential. Normalcy would have been sweet but it was maligned and unattainable.

“Unfortunately, child Dal wasn’t superhuman. He was bright, gifted and relentlessly curious about everything. He drove us nuts with questions. But we loved him anyway. I used to want to cuddle him but he wouldn’t have it. I restrained myself. You can’t make them, you know. Adults would cuddle with kids a lot longer, I think �" at least I would. But they’ll only cuddle with you for three or four years, if you’re lucky �" and if you’re their parent!”

(Holden was fond of children, in a healthy way, but completely innocent about parenting. For someone who had never raised one he might have made a reasonably good babysitter with a young enough child. But a smart, older child could easily have tied him up and left him behind the sofa while he played video games all night �" especially a pretty child.)

“Dal begged Corinne to put him in school. He had no friends his age and he was stifled and bored around her. But Corinne didn’t enroll him until he was ten. She was afraid the system would f**k him up if they got hold of him sooner. But she didn’t need to wait for the system to do it; she ruined him on her own. So by ten it was too late: he was a misfit when he started and he gravitated towards the other misfits. There were plenty of them in Kits, too. He dropped out at sixteen and all he wanted was to work for a moving company and drive a ‘big rig’. Can you believe that? Pathetic! She didn’t encourage him to think big, did she? I never could figure out what went on in her head and I don’t believe anyone ever did. She was closed about it, her past, I mean, mostly. Very closed.

“Anyway, Dal was always fascinated with the wheel. I remember him in the park on his first two-wheeler, ear to ear smiles! I still have a photo. He was like the rest of us �" how could he not be? We raised him. Any ambition he might have had didn’t survive that enervating druggie environment, even though he had no taste for them. He witnessed everything. He watched his best friend’s dad OD. At sixteen Dal was energetic and enthusiastic. He fit right in with movers. They’re called swampers, the ones who do the lifting. Dal had a strong back. The company saw him coming and they hired him right away. He was reliable then, I guess. I don’t really know, of course. Of course, I wasn’t there and all this is just what he told me. I’d love to know the derivation of the word ‘swampers’.

“He never strayed far from Corinne but he knew how weak she was, and he must also have known that she was a man-hating manipulator. After he got out on his own they fought even more. I think what it comes down to is that their dependence on each other was boundless and absolute. The b***h was all he ever had and he really loved her. She was his everything. There was a lot of frustrated blocked love in him.”

Corinne lived a self destructive life. She ate poorly and abused drugs on a daily basis. Her penchant for short term relationships with losers and users often left her bruised and crying for vengeance. These things and the way she neglected her health brought on a series of debilitating strokes. One of them impaired her speech, crippled her whole left side including her face, and turned her mouth into a grotesque frozen grimace. Unable to work, she moved into subsidized housing off the Drive. She lost many pounds and several inches in height. Corinne needed Dal to score for her. It was the one way he could please her. He had been her candy man before but never her primary until then. He still had connections but he only went to them for her.

All his heroes had been users and his love hate paradigm was Corinne. That was his life. But after trying all of them, Dal admitted that his taste in drugs was pedestrian. He disliked everything except cider, Captain Morgan’s rum with the pirate on the label, and tobacco. “Liquor is quicker” he insisted, parroting her, the ‘cocktail girl’. He may have heard her say it once, for a laugh, but she never could put any limit on her own indulgence. To the end she remained a generalist, addicted to everything and nothing. And after all she’d done to raise him to an appreciation of the finer things; Dal’s preference for booze was disconcerting and embarrassing. What was a mother to do?

When she passed away suddenly, alone, in February of 2004, Dal had been an alcoholic for a long time. He spiralled down in bitterness, fear, and grief. How could she leave him that way?

Holden and Dal:

A few months later, in the spring, a reunion took place on the west side when Holden and Dal crossed paths at Kits Beach. Holden was taking his morning constitutional. Dal, thirty five and greatly altered �" picking up butts in the street, orphaned, and a little unhinged by failure, loneliness, and privation �" had borrowed two dollars on the east side to eat before going to work on the west side. He was feeling anxious. Did he have the time and date right? They’d fucked up the last time, told him the wrong day. He hoped so; he was desperate. He looked again at the crumpled note paper in his hand. Yes.

He happened to be sitting on a log with coffee and a donut from Tim’s, waiting there to start a move at 8AM when Holden walked past. They hadn’t seen each other in twenty years but he knew his friend lived in the neighborhood and, with that as a guidepost, he recognized him and called out several times. Holden, already informed of Corinne’s death through the grapevine, had had a premonition of seeing Dal soon again. He was startled but not altogether surprised to hear his name �" this was his daily routine, his walk; people knew each other here at this time of day. But he would not have known Dal until his subdued voice and his manner gave him away and the past came flooding back.

Holden could not wait to give me his news about reconnecting with Dal. He kept adding to the story as it developed and it grew posthaste. With little else happening, the actualization of his presentiment felt like a great deal more than that: after all, he had been consciously waiting for it. (I was relieved to see that he held to rational reservations on this point �" he did not believe in such ethereal realities. I did not advise him to do other than what he chose to do as that would have alienated us and left him dangling. But I did often urge caution.)

And he started out with at least a modicum of prudence. Events advanced in such leaps and bounds that I was very glad to be seeing him weekly. He needed to talk and think aloud with a neutral third party, to connect his distant past with the boy Dal he once knew and the large, hulking, dark reality of the present. Holden got hurt in the end but, as bad as it ended, it could have been far worse. With his support mechanisms functioning, he showed remarkably stability throughout this year long ordeal.

Their relationship gave his abstinent life another level of meaning, a goal. It became all about helping Dal. Unfortunately, he did not see how unrealistic it was. He lacked the life skills to assess this much younger man’s mental state, his past, his dependency, and his needs. He’d been absent for the last twenty years of his life. But fired by his mission, Holden jumped in and tried his hardest. He was fearless at his task and fortunate: it was as if some ethereal being was watching over him, guarding him as he bumbled through one dangerous episode after another. (He had told me at the start that he did not consider himself ‘lucky’ but ‘fortunate’ rather and the proof was that while he was poor he thought he was so much happier and better off than most ‘losers’.) The outcome felt inevitable to me after I came to know Dal through Holden. Nearer the end Dal and Holden felt it, too: Dal was killing himself with alcohol; he had cirrhosis. Frightening darkness gathered round us. Fortunately �" that word again - he had three structures, his amazing will to life, AA, and a devoted psychiatrist, to help him through it and they worked.

Holden had cut off contact with Corinne twenty five years before and the loss of Dal had just been concomitant to that. He had turned away and moved on. Doing anything for the boy had seemed impossible to him at the time. He had his own problems. Then seeing Dal in the park, a man of thirty five, revived all the feelings �" guilt prominent among them �" that Holden still had for the child he remembered. Perhaps abstinence made him feel responsible for Dal’s present condition. Believing that there was time, a few weeks later he had set out to help Dal the man. Along the way he would brush with danger more closely than he knew, and fail to appreciate just how muddled Dal’s life was until they became inextricable. Not only did Dal crave alcohol, he was ill. Holden, with his strong constitution, did not recognize the subtle symptoms of illness. Dal himself was only half aware how sick he was, ignoring the recurring, painful symptoms that wracked him. He was not even on welfare and had no medical assistance. Fearing what a doctor might say, he had avoided them for years. Remember that he had had no home for a few years and few friends. Three or four were kind but almost as poor and muddled as he and addicted to things also. Dal stayed with one and then with another, moving on before they could ask him to, never overstaying.

Warm hearted Holden had been raised in a devout Catholic home and gone to Catholic schools. He had to do all he could for Dal. What he wanted, he told me, was to see Dal make the most of what he proposed to give him. But Dal had never experienced open handed paternal kindness.

“He was not ungrateful”, Holden explained in Dal’s defense. “No. Anything but. He thanked me all the time. He had just never known love. He didn’t know how to use it. He had no self-confidence, thanks to Corinne. She took his soul, you know? She left me his shadow. She was mean.”

They spent their free time together and it soon became clear how Dal had been scraping by. Holden determined to find a home they could share. Never mind that his employment was piecemeal and he did not earn enough to pay for such things. Never mind that Dal only worked when there was work, mostly around the end of the month. And never mind that his hourly rate was low and it all went on booze and tobacco. Hope lives; there had to be a way.

With his future so unclear, Dal tended to dwell on the past a lot. There was the one they had shared until Dal turned eleven. He actually remembered little of that one. He was so young that he might have forgotten. Or possibly he preferred to put it out of his mind. And there was his after that one, on which Holden got an earful. Man Dal took pleasure in enlarging on his exploits for the eager ears of his new listener �" the old family friend. With no third party to question his veracity or contradict him, he elaborated on his accomplishments as a driver, a mechanic, a mover, a Romeo, a sportsman, and a party animal. Holden, ignoring the dearth of evidence in Dal’s support, took him at his word.

One night Dal told Holden his dream: to have his own moving business. He’d been in it almost twenty years and knew everything there was to know. He could drive any rig, size up vehicles, select reliable and trustworthy swampers, etcetera. He said he could run a moving business. There was also much about the moving business that Dal did not think to mention and Holden did not think to ask �" like its seasonal characteristics and the matter of parking such a large vehicle. It was not deliberate but an innocent oversight. Holden had no cash, only an overabundance of high interest consumer credit and a credit-line left over from fairly recent days before he spent his inheritance. With that and a proven lack of business savvy he decided that he could raise Dal from undeserved social and psychological ignominy by financing his dream. Dal would run the business for Holden, pay him back, and eventually make them both financially independent. They shook hands.

He wanted his psychiatrist’s approval. Unfortunately he didn’t categorically need it or the sirens going off in my head might have stopped it. I knew that trying to fulfill someone else’s ambition - a pipedream in this instance - was foolishness. It was not his place to go out on what would eventually amount to a forty thousand dollar limb for a lovable indigent alcoholic with nothing more than high interest credit. It would be a nightmare for Holden and I advised him to think twice. I said everything but ‘don’t do it’. He didn’t listen, and sleepless nights and bad dreams were what his credit and good intentions bought.

A friend of Dal’s sold them his beat up old five ton moving van that immediately went into a garage for an expensive overhaul. Dal had given Holden a list of the repairs he thought it would need to make it road worthy so this was expected. But its ailments came to way beyond what Dal predicted and Holden got frightened. He pulled it out of the shop - the worst possible decision. For a short while it ran, but unreliably, and soon not at all. They had an albatross on their hands. Dal parked it illegally for many months. It was left undisturbed and unticketed thanks only to the kindness of neighbors who did not complain. Then one of them got fed up with the graffiti billboard the local kids had latterly made of it, and phoned the city. And with that their teetering house of cards fell on them. The only way Holden could pay the rent and the bills was with cash advances. He had two part time care giving clients but they were intermittent. Around this time he began to work for the Crows.

Dal slipped into a mire of depression and guilt. He blamed himself; drank harder; and sequestered in his room without eating for days at a time. He vomited bile and then blood and went about saying “I’m not afraid to die! I’m not afraid to die!” Holden was terrified and did not know what to think. Was Dal insane or only drunk? Over several months, on three occasions he found Dal comatose with renal failure. The ICU revived him each time. Dal wasted these calls to arms and what might have been opportunities to save himself. For instance he did not quit smoking after going without for a week in hospital and he went right on drinking as soon as his liver had repaired itself enough to tolerate alcohol. He gave up.

“I couldn’t enable a suicide” Holden explained when it was over. “I never intended that. I’m sure he didn’t either but that’s what happened. He wanted Corinne. Dal couldn’t go on without ‘Mommy, Dearest’”.

I had to smile. “You’re being rather sarcastic, aren’t you? Mean to him about it? He couldn’t help it.” I interrupted.

“Am I? Couldn’t he? Maybe you’re right. I started out feeling he was not to blame for how I found him. S**t!” He paused. “S**t! S**t! S**t! Why are people like that? Such weakness. I’ll never understand his death wish.”

“Well, there you have it, Holden.

“Is that all it was? A death wish? How tawdry. Is that a valid dichotomy, the will to live, the will to die? Apollo and Dionysus? Are they at war at some level? Do you think people are ever aware of this, this thing?” He paused again, waiting for me.

I said “Dal never had any stake or hold on life. He was weak. How could he go on after disappointing you and driving you into bankruptcy? You gave him his last chance to make good and he failed. That must have felt like the final disgrace. He was probably imaging all the ways his mother would have humiliated him over it. He wanted to die, I think. We can call it a death wish. I believe in the ‘will to life’. The holocaust survivors had it in spades. But ‘the will to die’ - I can’t say that’s real.”

Now Holden picked up the thread he had dropped a moment before. “I said, ‘Listen, Dal. You’re killing yourself. That’s all you’re doing. It’s not fair to do it here. I’ve tried hard to keep you alive and you’re just giving up. If you can’t stop yourself, find somewhere else to do it. I won’t help you commit suicide. It’s too much.’ That’s what I said.”

But Dal was not listening. After havering two more weeks, Dal moved out. And two weeks later, alone at a friend’s house, he fell down a flight of stairs and broke his neck. Death itself was not an absolute shock but Holden had thought cirrhosis would be the thing. Dal was accident prone and it appeared unlikely. But still, he wondered, do people kill themselves by throwing themselves down a flight of stairs? Had it been intentional? He never could make up his mind. The saddest part, Holden thought, was that Dal had no will to change. His own failure to restore Dal’s confidence and help him deal with depression marked him permanently and he vowed to never try it again.

Holden had tried the impossible living with Dal for fourteen months. The support of AA and our weekly sessions helped. Though it was doomed, the end itself was always uncertain and the unfolding gave very little cause for optimism. But throughout and as rotten as this failure made him feel, Holden was never tempted to fall back. Watching Dal’s descent only reinforced his determination to leave alcohol behind. I was there for him through the crisis. And Jamie was also commiserative and supportive when Dal died. But he came to me because we had lived it together. He journaled every awful detail �" totaling five hundred grim pages that he couldn’t look at afterwards for a very long time.

Holden meets Jamie:

Holden and Dal were still living together when Jamie began to debate and defer �" hemming and hawing over the issue of help with Ross. She had no one but me to talk to and made things no easier by raising far too many pros and cons. In most practical matters she admitted she was not just helpless but clumsy. And she became what she called ‘bored’ �" that tiresome word - at anything without intellectual legs. This included a wide range of normal activities. Making up a shopping list, balancing the cheque book, driving, and care giving drove her crazy. Home maintenance, decorating, tidying up, doing the laundry, and cooking, were others. Thank goodness Ross had money; he didn’t expect her to do things for him. It was just a matter of finding the right person to ‘do’ for both of them. She wanted a caregiver / housekeeper / cook, all in one �" not an easy thing to find.

It is not common practice. Strictly speaking, it violates of the rule of privacy and anonymity to do what I did next, i.e. introduce patients - and I’ve never done it before or since. (Another psychiatrist would definitely have frowned.) But I discussed it first with Damon - also unprecedented. I told him that I had known Holden for over a year and that he was in recovery. I found him reliable, trustworthy, competent, and an experienced care giver; a cook (a graduate of the Culinary Institute) and a housekeeper. I said he needed financial help, responsibility, and structure. I explained that my intention was to temporarily fill the gaps in Holden’s current work schedule. My plan for Holden, my scheme if you will, went no farther. Then I told Damon something of Jamie - her background, her foibles, her present circumstances, and that she was also in recovery. I explained that they both were stable, lucid and intelligent. She was an academic and a scholar. Holden was narrowly self-educated and had a certain haughty though shallow disdain for conventional schooling. (His school experiences had disappointed him.) He was competent in practical ways where Jamie was awkward and dysfunctional. My plan for Jamie was to put her in touch with someone who could meet all her needs. I was not playing Dolly Levi, arranging marriages. I was myself setting up something practical for two people I knew well, whose needs fit perfect. It was a way to help them. If they decided to try it and it didn’t work they could end it as they wished.

My partner was unfamiliar with psychiatry and not qualified to judge the ethical standard of my proposal. But I wasn’t asking him to do that. In fact, I never mentioned ethics. Damon - a working man, a man of business, (real estate) - was a serious, intelligent individual who understood human nature well. I asked only for his opinion of my plan’s feasibility. When he approved, I took my idea to each of them individually.

The following notes summarize my session with Holden right after his interview with the Crows, after he had already started.

“It was stifling. I could hardly breathe. There was an overwhelmingly stuffiness �" mustiness on the drapes, the upholstery, and a worn Chinese rug smelling a little like cat piss. Everything is old and faded, very tired. Drab is the word. And then I smelled something similar, but worse - on them! BO; halitosis! I don’t know what. I had to sit between them and we sat very close. We talked in the sunroom. My god, it was really warm there and the windows were shut tight. The house was dusty - not clean - not exactly cluttered �" it’s a big place �" but definitely not tidy. There was cat hair everywhere. Anyway, the smell of them . . . I almost gagged a couple times.

“How close to you does Jamie sit when she’s here?” he asked.

I frowned and shrugged, never having detected an odour from her and no wanting to send him off on a tangent.

“She must not wash. And she smokes, almost constantly, too” he continued. “And Ross, well, he hasn’t had a bath since his fall, apparently. That must be a month. So you can imagine. I’m giving him his first one tomorrow though, a sponge bath in his bed. That should be fun �" a month’s worth of willnots! And there’s no air in the place. I’m trying to air it now. Otherwise I don’t think I could stay. Really! But most of the windows are nailed shut so it’s a problem. I’m working on it.

“Well, anyway, aside from those two things we all liked each other well enough. And so I’m hired! What a relief to have something coming in.

“Dal’s been spending all his welfare on booze �" he’s been giving me nothing towards food or rent. Of course, he doesn’t eat, so . . .

“Thanks a lot. For everything! It’s great. Ross is easy going. It seems as though he mostly just wants to be left alone. Jamie wants me to get him up, start him exercising, read to him, and to be there - be on hand just in case he falls again or tries something foolish. She’d like me to get him out of the house; take him to some of the old places he used to like, good old Stanley Park for one. She’s gonna’ let me use her car. He doesn’t show a lot of enthusiasm yet. Still sizing me up, maybe. We’ll see how it goes.

“I’m going to be there four hours a day, four days a week, for now. She hired another part time person through an agency. We haven’t met yet. This is a life saver for me. Thanks again. I asked for twenty an hour, by the way, and they didn’t bat an eye.”

That was a great deal to Holden. In fact, he had never earned so much. Jamie also thought it was a lot �" more than she wanted to pay - but she didn’t let on, not to him anyway. She needed help and he came highly recommended so she didn’t balk. Aside from his hourly rate, things started off promising for the three of them. They took to him and vice versa. He fulfilled their immediate needs and others they didn’t know they had.

Among the latter, he cleaned and organized their kitchen, where he was expected to take over. In the process of doing that, after a month of constant running battles he eradicated a plague of entrenched cupboard moths. Holden had found both the clutter and confusion of the drawers bothersome, and the air born pests disgusting. Yet Jamie appeared somewhat apathetic towards all of it. As to whether she really was as indifferent as she seemed to disorganization and dirty flying insects she was not forthcoming. While Holden was getting to know his new employers, things like this were unenlightening. Ross was unconcerned about anything that did not affect him in a direct way so his apathy was easier to understand: he did not cook and he probably did not see the moths. But Holden could not believe Jamie could be unmoved. Yet she gave that impression. Did she actually function better in dirt and muddle? One look at her squalid bedroom �" overflowing ashtrays, half full mugs of cold coffee, dirty underwear, runny stockings, torn sheets with burn holes, cat hair, thick dust, the unmade bed �" should have been enough. He, at least, was happy at the extermination of the moths and the rationalizations he achieved in the cupboards and drawers. It had been difficult. He had told Jamie beforehand what he hoped to do and she had not stopped him. She had not stopped him but her encouragement had been tentative and nervous. “Watch your step,” it implied.

Now his kitchen was clean and functional. There was no longer garbage in the fridge and the grease in the oven had been scraped off so it was not a fire hazard. But Jamie, who said little approving or disapproving about his improvements, never adapted. Five years later she still claimed she couldn’t find the flatware. As long as Holden worked for them she took umbrage at the fact that it was his kitchen, not hers. The kitchen as Holden found it was just as Marguerite left it, only much dirtier. Marguerite had always had a housekeeper to keep it up. Jamie was less fortunate and when she wasn’t making smoke signals, it was a shrine to Marguerite. What Holden called ‘disorganization’ was Marguerite’s disorganization. It was sacred. Jamie would never have ‘rationalized’ it in any way. As for the moths, Jamie could not deny that Marguerite would have had the cupboards fumigated. So, yes, Holden had saved her having to do it eventually. In my opinion, which is not on record, her resentment over Holden’s improvements was mere irrational hubris - unjustified and excessive. Of course hubris can never be rational, can it? Even she admitted that she cooked with no culinary finesse or distinction and always left the kitchen in smoky, greasy turmoil. But that was because the whole business took so long and was so boring! She seemed to understand that it would be unfair to expect Holden to tolerate it and let him have his way. But the irritated expression on her face often made her dissatisfaction palpable.

At one of our afternoon sessions Holden said, “I know you did me a favor by introducing us and, don’t get me wrong, you did and I am grateful. But she’s really somethin’ else, Jamie. She’s a perfect slob and a terrible, god awful cook. Just dreadful! You can’t imagine the mess she makes. There are no words to describe it except, maybe, ‘astonishing’. Ross and I walked in on her one afternoon last week. We were coming back from an outing. While we were gone she went to the kitchen to make something to eat. Sounds innocent and harmless, doesn’t it. She didn’t need to, there was plenty of food - she could have had a sandwich. I have no idea what she was trying to make or if she ate it. Maybe she was trying to prove something. Anyway she failed and when we got back the kitchen was filled with smoke. They don’t even have an exhaust fan �" can you believe it? You couldn’t see for all the smoke! I smelled it outside in the driveway, forty or fifty feet off. The kitchen door was wide open. I panicked! Did I leave the stove on? Did the house catch fire? But where were the fire engines? What a relief it was to blame her! Typically, nobody said a word about it. Well, what was there to say? I hope her mother cooked better than that. Of course, I had to clean it up.”

At the start Holden still had two other part-time clients but they fell away, first one and then the other, over his first six months at the Crows. Mitch and Sherill Fenton were first to go. Jamie took up their hours and soon he was working for them full-time. This was not what I had had in mind but Holden was pleased and I saw no harm.

Ross himself made few demands except for phobias he wanted Holden to respect. One was that he keep the doors and windows shut 24/7 - something he could not bring himself to do. It would have been an insane act of self suffocation, which is what he charged Jamie and Ross with doing to themselves. It was summer - hot and dry. A mature, sweet smelling, semi-wild garden with a lot of grass was all around Ross’s house. He said that when he opened any window in the sunroom he could smell honeysuckle while he read to Ross and he couldn’t shut out something so delightful. The kitchen door was a Dutch door, divided in the middle. He left the top half open. A few windows, he discovered, were not nailed shut after all. He managed, with great effort, to open some a few inches, thus devising cross ventilation. When fall came round the mustiness was gone.

“I doubt they notice it, you know. But I do. It’s a relief. It’s a nice old Edwardian but it’s pokey. It was never really anything special, if you know what I mean. It’s broken up into dim windowless hallways and small rooms with overgrown old cedars all around. They block the sun. A shame, really. If it were my house, I’d cut them down, pull out the roots and plant flower beds. The house would be much nicer with sunlight. What have they got against light and air anyway? How can they expect people to work in the dark without oxygen?”

Holden may have preferred to think otherwise but his unilateral actions and his casual slurs on their 'dark pokey' house did not sit lightly. The Crows took offence. I could have warned him but it would have been wrong, manipulative, and interfering on my part. I sympathized with his plight, being forced to take action on his own to air a sealed, stuffy work space just to stay on. But my place was to remain impartial and let it play out. So I said nothing. A large part of what we do is to listen in silence so our patients can hear themselves.

At the outset they were so passive and so relieved to have him that for a long time they gave in on things like air circulation and other matters as well. Ross made a point of telling him to shut the windows but he left them open a crack. Sometimes he closed them while Ross was present and opened them again when he shuffled back to his room. He was amazed at how much the old man knew despite advanced macular degeneration. Or he may have noticed the draft. Whichever it was, he mentioned it to Jamie and she told me. Eventually Ross stopped pressing the issue, but he remembered.

It took time to discover why he had nailed the windows shut so long ago. The answer turned out to be reasonable; at least it was to people of his generation. It came down to a simple fear of feral critters in the house.

“Well,” Holden snickered, “critters are already comfortable everywhere in their house �" not in the house per se but in the attic, the walls, and the floors. I can hear them. After so much neglect there are lots of openings. I’m surprised there aren’t rats. If I didn’t keep it spotless, there would be.”

But with so many large overgrown gardens, pest control trucks were everywhere in Shaughnessy. He knew they were around. He still feared dealing with a skunk or a raccoon entering through an open door or window and taking over his house. Once and long ago, he had fought such a battle and never forgot it.

Holden claimed that Jamie never left her room. In the initial trial period she was just leaving him alone, appraising how much he was capable of taking on himself She was present and sober if he needed guidance. But these things were not made clear and the confusion, which was Jamie's middle name, led to many misunderstandings. She observed and kept her own kind of account. Wishing him to be ‘the one’, the right fit on her first shot at it, she gave him the benefit of every doubt and let him run things 'downstairs'. But she did so without abdicating her own authority. It only appeared otherwise to Holden, who did not know her. She was so accustomed to playing second fiddle and so desirous of having someone else take charge of the day to day management of the household, and of Ross under her oversight, that when his autocratic behavior began to manifest she at first gave it a wide berth.

She had not hired Holden to get Ross ‘off her hands’, as he sometimes imagined. She may not have loved him. She may even in her imagination have disowned him. But in her brittle fashion, she still cared about her father. Even if she appeared aloof Jamie was a devoted daughter and a serious primary care giver. Ross and Holden must get along. Ross wasn’t capable of friendship but he needed companionship on his terms and she couldn’t do it. She wanted Holden to make her dad see that he was not dying but would live on. That much he or time itself had accomplished. And Holden must stimulate him. She wanted him to get Ross up out of his bed.  He should take him for a drive or a walk in the neighborhood on a fine day, and, most important, make him do daily physiotherapy. They were getting out for drives and walks regularly and Ross’s positivity had picked up sharply. But they had ceased doing physio. She now believed Ross would not walk again without the walker and this was unacceptable. She would have continued to put up with Holden’s quirks had he even tried to do as she asked. But he was not pushing Ross hard enough �" not as hard as she wanted. Her father had not improved as much as she had hoped.

She had made all this, her goals, plain at the interview. And Holden had listened, observing both of them who appeared to be different souls. When he first heard Jamie’s voice it lacked confidence that her goals were even attainable. She was talking to herself. She as much as said that, knowing her father’s stubbornness, a close approximation to it would be enough. He also watched Ross - his eyes half closed, his mind wandering as he listened �" or did not - to it, too �" that voice saturated with the extreme tedium of all the boring things she now had to do, doubting any man would listen. He caught her glaring at Ross once or twice, as if knowing how his mind wandered.

Afterwards Holden’s decided that the old man would never intentionally do anything to please her �" or anyone - unless it pleased him first. Given Ross’s age and the fact that it was his dime, he had to please him. But if he did not also please Jamie, Ross’s satisfaction might not be enough. This job, Holden thought, might be very cushy; he had to take it seriously. He had learned a great deal in that interview.

“It’s never easy, care giving, you know” he said a few years later, once again waxing on the subject. “I push him to do what she wants but I can only go so far. If he doesn’t like it, at some point he’ll just roll over and ignore me. He does it all the time. He tunes me out. That’s Ross. I can’t punish him for it, can I �" refuse him dessert - or yell at him and treat him like a child. As for Jamie, I try to defend her father’s resistance to physio, which he hates. I say things like ‘I can’t force him to do something if he doesn’t want to’. And ‘I don’t feel right about doing that’. But she sees right through it and comes back with perfectly good arguments to the contrary that leave me with no comeback. And that’s Jamie. So I don’t know what to do. Must I drag him physically from his bed into the living room for physio? An awful lot goes under the rug. How long can I keep it up?”

He delivered these comments on the two of them early in his employment and the answer turned out to be quite a while.

Jamie told me, “I think Holden is just as bored with it as Dad. They both hate it. But that’s just too bad! He gives in to him too easily. Of course, I know - it’s the pot calling the kettle black, isn’t it? I give in to him, too. And god knows I can’t stand exercise either. But I’m paying him for it and he should do it!” She had started this particular session beside herself with frustrations on many levels. She was fed up with everyone. But an hour later she left my office a lot more relaxed.

Projects:

Each of them was giving me fresh perspective on the other. This was unprecedented. They were mature, intelligent people and I respected their opinions. So I had to step back and be careful how I stirred the pot. Jamie talked less on the subject of Holden than Holden did on her and Ross. She had other things going on - Ross, two sisters, and a son, daughter in law and three grandchildren each with problems. Holden’s life was smaller by far. By then it was primarily entangled with daily messes at the Crows. Oftentimes there was practical care giving logistics to work out. At others he found himself embroiled on an emotional level with Jamie's issues. He found the job frustrating and, aside from the money, thankless. Occasionally he, too, arrived at my office rather bilious.

To show that he also saw her in a positive light, Holden's appreciation of Jamie’s intelligence increased during a fairly long period in his first year in their service. This came about when he volunteered to help her with a drawn out project she had been postponing for years. She wanted to sell Nick’s massive library, which was worth a good bit. This famous Pre-Raphaelite collection - and his Victorian furniture, some of which was good and valuable �" was what Nick left her. But, as far as Jamie was concerned, half of everything belonged to Dante �" if only he would take an interest! They both needed money and she wanted to dispose of it. But to do that it would first have to be catalogued a tedious task neither of them could bring themselves to start. Some of it was stored at Ross’s and some at Dante’s in Ladner, making the job even harder. He was too busy and distracted, and Jane found cataloging �" you guessed it, boring!

Over the next six months Jamie brought boxes and boxes back and forth to town from Dante's, and Holden used some of his time to record both the Ladner and Shaughnessy halves of it. He had anticipated a dry and dull job but it turned out to be exciting, at least sometimes. He got to leaf through thousands of original Nineteenth Century tomes, many rare and some unique. With Word he recorded the title, author, and the edition, the publisher, date, and number of pages. Then he detailed the condition of each book with any other pertinent information - autographed or dedicated, etc. This became a welcome relief from housekeeping. He hadn’t done clerical work since he worked in an office in his teens, when electric typewriters were the thing. He rather enjoyed doing it again �" especially knowing that he wasn’t making a living at it and it would come to an end.

“This is fun,” he told me one day in the middle of it. “She set it up for me, you know �" how to do it, what to include. It’s pretty straightforward, with a few exceptions. Her husband, that Nick Fredericks, he was some collector. I’m impressed. Some of the books are fabulous. I admire him for that, if not for other things she’s told me about him! It’s a shame he made her pay for them and then gave himself all the credit. But I guess that’s how he was.

“She’s also a computer whiz. Did you know that? You wouldn’t think it possible to look at her, would you? But there it is. She is. Yeah, when something goes wrong she just breaks it down to small bits. Amazing! She takes it right apart with a pliers and a screwdriver - and gets to the problem. I mean, for a scatterbrain like Jamie, it’s amazing isn’t it? She actually fixes it, if she can, and puts it back together, even if it takes her a few days. She’s amazing - what a brain! And what courage! She understands computers. They scare me to death.”

Here was another disparity: She had a remarkable brain but Holden could take on and finish large and small practical projects she could not. He finished things �" boring, tedious projects she would either never have started or would have abandoned. Jamie’s gratitude for these favors was not all it ought to have been. It was small, tainted by a petty, kind of belittling envy that he could so handily do things she could not. It was hubris again. She reacted the same way to his culinary skills, with the same unhealthy jealousy and false pride. But her ability to fix the mysterious sick innards of a malfunctioning computer gave Holden immense respect for her and he did not dissemble.

 “I love books, too, like Nick did, and I love collecting. I’ve been giving this some thought,” he said to me. “Maybe I’ll collect Proust. They’re paying me all this money and I can’t save. Maybe I could save that way. I could see a big Proust collection as an interesting project and a hedge fund, you know.”

The famous Parisian novelist was Holden’s favorite author and, once again, he quickly made up his mind to go ahead. With no other way to go about it, he began buying Proustiana online. This turned into a mad, expensive obsession until he had fifty thousand in it. The whole collection stood at more than five hundred items, and was fully catalogued, when he ran out of money.

Not much later Jamie exclaimed, “He did it! Hooray! The catalogueing’s done. What a godsend he’s been. Thank you. I couldn’t have done it and Dante’s much too busy. There are too many stories and bad memories attached to those books. And to think I paid for them, goddamn it! Most of them anyway. What a relief.”

And it was a relief, for a while. I’m sure that one day it will even be useful, when they sell it. She felt freed by the removal of this heavy Damoclean sword that had threatened her and Dante since Nick died. But for now it makes no other difference. Because when Holden finished, for a year she left selling it up to Dante. She did not pressure him. Time passed and, in his usual way, he did nothing. Today half still sits in large heavy crates stacked against the walls in Ross’s spare room. Half is still at Dante’s where it is vulnerable to depredation by him and his family who see it as a nuisance in their crowded little house. The market for these things peaked around the time Nick died. So called ‘markets’ may be nothing but a few serious buyers with deep pockets. In his day Nick and a few museums and university libraries in the UK was the Pre-Raphaelite market.

Despite his earnings, as he admitted, Holden could always spend money faster. He saved nothing and sometimes needed more before a payday to scoop something he could not live without. At such times he would go to Jamie and she always came through. With her close acquaintance with acquisitiveness, the male gendered beast, came the common sense to never try to dissuade Nick, or Holden in his turn. She got it from Marguerite who never could discourage anyone from anything. When her daughters needed help they looked to Marguerite; when Dante and Holden needed it, they went to Jamie the Rock; she would facilitate. A facilitator, that was she. Or should I use AA parlance and call the two of them enablers?

Another bone of contention was taxes, the key to another marked difference with harder consequences for Holden. It was not hard for Ross to pay his but it was difficult for Jamie. But never doubting they owed something to their beloved, deeply flawed Canada, they did it. Holden, once he became self employed in the cash economy, well before he met the Crows, had finagled his taxes. He filed every year to collect whatever the government was handing out but he paid little or no tax. As he got older, to sleep sound, he kept it up though he was even less inclined to pay. When he began working for the Crows they paid cash in a luscious tall stack of twenties from the bank ATM. But when his earnings increased to over a thousand a week, they began to pay by cheque. Holden wondered if this could be an attempt to force him to declare his income and pay tax. He would either have to deposit the cheque in his bank account and wait for it to clear, or cash it at their bank. The former would have made it impossible to hide this income if Revenue Canada ever went looking. A pall of inconvenience and possible trouble threatened. But when he read the address on the cheque and discovered that the bank was convenient - just across the road at the mall - he was relieved. From then on he cashed his cheque there and became quite friendly with the tellers. By then, however, Jamie was well aware that he did not declare his income from them and she didn’t like it. By doing that, he was taking home twice what Nassimi did. Nassimi paid her taxes.

“I wish I’d never let on that I don’t pay. Leona Helmsley got jailed for it and she was big. Who am I? That was a big mistake” he said.

It was. She may have found it boring and bothersome but Jamie took responsibility seriously. She was a proud, loyal, conventional citizen. She voted in all elections and told no one for whom it was cast. Loyalty was a big part of her. But he was mistaken to think that she would ever have been disloyal to him over taxes. Knowing that someone in her employ was taking advantage of the taxation system became a sharp pebble in her shoe. To walk in it she would have to take the shoe off and cast the pebble out. While Jamie kept mum, Holden did not realize how much her original high hopes and regard for him had sunk. Meanwhile his shallow cynicism became sharper in gruff, ill informed, off hand remarks on politics, local matters, and events. As an intelligent but non confrontational woman she got bored, resentful, and kept more and more to her room. Holden was running on empty and only working for the paycheque. Care giving no longer gave him any other satisfaction.

Things deteriorate:

“I’m not perfect but I try not to whine and I don't like whiners. I find it hard to be around people who can’t look after themselves. Don't you? Those two are hopeless. I practically have to wipe his a*s, you know. It’s almost come to that. He’s a ninety year old child,” said Holden when Ross turned ninety. “I do my best to make things for them that Jamie doesn’t have the patience, or won’t take the time to make, things they’ll like. He and I sit down by ourselves, and he wolf’s it down in fifteen seconds and goes back to bed with barely a comment. He won’t sit up long enough to digest it like the doctor told him to, not even fifteen minutes. No. It’s just straight back to bed. He whimpers ‘it hurts if I sit up after I eat’. I don’t believe it. And she doesn’t join us because, well, who really knows why? Him, I guess. She gets very tired of him. We all do!

“She’s up there in her room, wallowing in self pity. She creeps down late for food, and eats alone. They’re uncivilized eaters! How satisfying can it be, cooking for people like them? I can tell, she thinks I fuss too much. It’s like she thinks Ross isn’t worth the trouble. She may be right. But what else do I have to do? I read to him for an hour - or two hours on a good day if it’s a book we’re into. We go for walks or a drive in good weather. Aside from that, shopping and cooking is about all I do! So, I say, why shouldn’t I? I like to cook; she doesn’t: so how can she possibly understand me? You know how hard to look at she is when you sit across the table from her. But if she’d at least came down and eat with us and show a little appreciation. . .”

“Well, I give up” Jamie said a few weeks later. “Kyle came for Dad’s birthday. She arrived a week early and stayed for three. Of course - I understand �" it’s a long, long trip from Perth and you want to make it worth the trouble. But she takes over the house! The phone never stops �" her friends just wake from the dead. They constantly call and come over. There’s no peace! She’s good with dad. She brings him to life. She actually talks to him, which I can’t always. She suffers no resentment apparently, for what he did. She moved away before Mom got sick and lived in Australia through all of it. But she’s a vegetarian, you know, and that’s another thing for Holden to deal with - and he lets me know it, too, which I understand. But I also resent hearing about it. Why does it have to be my problem? I stayed in my room whenever she was at home and we hardly spoke. She was out a lot and used the house as her base, which is fine with me. It’s hers, too. But the less we see each other, the better. It was disruptive, having her there, and it made me realize how little I like change. I’m getting old.

“We had family - Dante, Susanne, the kids, Kyle, Holden, and I - for Dad’s Ninetieth birthday lunch. I got him a DQ devil’s food ice cream cake. At ninety you have very few friends. Ross has almost none anymore and for one reason or another none could come. Of course, there was no point making two entrees, so Holden made a vegetarian dish for all of us, meatless lasagna. And I must say it was terribly good. He outdid himself. Even Ross had seconds and Dante’s kids licked the casserole clean. It was a feast.”

“Kyle was going out again, dinner with friends, and Nassimi was coming so Holden wasn’t eating with us.” I asked him to make a haggis for dad and me. It’s our favorite Scottish dish. We only eat it once a year. For once he didn’t know how to make something, the haggis, and he said the thought of haggis made him squeamish. I tried to ignore that and asked him to just go to the Scottish Shop on Dunbar and pick up a small one. I didn’t expect him to make haggis from scratch. I steamed it myself. It’s simple, really. Anyone can steam haggis. And I asked him to buy some of the kippered herring, too. He made a sour face but he did it. It’s so rare that I ask him to make something special that I hate it when he acts put out like he did. We’re paying him.”

By now Holden was living alone. He had wasted no time declaring bankruptcy to free himself of the bank debt he incurred trying to help Dal. The Crows did not need to know this and the trustees did not know he was working. While they cleared his debts at zero on the dollar of debt, he actually had quite a lot of cash for Proustiana. Some of this extra income was the result of Jamie’s now wanting twenty four hour care for Ross. He had grown more unpredictable, especially so at night. Being free to work as many hours as he wanted, Holden chose to spend most of his time there. His hours were huge while the work itself was less taxing.

“It’s being there all the time, that’s getting to me” he said. “Nassimi and I take turns sleeping over. That soft foamy of theirs on top of the mushy sofa cushions is really uncomfortable; I’m getting no sleep! I use a firm foamy at home so the change is radical and I can’t get used to it. I rarely have to do anything for him at night. I just lie awake listening to him snore on the baby monitor, which is usually turned up too high. I never realized how sensitive they are. Of course they have to be, I guess, with babies and all. Parenting must be awful. Anyway, it’s a bad set up! I hate it. It’s like sleeping with him right in the room. I’m dragging my a*s all day long. There are hours with almost nothing to do. I read, and watch HGTV a lot of the time and suffer guilt for it. I tell myself I shouldn’t but I still do. I lie on the sofa and fall asleep in front of the tube in the daytime and then I can’t sleep when I’m supposed to. Jamie’s very quiet �" not sneaky, just quiet. I don’t always hear her on the stairs. Sometimes she walks right in on me. She never says anything but it’s very embarrassing. I try not to let it happen but it does anyway.”

When I had set the wheels in motion I never intended or foresaw such an extended entangled association. I had never imagined Holden’s spirit so consumed in the lives of these people. Had I made a mistake?

“Why are you still doing this?” I asked him then, five years after I begot it.

He hesitated, obviously thinking it over.

“What do you mean? I don’t follow: what should I be doing? I have to work” he said.

I tried to be clear. “Well originally this was just supposed to be a part time, temporary half measure to help you and Jamie out. Why has it gone on this long and come to this? Do you need to work so many hours?”

“You know what? I didn’t realize that. Or maybe I just forgot. It’s the money, I guess. It must be.”

I was not expecting such candour. But, I thought, he’s still missing the point.

“The money?” I said. Was I surprised? Had I believed �" or hoped - Holden still had a higher motive for care giving? But hey, I like money, too.

“I do like it,” he said defensively. “At least I like what it buys. My wonderful Proust collection. Antiques. All that wonderful s**t. I don’t really believe in it; it’s just paper. But I can’t hold on to it any better than when I was a child with my allowance. I’m still a spendthrift with nothing in the bank. But I’m earning a lot. A lot for me, anyway. It’s scary to see I still can’t save a dime. I love it though, and now I’m used to it and I can’t cut back. Guess what: I’m addicted! And, you’re an enabler! How’s that? But seriously, I can’t give it up. If I could put some of it aside �" in cash, not Proust - accumulate a buffer against the proverbial rainy day - it would be great. Of course it would. That’s what my parents taught me.”

It gave me a chill to hear him and I did not handle this situation well. I should have stayed on the money theme. If I had made him see that he had become greedy, it might have ended differently, more satisfactorily for all. I could have suggested that he was overextending himself, that he needed to have a life, and that five eight hour days were plenty. Let Jamie find someone else for overnights. Holden listened to me; I might have made him understand.

Ross had stayed the same but Jamie and Holden were not who they had been in 2005. He was more altered than she - by time, by his income, and by living so much with them in their home. Jamie's approbation and strong reliance on Holden at the start had fallen sharply. His dependence on them was total. Now his food was too rich and fancy, he had not made Ross walk without a walker, his fine clerical work with Nick’s collection was over with and forgotten, and he no longer kept up with the housecleaning. The Crows are complex people and Holden never understood what made them tick. (But frankly I’m not sure I do either.) He overreached, and Jamie, though non-confrontational, would act because passivity was not working.

Retirement:

Never having seen this in her before, Holden had not understood that Jamie even had a breaking point until he breached it. Few ever saw it. Even Nick didn’t know of it until she announced she was pregnant. He began a polemic at once calling for an abortion. He proclaimed they could never raise a child because they were too self absorbed.

“Nick was. Not I. I worried about his reaction, naturally. At first I didn’t know how it would be, pregnant. I had misgivings. But I was delighted with it. I felt healthier and happier than I’d felt for years. We didn’t plan it, obviously; we had nothing. And then, once I understood there was a limit to how far Nick could push me, I was so relieved. I had been wondering about it. So I had a limit after all! That made me stronger. While I was pregnant I stopped drinking - just turned off the tap, you know. I never was better than while I had Dante inside me. Isn’t that something? I would never have let Nick talk me into an abortion. Never. But he kept trying. The more pregnant I got, the more he tried to prevail. We both won something �" I got my baby and Nick got to name his only son after Rossetti. I like the name, Dante. I was so glad mom was still alive to hold him.”

In that particular instance and a few others she was very controlled. Acting as her father’s primary care giver was another. Even from her crow’s nest in the old master bedroom high above, she was more on top of things than anyone knew.

At some point, nearing exhaustion, Holden said or did something, took a step too far. It may have been small or nothing in particular. But whatever it was it pushed Jamie over the edge and she told him to leave and not come back. Simple as that she cut him off. This was an extraordinary move to take for someone as retiring as Jamie. I was shocked when I learned how she did it.

Holden asked for a special ‘crisis’ session with me, and I saw him the same day. He appeared at my office strained, tense, and angry. “Guess what? �" I’m retired as of today. The b***h fired me!” he said.

“What?” I acted shocked. It was news but don’t imagine I was too surprised. Jamie had been hinting at changing her domestic arrangements�" as if telling me to warn him, which I hadn’t. So when it happened I only wondered what had taken so long. But then, I must remember that she is a plodding tortoise.

He went on to divest himself of the painful minutiae of the event. This was the initial step to putting the past into perspective: understand what happened, and then, in his case, prepare for a less structured future on a much reduced income. Time is elastic and bad days may seem forty eight hours long.

“You heard? Of course you did. He told you,” Jamie said when I asked how she was managing without him. “Dante and Susanne have taken over and, frankly, it’s been. . .  Well, it’s been difficult, actually. We all missed him a lot at first. I had no idea how much he actually did for us - he made it look so easy! And it’s not! It just isn’t. He was organized and they’re not. But we’re adjusting �" to each other - or I’m adjusting to them - to having one of them there, every day, all day. I stay upstairs. My son and his wife have very different personalities but neither is as conscientious as Holden was. But I knew that. Home care bores them. But they’re family. I can deal with them - I think so, anyway! At least so far. It’s summer and Dante’s off. He needs money desperately. Why should I give it to an outsider when my son is broke and capable? I guess we’ll see just how capable, won’t we. When he goes back to teaching, Susanne can pick up the slack and Nassimi, Dante and Susanne can take turns sleeping over. That shouldn’t be too much of an imposition if they share it equally. St. Anthony’s is close by and he’s used to roughing it. He doesn’t love it but he has to do something - he can’t live on what he makes.”

“Did you plan this?” I asked bluntly.

“Yes. I did. We did, actually. I just had to wait for the right moment.”

I tried not to judge her but that detail went far to explain why she had let Holden go in the manner she did. It had appeared irrational to me at the time, especially filtered through the victim’s perspective. The wheels of change were silently in motion all along and she had said nothing about it to me. I was proud of her.

Holden had been diagnosed with prostate cancer a year before. For the last twelve months while he still worked for the Crows he chose chemo over surgery. But a month after accepting forced retirement; he went ahead and scheduled the surgery.

He still felt cheated and misunderstood. “She fired me without warning, for no good reason that I know �" at least she never bothered to tell me �" and without a dime of compensation. After five years! I suppose I should have asked for it but I thought she would offer. She should have. Dante will never be able to do what I did. She’ll see.”

I agreed wholeheartedly.

At first Jamie thought she had been over paying Holden. That changed as what she’d lost became obvious. She soon saw how inconsiderate and completely self centered Dante and Susanne actually were. At least Holden took his work serious; in that he wasn't like them. It is normally unsound practice to employ a son as care giver to his grandfather. Even elderly, Ross was not likeable and didn’t try to be. And Dante was all Dante; he didn’t care about Ross. Ross knew it and Jamie soon admitted it.

“Do you think Holden would come back?” she asked, under a lot of strain as another school term approached. “I may have made a terrible mistake. Holden bothered me - a lot! - but there’s too much of his parents in Dante. I see it, having my son around all day long. God knows! It’s too awful. And Susanne �" a menopausal woman! Yikes, what was I thinking? Who needs that at my age? No, no, no! Maybe we could try again, come to an understanding.”

“He’s scheduled for a prostectomy,” I said quietly, with satisfaction.

“Oh, that is too bad” she said. “It probably would have been a mistake to take him back anyway.”

“Yes,” I said. “I think so.”

She gave more hours to Nassimi and tolerated Dante until he resumed teaching. By then she had already hired another care giver through Nassimi’s agency. The two of them worked out and they’re still there. Jamie is grateful, kind and considerate - as she should be. She pays them well and they do as she asks, and, in as far as it is possible, without inserting ‘personality’.

I never told Holden about Jamie’s ‘second thoughts’ on rehiring him. He recovered from the shock of being fired �" it was not the first time, after all, and he was already collecting CPP and OASP when it happened anyway so the transition was not as bad as it might have been. He did not give serious thought to looking for part time work, considering the likelihood too dim. He sold his Proustiana collection at a loss. Nevertheless it was a large infusion of money when he needed it and he was ‘fortunate’ to find a buyer for it. The markets for ‘old things’ had dropped precipitously. We continued to see each other for an hour every two weeks.

Two years later, my partner Damon reached the end of another remission. There would be no more and I wanted to give him all my attention. The horrible disease came on rapidly and this time we could do nothing. We were together when he passed six months later. After that I didn’t need to work; I had investments and real estate. I wanted time and these things bought me freedom. So I left St. Paul’s and with great difficulty whittled down my VGH caseload to four patients whom I wanted to continue to see. Ending Jamie’s treatment never entered my mind. Our work together continues, stabilizing and necessary. She is still my patient and I love her dearly.

Holden’s prostectomy was a success: the cancer was entirely removed but, as goes the prostate so goes the libido. With the disease - and his sex drive - gone, he knew that, like Ross, he too might have a long life and adjusted to it, filling up much of his time with writing. In his first year working for the Crows, after less than twelve months abstinence, he began his autobiography. It was a natural progression from journaling. But it was an extraordinary project, especially for one so reluctant to commit and so avoidant when we began. Yet what better time to begin the account than at such a vital turning point? But other patients had said they were going to write and couldn’t. So I waited, hopeful for his sake but without expectations. How amazed was I then when he began handing me chapter after chapter for his case file? These were early drafts that were superseded as the years rolled on, before I stopped working with him. (He would have liked me to read them but I am not a reader. I browsed through them and found that he tells the story well. I praised his work and encouraged him to continue.) My satisfaction was not contingent on his finishing it. After all, perhaps one in a thousand can. If he had never finished, writing it would have helped him.

He was still writing, still reaching for absolute clarity on himself and his past, when Jamie ‘retired’ him. Two years later he felt satisfied and put his pen to rest, ready for new projects. As author and subject, he took an analytic approach in his memoirs. Having done my own psychoanalysis of him for six years, I read very little of it. He chose a difficult, not to say a nearly impossible task in his first attempt at a book and he actually completed it. He is the only one of all my patients that did that. This raised my estimate of Holden again. He had followed through on two impossible projects: Dal and his memoirs. Either would have been an achievement. Failing at one was not nearly as important as the effort.

It made me see that even at sixty six he was still capable of changes. He had not only become abstinent, but he had used it to tap into blocked creativity of forty years duration. At sixty he began to write with a measure of success for the first time. Alcohol had been at least one cause of the block. Since I haven’t seen him in two years I don’t know how far he has taken it but I have no reason to think he would stop and I believe he still writes.

Unanswered Questions:

There are left over questions with every patient but on Holden from first to last I always had too many. The more he told me, the more difficult it became to slot him. He did not fit into any of the orthodox psychiatric categories we use to pinpoint treatment. It’s not absolutely necessary to do this but it’s comfortable. At the end he said that I was the only psychiatrist who had ever helped him. But when I cut him loose I still had not figured him out. At our last session I told him that he was the first patient I could not categorize to my satisfaction.

It was never his intention to be a sphinx but he liked hearing me say it because it flattered his ego. He liked to believe he was different. And by telling him these things I reminded him that I was fallible, too.

We had been talking over terms we used to categorize various types of personality in patients. Then he asked how I would describe him. After six years I should have had an answer.

“Which am I? I think I’m narcissistic” he said, fishing around. “I know I’m self-centered and a collector of sorts but that’s not narcissism, is it. I’m avoidant, that’s for sure. So what is Holden?” he asked, referring to himself in the third person as he sometimes did for fun.

“Holden still eludes me” I said, playing his game.

“You’re an enigma and terribly good at fooling yourself and everybody. You’re a charlatan - a confidence man but you don’t even know you’re doing it” I said after a sort pause. “If you don’t know you’re doing it, you’re not a very good charlatan” I added. I had made a poor attempt to answer.

He was offended and wanted clarification.

I continued, “Your charlatan persona is ever changing. Where does it come from, Holden? I’d love to know. You prefer to be a dilettante at everything you do, a hummingbird darting from flower to flower. Its colors change as it weaves through the light. You write. You collect. You take on impossible commitments and you actually do some of them. At the same time, you’re utterly avoidant. How can this be? Sometimes, for a lark, you’re contrarian. But you’ll never commit to being a writer, a collector, or anything else. You won’t be known as anything. You’re afraid. And you’ll never be financially responsible, will you? You must tempt fate to feel alive. I don’t know how you survive” I said. “And neither do you. Do you?”

My attempt to define his personality had turned into a diatribe. It was too late to wish I had directed it at myself.

Then, as a concession for my rant, I looked in his eyes and said “I hope you realize that I’m more frustrated over my failure to get personality right than I am with you for being you. You’re a wonderful man, Holden. I think the world of you. Categories are just convenient tools; they are basically meaningless. And if I could categorize you, you would wiggle out of it anyway. Right?”

After that we agreed that Holden no longer needed psychoanalysis and that we had travelled far. Far enough? Who can say? At that very point I stopped treating him and quit working at St. Paul’s. The work load had become impossibly heavy, and I needed to be with Damon.

He asked me to and I assured him that I would stay in touch. But I grieved too hard and too long over my partner to follow through with my promise. It is unwise and perhaps impossible, friendship with a patient after therapy. There are good reasons for this. And it may also be that I’m too much of a stickler for tradition.