HOW I BECAME A WRITER

by Dean Unger

I was an infant of six months when she died. There are no accessible memories to speak of, only a faint and foggy familiarity when I think of her: I was seventeen when I found her journals, written during the last years of her life. I was going through my grandfather’s basement, after he too had passed, and made the discovery that would set me upon my future path.

Evelyn Bennett (Maylor) was a nurse for almost her entire life, residing in Powell River, British Columbia, where, up to her death, she attended emergencies and situations that required medical attention at the large pulp and paper mill there. She died of cancer; refused to accept treatment, as she had seen the difficulties that the treatment options available at the time could wreak upon patients she’d herself had treated. As such, her decline was rapid. During the last year of her life, as I discovered from the journal entries, she sought to live a piece of her life-long dream of becoming a writer, something she was not able to do, due to her “earth-people” freaking out when she took time to write. She took up a distance education, literature and writing program, through the University of British Columbia – a pilot program they were offering at the time (1969). Her journals included much that she had written throughout the program. Her instructor’s name was Robert, who, by her admission, was a pedagogical upstart with barely enough experience to plumb toilets, let alone teach literature. Later on, by virtue of the conversations that took place between them, written in the margins of her assignments, a mutual respect, that later became a cherished, but short friendship emerged. Robert’s final comment to Evelyn, just before she died: “And now I see, with my unformed eyes, it is I who is being taught.”

It was an unexpected boon, finding her writing. I was at a crossroads at a crucial time in my life, a time when my navigation system was off-kilter, which brought all the attendant wrong turns and adversities – life storms. A wrong turn here and it could well have been the last decision I ever made.

Thinking back, it was as if she wilfully reached out and somehow arranged for the package to fall into my hands: I vividly recall picking up the thick manila envelope, and trying to blow the dust from it. I pulled out a few among the papers within and sat upon whatever came nearest to hand.

The piece on top was sparsely arranged. This, I imagined, was for effect – a scrivener to give the words an extra dimension, as if they weren’t doing enough already. There it was, “Veritas and Antinomy”, the first piece I would read, that would breathe life into a friendship of sorts, a mentorship, and a potent source of inspiration and family pride. The title, I discovered later on, was written in Latin. She was a fan of Voltaire. Veritas: A fundamental and inevitable truth; and, Antinomy: a fundamental and, apparently, unresolvable conflict, a perfect contradiction of terms: beauty and evil; freedom and slavery; It was just like a hit of adrenaline to fertilize the writer that lay hidden, dormant, sleeping away a long mindless night. There, in the basement at my grandfather’s house, the very first flames flicked at my heels to grab a quill and scribe. This sound revelation was rooted in my very core, but there was a time that I let it slip from view. I was too busy in the music world to see.

The long and the short of it is, that what I was haunted by, was her voice – her spirit. It was alive there on those pages and did ignite the inner core of what drives me. There is a photograph of my Grandmother – Eveyln Bennett (Maylor), on my writing desk: a black and white portrait, taken in her newly starched nurses uniform, just after she graduated nursing school in 1947. I keep it there to remind me what I’m here for. The main character in A Garden of Thieves, was wholly inspired by Evelyn and so for me, her spirit lives on in the story.

She looks upon me now as I write this letter, imagining – nay, knowing – this is her voice:

To My Dearest Grandson,

How should one start this? I’m in unfamiliar territory now. Fingers feeling for purchase. Do I call you Mr. Unger? – Absolutely not! Formalities are for fools. Time wasters. Truly. And if you took a step back for a moment and viewed it objectively you’d see what an ass you were being for your efforts. No. I know you well enough. Though all these years have passed, it took but one look into those eyes when you were a small child, a newborn.

I could not for the life of me figure how God, in all her wisdom and empathy, would require me to endure such torture, yet feel such bliss.

I held you whenever I had the chance. Whenever I could, when my strength was level, and I could sit up and use the wall behind us – the foundation – and the bed upon which we sat would be the cockpit.

I gazed into your eyes, and I tried with every last synapse, cell and connection, to experience an entire life with you in those very few moments of time. And you stared up at me with those eyes. I will never forget it. They were the colour of a melting glacier on a sunny day, in the bluest turquoise-blue ocean, and yet, bordered by grey. I was amazed to see you staring right back at me. Right into my soul. You were so young. Yet, there you were, gazing at me wizened and alert, as though you had lived before, and so you knew all about it. It was as though you knew my thoughts… As though you thoroughly understood that I had something to give you. Something important. Something that couldn’t wait, but would have to for lack of a better plan.

I wrote this letter to you on your first birthday. You were actually six months old, but, for the sake of posterity we agreed, what few of us mattered, that it would be acceptable if we jumped ahead by six months and celebrated a birthday party. It was the last time I held you in my arms.

I wanted nothing more from this life but to have a conversation with you once you had become a young man, to tell you what you would need to know about the past; about what happened. But of course this was not to be. I knew it was unreasonable and silly of me to ask God for one last favour. She’d been so pleasant and ambivalent over the years. Noninvasive. Non-judgemental.

I woke up from a deep sleep later that night knowing that I had to write to you. I had to pen a letter that would find you at just the right moment, when you were old enough to understand. I was initially annoyed at my own obtuseness at not realizing the obvious solution: I was a writer. Write!

With the best of intentions, I started what was to be a letter. I soon discovered, however, that God had gazed upon me that night with an ambiguous smile, and credited me just enough time to finish my correspondence in good form, before I was called too. What came was more a full-on manuscript than a familiar missive.

So there it is. We will simply, then, by this very communication, collapse time upon itself and sit here side by side for as long as we have. After all of this, if your philosophical mind tools to other climes, I shouldn’t hold it against. Mind you, ask the questions of life while you can still do something about it.

Whether my Ashes are spread ceremoniously on the Ocean, or dumped into the fire with the spent cigarettes matters not to me… Some would accuse me of being romantic. But I suppose, for the sake of political types – and writers looking for superlative and droll finis – one should stick to what seems a more appropriate send off, like being dusted on rose bushes, or painted on waves or some such.

…For now, why don’t you stay a while. For this is the story that those eyes of yours beseeched of me that early-September day, long ago.

I do not mean to sound bitter. In fact, I am not bitter. My time for the joys and the storms of life has come and gone. This part of the play is for you! Therefore, I say, Fortis in arduis: take courage, and be strong in your difficulties.

Love & Light,

Your Grandmother,

Evelyn Bennett

I can say with resolve, that my heart, my soul, can once again bear the burden of truth. So, in Quixotic fashion, I turn, with pen in hand, and with this mighty sword will break these impetuous chains that threaten to sink me.

From the beginning then….