Letters to Brian: A Year of Living and Remembrance

By Martha Brooks

In daily love letters written to her husband and soul companion, Brian, over the year following his death from brain cancer, critically acclaimed author, playwright, and jazz singer Martha Brooks leads us on a journey through grief that is both deeply personal and undeniably universal.

By turns funny, shattering, and uplifting, Brooks wrestles with the crucial question of how to continue a lifelong romance once your lover is gone. The answer seems to come from Brian himself, leaving timely clues and orchestrating surprising synchronicities of healing through family, friends, and complete strangers. Through her “Letters to Brian”, Brooks learns not to overcome her grief but to live with loss. And she comes to realize that we are never truly alone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Turnstone Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9780888015228

Martha Brooks

My sister and I were raised in southwestern Manitoba, near the U.S. border. Mom was a nurse and Dad a thoracic surgeon. We lived on the lyrically beautiful grounds of a tuberculosis sanatorium in a sprawling many-roomed house with sleeping porches and a wraparound veranda that overlooked Pelican Lake. The surrounding hilly countryside and the feeling that a living spirit moved within this landscape was my earliest artistic influence and I still write from and in that landscape. In fact, our summer home across the lake from where I grew up is the perfect place to grow a novel! The other influence was my own chronic illness as a child, forging my vision and opening me to an early understanding that suffering and miracles often exist side by side. I still write from these influences.   Other personal details include: the surgery when I was eighteen that gave me health and my two voices as an artist; a husband of forty years who is my soul mate and best friend; a grown daughter who is an anthropologist–poet, a three decade career in writing and public speaking, eight books (the first is out of print), four plays, and—at sixty-three years of age—a joyful parallel career as a jazz singer and lyricist where I get to play with some of the best jazz musicians that Canada has to offer.   Martha Brooks resides in Winnipeg, Canada, with her husband, Brian.

Book preview

Letters to Brian

Letters to Brian

A YEAR OF LIVING AND REMEMBRANCE

by Martha Brooks

Letters to Brian: A Year of Living and Remembrance

copyright © Martha Brooks 2015

Turnstone Press

Artspace Building

206-100 Arthur Street

Winnipeg, MB

R3B 1H3 Canada

www.TurnstonePress.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or ­transmitted in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic or ­mechanical—without the prior ­written permission of the ­publisher. Any request to photocopy any part of this book shall be directed in writing to Access Copyright, Toronto.

Turnstone Press gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba Arts Council, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, and the Province of Manitoba through the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Book Publisher Marketing Assistance Program.

Photo pages ii and 207 by Maureen Brooks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Brooks, Martha, 1944-, author

Letters to Brian : a year of living and remembrance / Martha Brooks.

ISBN 978-0-88801-521-1 (pbk.)

1. Brooks, Martha, 1944- --Marriage. 2. Brooks, Brian, 1943-2012--

Death and burial. 3. Authors, Canadian (English)--20th century--Biography.

4. Grief. 5. Loss (Psychology). I. Title.

PS8553.R663Z47 2015 C818’.5403 C2014-907888-9

To Brian, of course,

for the gifts of your life and your love.

somehow sweetly alive

these ghosts that i inhale

the moon and i survive

while the dearly dead prevail

The Wind Song

—Patricia Barber

Letters to Brian

. . . contentedly inseparable …

My husband, Brian, about a year before his devastating diagnosis of brain cancer, read aloud to me an excerpt, published in The Atlantic, from A Widow’s Story, a memoir by the American author Joyce Carol Oates. She and her husband Raymond Smith seemed to have been an extraordinarily close couple and, as Brian observed, They sound like us. We were at the family cottage on Pelican Lake at the time … contentedly inseparable … our own long marriage began in 1967. Unaware of what was to come, we had nothing more spectacular on our mutual bucket list than many more summers there, joined at the hip.

Brian’s diagnosis came on Remembrance Day, 2011, and through the last year of his life, he and I, together with our daughter, Kirsten, who had just turned thirty-nine, treated his disease not as a death sentence, which it surely was, but as an opportunity to tighten our bond and appreciate whatever time would be given. By the spring of 2012, Brian was well enough to welcome the miracle of another season at the family cottage—our Eden place—and that’s where he and I spent the next six months.

I kept a journal of the time from when he was first diagnosed, and all through that summer and into the fall—a scattering of entries recording an ever more excruciating awareness of the fragility of his situation. After his death on November 27, 2012, at 9:27 A.M., I found myself turning more and more to its pages for solace and shelter. After all, I was and am a writer, fully equipped to wrap my heart and mind around grief—and to use those words as a way into the hard but necessary work of grieving.

That was all well and good for a while, but a month after his death, I picked up my pen and surprised myself by writing, My darling Brian. The words that followed flowed into a letter to him. And while, in my sorrow, I realized that my handsome husband would never again appear in the doorway, all six-foot-six of him, I also realized that he could be a kind of long-distance lover. Here he was, the man of my heart and best friend, with whom I could share thoughts as we had always done. I just never expected to hear back! Yet, and here is the surprising thing, what should have been a one-way communication quickly led to the synchronous and the miraculous in a kind of call-and-response between us that allowed me, ultimately, to cleave to the mortal while still carrying his love around like a lucky charm.

Letters to Brian, the book, concludes at the first anniversary of his death. However, I continue to heal by staying connected to him. I summer in the valley we both loved. And as I write this, mid-August 2014, I still, almost every day, pick up a pen to tell him how much I love him and give him news from home. Not to do so would be to close myself off from the longest and most profound relationship of my life.

JOURNAL ENTRIES

23 November 2011

Several decades ago, when we were a young and carefree married couple, we were robbed. Painters had come into our apartment and one of them, a profusely perspiring glassy-eyed guy our age, helped himself to Brian’s wallet. We didn’t realize it had gone missing until later that evening when city police arrived at our door. The thief had tried to buy gas with Brian’s credit card, making the fatal mistake of forging his signature: Brain Brooks.

10 January 2012

It’s been two months less a day since Brian’s diagnosis: inoperable glioblastoma. As I write this he is up at the dining room table grumbling about our finances. Over the time when he moved from bouts of crying and wild optimism to a full-blown steroid-induced psychosis that landed him, over Christmas, on the psych ward, we cut up his credit cards. Today we purchased another pair of eyeglasses at Costco—nothing like the round ones he’d wanted over a month ago to make him look like Steve Jobs, and they would have been flattering had we found them, hang the cost. His most recent pair got tossed, inadvertently, into the trash at the hospital sometime over the past three weeks. Everyone there turned the place upside down trying to find them—to no avail.

Today, he is upset, and I don’t blame him, to have to spend more money on new glasses. We’re spending money like drunken sailors! he said.

So we’re back to a saner place that includes frugality. But now he doesn’t understand why he can’t drive the car. When we explain that he has a brain tumour with its accompanying brain injury, he still doesn’t get that that’s why he shouldn’t be behind the wheel. I have stopped driving. Grief and its accompanying trauma are bad seatmates. Someday I’ll drive again, but for now I’m a danger to myself and everyone else on the road.

And I have not wanted to write—writing being as natural to a writer as breathing. Through many dark days where two months feels like two years, breathing is all I can do, one breath at a time through an endless series of shocks to the spirit, body and psyche.

In spite of the fact that the tumour is in his speech centre (his difficulty with word finding was the first thing that gave his condition away), he speaks fairly well now and even (very slowly) reads. He was abruptly taken off everything when his mind collapsed, but the radiation in combination with the chemo drugs and the steroids, according to his oncologist, seem to have kicked the crap out of the tumour, and he’s stable. For this miracle I am grateful. We have entered a period of grace, a flow to be regarded with gingerly respect. I am a bright woman. I know there is no road map for this stuff. As a writer I deal with ambiguities. Our life has been torn asunder and glued back together. It looks suspiciously like our old life, but I’d be a fool to think that it is.

11 January 2012

I need to pay attention. Enjoy this time. Stop in the middle of it all, take a breath and return to my original thoughts, the state of gratitude and grace that flowed so abundantly from my spirit before all this happened. Last fall—and all through the summer at Eden—the equation of we, of us. The bucket list I referred to in the cottage journal: nothing left on it, I claimed, except several more summers at the lake with Brian.

Supper at the Brooks’—tofu, quinoa, stir-fried vegetables, cookies freshly baked. Patricia Barber, jazz artist extraordinaire, playing in the background. Nobody writes lyrics like her, Brian remarked at the table. Fire going. Cold night outside. Later, we’ll slip into bed, listen to each other’s breath, look at the shadows on the ceiling, just be—hip-to-hip. I love this man.

17 January 2012

Brian said to me today, We’ve had a pretty good run at it. And we’re not done, yet.

15 February 2012

I’m now back to driving. Brian and I took a trip out to Ninette and the cottage overlooking a frozen Pelican Lake, yesterday, Valentine’s Day, to celebrate just being together—a noble accomplishment. He’s been depressed. Well, why wouldn’t he be. Actually we both have. But yesterday our country friend, Marilyn, and I were with him in the yard at the cottage as we all noted the sun coming through the branches of the winter trees. Then, when Brian walked a little way into the woods we slowly followed him. So quiet in there. He raised his eyes and just stood there, looking around, before he said, It’s lovely.

21 February 2012

A light has burned out behind my desk in my office—I just noticed it, I say to Brian.

Okay, he says, lifting his head from the newspaper, I’ll deal with it.

He likely won’t but it’s good for him to think that he might.

I just made red lentil soup with fresh tomatoes and roast cumin, I tell him.

Smells good, says my husband, who for the past decade has done almost all of the cooking.

Now I sit in the living room with him, pen in hand, glass of sherry on the coffee table. Moments of treasured normalcy in the Brooks household. Holding fast this moment, this day, the rustle of the newspaper in his hands. Heartbreaking.

6 March 2012

We are taking great pleasure in being together—in the extraordinary ordinariness of it. No drama. The lovely mundane everyday beauty of us.

8 March 2012

A sunny afternoon. We’re in bed and I start to cry.

What’s wrong? he says.

I can’t stand the thought of you not being here, of losing you.

He gives me his lovely smile, head turned on the pillow, and says, That’s why I’m not going anywhere. I told you right from the beginning I wasn’t.

That’s good, I say. I’ll hold you to it because I’m drowning in my own tears, here—gives a whole new meaning to that.

14 March 2012

Today we went to Rona and purchased dime-sized discs for my desk. Back home we lifted each corner of heavy glass and secured all four so that it no longer teeters precariously. A small job (with gratitude from me) that lifted his spirits. Gratitude, that word, again, is immeasurably healing.

Such a strikingly beautiful yet simple desk. He designed it for me with all of his genius intact.

Still is a genius.

18 March 2012

A wonderful family Sunday. The best, Kirsten and I agreed, since her dad got sick. Brian was very clear and funny. Dinner, a baked tomato polenta—which he himself has made for years but now claimed he couldn’t remember ever having eaten—arrived at the table, fragrant with fontina and gorgonzola and fresh herbs. Despite his memory loss I really think he was having us on. He isn’t above doing that. He tucked into it and we had a free and easy time, and Mike had three helpings, egged on by his father-in-law. Later, sitting around the living room, with the screen door to the patio open, in March in Manitoba of all things, we four chatted about everything and nothing as a warm fragrant breeze blew through. Spring and summer all at once. A moment in time.

23 April 2012

Twenty degrees. Painted my toenails blossom pink in honour of the season. A continuation of all good things. Bravely forth. May 1st and a summer on the hilltop overlooking Pelican Lake in three of its seasons, with my man, is now in sight.

25 April 2012

Be grateful for luck. Pay the thunder no mind—listen to the birds. And don’t hate nobody.—Eubie Blake

1 May 2012

At the cottage at last. Frankly, wondered if we’d make it here together this year. But the maniac gulls welcome us and the sun and the pastel blue sky of spring and the fiery green leaves. Home.

3 May 2012

Yesterday, while Brian mowed the lawn, Myra and I took a walk through the woods. I picked sunny yellow marsh marigolds from a cold stream and brought them home and put them on the table and then cooked us a blueberry crumble cake and stir-fries. Myra is in a constant state of canine rapture.

4 May 2012

We drove in the rain to Belmont. At Dolder’s Nursery, with its earth-rich plant smells, we purchased a very large rosemary plant which now resides in the breezeway and smells wonderful. Last year a rosemary I’d planted outside the cottage, under the protection of the French lilac bushes near the front door, did not survive the heat of summer. We always dig up a rosemary and take it back in the fall to our city kitchen window, and when it died that felt somehow like a bad omen. As bad omens go, if you believe that sort of thing, it certainly was one. Anyway, this rosemary, lively and succulent and bushy, practically breathes. Let’s see if we can get it and ourselves back to city life, safely, come fall.

18 May 2012

I suspect I am, ever so gently, being eased out of the kitchen. Confidence is a great motivator—mine, as well as his. I did say to him, yesterday, Anytime you’re ready to kick me out of here let me know and I’ll go gladly. He’s still a genius cook—as his improvised tomato-tofu dish, yesterday, attests to—and he was pleased that it was so good. Have I mentioned, lately, here in these pages, how much I love this man? His gentleness, his sanity, his thoughtfulness, his sensible and reasoned approach to life and to me. What a rare bird he is. What a lucky woman I am. Forty-nine years and counting. When you love somebody, when they are the right person for you, there are never enough years.

6 June 2012

After much prodding from Brian and a little more from our friend Marilyn, I’ve jumped back into the writing. Clarity, speed, joy—it’s all there—and the novel, at last, is taking shape.

1 July 2012

Been working at getting my jazz voice back in shape. I sing all the time, now, to my appreciative husband. It’s been a year since the Winnipeg Jazz Festival and I’m a little rusty, but singing is always such a pleasure. Went back to the city to do a gig. Rob Siwik walked into the place to set up his drum kit, said Hi to Brian who was, as usual, sitting front and centre, and then he added a completely impromptu, She’s in great voice. Brian beamed and squeezed my hand three times. Then for the next three hours Jeff Presslaff and Rob and my longtime bassist, Steve Hamilton, played sublimely and tenderly and I sang for the folks but mostly for my husband. Our friend Pat, who came out to hear us, said that the music shifted something in her DNA. Brian, hugging me close the next morning, my ear next to his heart, said, You needed that. You needed it for you.

15 July 2012

In Brian’s hand, Hapey Birsthday, Marth (a clump of ink) a. All My Love—Brian

I made a mess of it, he said, shaking his head and handing it to me.

No you didn’t, I said, pressing his message to my heart, it’s perfect. I love it.

8 August 2012

Been a month of comings and goings and, mostly, stayings. The tumour is growing again and we’re trying temozolomide once more. He survived his first week of chemo pills (three weeks off and then another week on). The week after he was tired and unwell. This week, after a two-hour round of reiki with his favourite daughter, he’s feeling better.

9 September 2012

Golden autumn day. Wind lullaby in the leaves. Kirsten and Mike out for another weekend and she’s staying for the week and wants to give her favourite father a few more reiki treatments. Each day in Eden is a blessing. When we arrived in May we couldn’t have predicted that we’d still be enjoying a (relatively) normal life, seeing to fruition an entire spring, summer and fall here.

15 September 2012

Kirsten’s birthday, and the day after we received the remarkable news that after only