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I suppose it comes down to DNA. In the nucleus of each cell, coded in those entangled strands, lie threads of my ancestors—living and dead. My Norwegian great-great grandmother, who never accepted her son, Thomas, leaving the priesthood. After he married, she hounded Thomas and his wife, forcing them to immigrate to Canada. My kind and gentle grandma Bessie, who faced tragedy with great courage. And finally my mom, Dorothy: writer, social worker, feminist.
This thread of DNA has led to me.
Words shaped my mind earlier than most. The first book read to me—Richard Adam’s Watership Down—flowed from Dad’s tongue while Mom’s every heartbeat still gently jostled me within the amniotic fluid. Later, Mom cooed stories about animals and fairy tales with feminist maidens, while my dad told tales through flute and guitar. In kindergarten, too shy to fight for the train set, I abandoned toys for books.
What compels me to write? To lose myself in legend and share personal wisdom? Though I work in science—teaching students about microscopic cells and the vast biosphere—writing inspires me beyond any discipline. Yet my obsessive drive to create characters, narratives, even entire worlds is not enough. To archive and preserve ancestral stories is a commitment that springs from a well of curious habit. I have transcribed writings from three relatives—mother, aunt and great-grandfather.
As the third born of four sons, I feel the closest feminine ties with my mom, Dorothy, and her sisters—Betty and Chrissie. Only through transcribing their writings have I come to understand the three bookish goddesses nicknamed “sisti-uglers” by one of Chrissie’s boyfriends.
Mom raised me to love art. She put books—everything from The Iliad to Harriet the Spy to Aesop’s fables—on my shelves. She introduced me to foreign film—Fellini’s La Strada and Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. She nurtured every creative project I undertook: wall-to-wall mazes drawn across pin-feed computer paper, a filmed fantasy adventure in the backyard, and entering my first writing contest at age thirteen. While Dad held the role of ruthless editor (invaluable to me, if hard to bear), Mom was always the encourager. The one who says, “This is great! Send it out!”
I transcribed her manuscript first. Touching: A Family Love Story is filled with sex, cancer, death, tainted love, women-scorned—the six hundred yellowed pages contain everything my parents censored. In 2002 I found the manuscript languishing in the garage. Packing tape peeled from the flaccid box marked “Mom’s book.” As I picked up the hefty stack of papers, the clack of the typewriter instantly sounded from memory.
As a kid, that noise meant one thing: Do not disturb! My mom took refuge in the study—a room built by Dad, and later my bedroom—where she pounded at the keys. I remember the rhythm of the type bars hitting the paper, the grinding carriage return. Another finished line. She spat out dozens of pages each session, yet the silences meant even more. My budding eight-year-old intellect knew something about the artist’s mind. That sacred creative space. When I drew four-meter mazes, I tolerated no interruption. I can still hear Mom’s tone of voice, still see her piercing stare when I dared trespass. I possess the same fiery conviction. The only time I ever snapped at my girlfriend is when she peered over my shoulder while I wrote. To come between artist and art is to step between mother bear and cub.
Children do not witness their parents’ adolescence; they see them as mentors, life teachers that seem to shrink with time. Little did I know, as I set Touching on the desk next to my computer, the visceral journey that awaited. I discovered parts of my mother I had never met, parts almost too painful to bear.
On page one, Mom quotes Virginia Woolf: “The beauty of the world…has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish cutting the heart asunder.”
Next page Mom holds her sister Betty in her arms as she dies, and then sings to her mother in a Pincher Creek hospital. “For almost seven hours I sang her favourite songs and hymns and slowly willed her to die. It was a labour of love. I gave my mother death as she had given me birth.”
I soon realized that in digitizing her book, I would be swimming in the depths of my mother’s anguish and grief.
As I transcribed aged typeface to bits and bytes, I moved vicariously through 1983, a year where I played with Star Wars action figures. A woman I thought I knew—mother, protector, housewife—became daughter, sister, writer, pissed off feminist, frustrated wife. I was six when her world collapsed, her older sister and mother having died a week apart. One morning, ready for school, I remember Mom breaking into tears, clutching the walls for support. My maternal pillar crumbled before my eyes. Dad said we could stay home. But my brothers and I ran for the bus, eager to escape. Our home could no longer shelter us from the storms of reality.
One hundred-and-fifty-thousand words later, I gained a fuller understanding of Dorothy Anne Lee, all the layers of onion peeled back to reveal the hidden, fragile flower. Behind Mom was a woman with admissible faults and extraordinary resilience. A woman who kept breastfeeding even when her doctor said: ‘Beyond three months it’s pathological.’ A woman who faced her own breast cancer scare—then watched two of the closest women in her life succumb to cancer. Despite her heart being cut asunder, she found strength to carry on, to write her story and live her life.
At Aunt Betty’s 50th birthday party, my mom wrote a series of clues for the family treasure hunt. As she says in Touching:
Betty started this ritual over forty years ago. The rules had always been simple. The clues must be clever, brilliant and challenging. They must be difficult to decipher but not impossible. Betty had always been the most clever clue maker. Hers were rhyming couplets often with literary references.
Nelson [author’s note: Nelson is my dad] had the distinction after he joined the family of producing absolutely brilliant clues that defied all the previous rules as to rhyme and reason…once he just gave Betty a blank piece of paper. It took her an hour to figure out that it meant “empty space”, which referred to the empty space in the crawl space above her ceiling.
Twenty years later, for Mother’s Day, I wrote clues for Mom. I organized a treasure hunt, just as she had done for Betty on her last birthday. Mine were not as clever or erudite. “Frozen chest” led her to the freezer, “hot cube” to the dryer, and eventually “music-maker’s seat” to the piano bench. Inside lay the crisp white pages of Touching.
The journey through Mom’s book led fittingly to my indomitable aunt, Betty Lambert, English professor and author of seventy plays. “Brilliant, wise, larger-than life,” my dad, her ex-student, succinctly wrote of her. While on holiday in San Francisco, she fell in love with an African American law student. Within the month she realized she was pregnant, but he did not want to be a father. Betty decided to keep the baby and raise the child on her own.
When I was young and shy, her flamboyance intimidated me. During family visits to Aunt Betty’s house, I ran in the backyard and played with Golda, her golden lab. Only scattered images remain. Russian matryoshka nesting dolls. Black-and-white family photos on the mantelpiece. A huge painting of a potted cactus. How does one build a relationship from a six-year-old memory?
Years later, my mom introduced me to Betty’s plays. Jennie’s Story, inspired by true events, examines the ramifications of Alberta’s Sexual Sterilization Act enacted in 1928. This permitted sterilization without consent on those deemed unfit or mentally challenged. The young Jennie worked as a housekeeper for a Catholic priest. He seduced her. To ensure she would not become pregnant, he convinced authorities she was mentally challenged and took her to Ponoka to be sterilized. He told Jennie she was having an appendectomy.
I saw Under the Skin next. Based on a real kidnapping in Port Moody, the focus is Renee’s marriage to the cruel, ruthless John, and his terrible secret. John has confined the neighbour’s twelve-year-old to the bomb shelter beneath his workshop, where he sexually molests her. Renee’s subtle reaction to what her heart gradually knows to be true underlies the play’s stark theme.
These productions were my first exposure to Betty’s vision. Her humour, honesty, and moral fury surfaced from the intensely drawn characters. As a teenager I read her sole novel, Crossings, moulding my nascent life philosophy further. Largely autobiographical, it depicts her physical and sexually abusive relationship with Mik. I began to understand woman as victims of patriarchal society, but persevering nonetheless. I witnessed violence and oppression endured with tender strength and determination.
On my personal journey to discover Betty, this treasure hunt led me to the veritable dragon’s den: Simon Fraser University’s special collections library. In that temperature and humidity-controlled room lay forty boxes filled with Elizabeth Minnie Lambert. SFU had bought her literary estate. Scripts, drafts, journals, letters, lectures…I tore into the manuscripts voraciously, feeding off her words like a coyote in a chicken coop.
For months I returned, every week devouring another few boxes. I read her notes on making love, script drafts covered in red edits, stories of teenage heartbreak, letters to an on-again off-again ex-lover, and personal diaries that shied away from nothing. Betty was always a seeker of truth. And she shared her truth, no matter how shocking. In one entry, I found a reference to me as a baby—my colicky scream filled her with an overwhelming desire to strangle me with her bare hands.
The dialogue in Betty’s plays made evident her wit. The mountain of manuscripts and drafts revealed her unwavering drive. Her entertaining letters, lovelorn confusion, and desperation for truth all danced behind the words. The aunt who died while I learned to print and spell now became a fellow writer and teacher.
In tribute to her words, I designed an elaborate website referencing every single work she wrote, published or not. But my goal was accomplished. My Aunt Betty was no longer a stranger.
Betty was a writer to the bitter end. Even when blinded by brain tumours, struck mute by pneumonia, she printed letter by painstaking letter on her yellow pad: I want to write. Her last words were on that same yellow pad.
What is the final demand in life? she wrote to my mom.
“I don’t know, Betty. But I’m sure you do.”
She nodded and wrote, every letter a tremendous effort, More and more and more nostalgia. So my mom talked about their father and mother, their childhood struggles, their bonding as sisters, how much they had always loved each other. She talked until Betty took her last breath in my mother’s arms.
Only two of the sisti-uglers remain, and my path now leads me to the youngest. Like her mother and older sister, cancer would later claim Chrissie’s body. Letters offer her only literary legacy, but she was full of story. In early 2007, given months to live, she clung to photos and family stories. During my final visits, we dug through boxes of familial treasures. As she moved excitedly from one subject to the next, I scrawled names and dates on unlabelled pictures, often including a question mark. Like a sponge, I sucked in her wit-filled anecdotes told with her wicked sense of humour.
Chrissie knew life’s importance. Hardship, injustice, ailment, and grief all tried to sour her spirit. Yet at her core, Chrissie lived for and shared story. Like Betty, she craved nostalgia.
And now, in my hands, the notebook of my great-grandfather, Thomas Craven, filled with fictional stories. This past week I transcribed the first, untitled tale about a bully named Piggoh.
Why am I driven this way, to set in stone words of the dead? Respect for ghosts of generations past? Morbid curiosity? Or perhaps, by following those who came before, I hope to find my own path.
In the lumberjack camps, Piggoh preys on Jules, a French immigrant. Thomas himself fled England for Canada in 1896 aboard the SS Mongolian, to escape his domineering mother. She demanded he stay in the priesthood. Instead, he married Bridget McGrane, a sweet Irish colleen—poor, illiterate, half his age, and soon pregnant. Thomas’s mother got him fired from a university job and threatened to disinherit him. He would have come into Westwood, a stately mansion complete with tea house, vineyard, horse stables and dog kennels. But he cut the phantom umbilical by crossing the Atlantic and taking the surname Cooper.
Thomas bought land near Cowley, a remote town 150 miles south of Calgary. He thought the scrubland would be valuable when the railway went through. But the tracks were diverted. With a third child on the way, and their barren land worthless, he became desperate for work. This man, fluent in five languages and with degrees from Oxford and Cambridge, accepted the job of logging camp cook. Thomas delighted in working outdoors, concocting new recipes, soups, and—as it turns out—fiction.
The story of Piggoh and Jules is obviously inspired by his days in the logging camps. Thomas’s penciled, cursive writing makes every third or fourth word difficult to decipher. With patient diligence, I transcribed the thirteen-page story; Jules stands up to the bully with one resounding punch.
[Piggoh] lay silent and peaceful amid the wild flowers and fern like a fallen angel. Jules, uncertain as to what would now happen, stood ready. Would Piggoh rise and beat him up? If so, he would take it willingly for the pleasure of seeing his tormenter ‘hors de combat’. The fallen bully lay without movement, looking up into the face of the French youth with surprise and with fear plainly written on his face.
Then Jules returned to his work and his axe, feeling and looking like a conqueror! Piggoh’s companions left him to recover as he was able, for it is against the etiquette of the woods to interfere in a fight.
“What happened?” was a question put by the bully.
“You were knocked out in one blow,” he was informed. “Served you damn well right!”
The last story in the notebook is called “The Timekeeper.” Thomas played that role at the ill-fated Frank Mine, a job he took some years later. At 4:10 in the morning, April 29th, 1903, 90 million tons of rock fell from the summit of Turtle Mountain. The town of Frank was swept away in a thunderous wave. By chance, Thomas was absent from work that morning.
Christened Turtle Mountain by rancher Louis Garnett, the oral traditions of the Blackfoot and Kutenai aptly referred to the peak as “the mountain that moves.” Thomas wrote about the day stone fell like rain in his article “The Terror that Came in the Night.”
The mass of falling rocks poured down on the town below with unceasing and irresistible force from the summit of the mountain literally burying the dwellings beneath and their unfortunate inmates, who waking in terror were buried in their rocky tombs beneath the crushing weight of countless tons…we know nothing of the [cause]—all is conjecture. Only one thing we know for certain is that we were and are alive and thankful to be so.
My three ancestral writers possess such diverse telling of tales. I search for the common thread, the fitting motif. My great grandfather dealt with mines and lumberjack camps. Mom and Aunt Betty wrote feminist-driven memoirs. I write about rivers, Iceland, and life on other planets. Is there a link?
We all seek truth. The truth of the Frank Slide, the truth of my Aunt Betty’s abusive relationship, the truth of cancer’s devastating effects. My own personal seeds of truth germinate into reflections on Mother Nature’s spirituality, world travelogues, and insights from exploring an entirely alien perspective.
On a cellular level, my ancestors and I share the same threads of life. Yet Watson, Crick and Franklin determined DNA to be a double helix—I have only elucidated stories from my maternal strand. On Dad’s side, stories are hard to come by. One week ago, wishing to explore my other helical half, I visited my dad’s mother. My hidden agenda? Hearing tales from her eighty years of life. Her first response came as a joyful sound, “For Christmas of next year, I’m going to write out my life story.” I felt a warm shiver of anticipation. I coaxed her for a preview; she was eager to oblige. Pieces of my past fell into place.
“My father—your great grandfather—had golden locks.” Hence my bright blonde curls up to age five.
“In cross-country, my brother and I finished third in all the Saskatchewan schools.” Hence my love of long-distance running.
“I wanted so badly to be a teacher, but my parents could only send one of us to university. My brother got to go. I thought to myself, I’ll get married and start a family.” My grandmother married and a year later Dad was born. The other half of the puzzle began to fill in.
I was curious. “Grandma, are you going to use your old script typewriter?”
She shook her head. “I’ll do it longhand.”
I offered to transcribe her words. Said it would be my honour—and it grants me first reading rights.
With this future project of preservation on my mind, I left feeling more familiar with my paternal strand. DNA fulfills its vital functions—protein production, replication, growth—only after being copied and transcribed. Then its purpose is translated into physical meaning. At some point, I will stop transcribing to focus on my tale. Yet the remaining pockets of truth compel me to further unravel those familial strands. This cause is ultimately selfish. When my time comes, I will be well prepared. In those last few hours and days, when death’s shadow robs my senses one by one, I will have no shortage of precious family nostalgia to bring me comfort.
Lee Beavington
August 20, 2009
References
Beavington, Dorothy. Touching: A Family Love Story. (Unpublished manuscript).
Cooper, Thomas. “The Terror That Came in the Night.” Pincher Creek Echo, April 26, 1962 (reprinted).
Lambert, Betty. Jennie’s Story.Lambert, Betty. Under the Skin.
www.bettylambert.com
www.leebeavington.com
