A Walk With Ron
Harrison Kim
Ron called me up two days after my wife killed herself.
“Hey, I heard the news from your sister. Cara finally did it.”
“Yes,” I said. “It could’ve happened any day the last thirteen years.”
“Let’s talk about today,” he said. “What are you up to today?”
“Well,” I paused. “I did my laundry yesterday. Cleaned the kitchen floor. Not many plans, actually. Maybe pay for the death certificate.”
“Well, let’s move an agenda,” Ron said. “I nominate a walk.”
We met out at Barnston Island ferry. It’s a three-minute ride across the river to the island. Just remember to hang on tight to the side of the boat. Barnston’s a circle of green in a sea of city mean, arcadian and lush, organic dairy farms and climbing blackberry vines. Fraser river flowing on all sides, stroking it down towards the sea.
Ron and I go way back. We worked 25 years together at the Forensic Psychiatric Hospital for the criminally insane (FPH). I ran the education program, he managed the potato factory. I worked my teaching degree, he finished high school.
Smiling, red faced, wrinkly eyed Ron stopped drinking just after his retirement.
“He’s a conversation genius.” That’s what I told everybody. “The guy could charm Medusa into dropping her snakes.”
Now we’re walking the circle route at Barnston Island. I tell Ron about the events two days ago. Not a regular shift at work, a big computer change. A huge flabby guy with giant tattoos of fish all over his arms and neck burst in to the school room without notice and insisted the computers be upgraded. A mandatory government policy. He even shook his fish. I shut down the class and escorted irritable patients back to their wards. Then I cooperated with the big techno switch.
Cara called early, her anxiety rising, she said. The dog next door yelping. She didn’t know what to do. I said “maybe turn on the radio so you don’t hear the noise. Take a bath, go out for a walk.”
I became so busy with the computers, I didn’t call her back. Before she hung up, she said she’d listen to CBC.
Ron nods and chats, he says “Was that the neighbours' dog?”
Cara believed the neighbours concocted a conspiracy to drive her out of our house. That included their extended family kidnapping a dog that they tortured in their basement.
I like the way Ron asks for details. Guys like to do that. I notice a lot of details myself, such as Barnston Island’s old dairy farm fields being converted to cranberry production. There’s steel armed backhoes digging up pastures and scooping out soil. Hills of black peat line deep new ditches. We hear more machinery chugging in the distance. Maybe that was how Cara heard the dog’s crying. Distant, yet relentless, and she couldn’t do anything. She’d called the SPCA many times, and the police.
I tell Ron that Cara’s apocalyptic visions of earth’s end seem reflected in these giant soil shifters.
“Yeah,” he says. “I remember last time at your house she talked nonstop about all the changes, retail clerks laughing at her, no one understands English, people cell phoning, yelling loud on the buses.”
“Yes, she’s terribly sensitive to noise,” I say. Then I realize it should be “was.” I pause. Then start again. “But sometime after she called, she did run the radio and the bath. A half full tub of water, still clean when I got home. The radio on.”
“She never took the bath though?” Rona asks.
“That’s right,” I say. “She had the radio cranked up. Classical music.”
Ron’s brother Ed’s a hoarder. He drinks all day while leaning forward in a lazy chair towards his one uncovered window, observing the street. Ron visits, tries to talk him into walking to the park. Ron’s good at selling anyone anything, but Ed prefers to sit and gaze. Years go by, and Ron tries the park walk suggestion every visit, never gives up. The brother piles up newspapers, appliances, bits of wood and iron, until he can barely peer out his window. It’s the same with Cara. For years, I tried to change her mind. I preach that the world’s not unceasingly negative, her best friend’s a loud, cell talking Filipino, and she’s mistaken about the dog. The whining and howling’s from a different animal, an anxious hunting hound. The owners, who live two doors over, often leave it in the back yard by itself, and it has separation anxiety.
Cara’s reaction: “No one believes me.”
The SPCA and the cops investigated her complaints several times. No tortured animals discovered. The police said the Sikhs next door felt angry and humiliated by these false accusations. Cara kept tossing notes over their fence.
“Can’t you get her into some kind of day program?” one policewoman asked “Next time she throws those notes, we’ll have to take her in.”
This same officer is one of the three who investigate Cara’s suicide. When she sees the body, the officer looks away and remarks “Oh, I think I know her,” and she steps backwards down the attic ladder, and says it again, with upturned face. “I’ve spoken with her.”
Ron chuckles grimly. “Yes, I guess she did.”
Our black humor could be from decades of experience at the psychiatric hospital, though I think dry is a pre-requisite for working there. Otherwise, a person couldn’t handle events. You’d be too darn serious and idealistic. Then you’d burn out and become bitter and cynical. I see it all the time. Ron and I have always been dry, parched on the wit front. Wizened, even. So we never crashed. We continued laughing together, both of us drinking kombucha in the cafes, after Ron quit the booze.
At the endless work meetings, we’d construct secret rounds of “twenty questions.” I’d be white board writing fellow workers’ suggestions re “continuing the greenhouse program” or “whether to switch to rubber pencils.” and at the same time Ron and I talked our secret code, using nods and signals. We played, right in front of the boss, while pretending serious surface dialogue. No one ever caught on.
It’s around high noon on Barnston, and two dogs bound out to follow us. There’s a short haired German Shepherd cross and a jigsaw puzzle patterned Rottweiler. I throw them a muffin. They gobble up and drool for more. Ron gets friendly, offering them rubs and doughnuts. The sun’s even warm, on this February day. In the field beside us, there’s picturesque vintage dry-docked boats, used to fish the river. And the river rides powerful, forever pushing, we walk upstream beside it.
“So, was Cara still on her medication?” Ron asks. He wears a big green parka. I wear a big red one. Ron gave it to me, from a stash in his car. I don’t ask where he finds these things.
“Yeah, she’d even obtained an increase last month,” I say. “I talked to her doctor yesterday. He’s really shaken up.”
Doctor Adel said he never saw this coming. “She seemed happier lately.”
But I did. Cara made her first attempt in 2003, using pills. I found her passed out, a note beside her. Emergency services and the hospital saved her life. After she came to, she said “Why didn’t you let me die?”
“I care about you,” I said.
Cara frowned, and looked away. “I’m just a millstone around your neck.”
Twelve years later, and two weeks before she chose her final ending, she smiled with what I interpreted as joy. “I love you so much, dear. This house and I would be empty, lost without you.”
So I could see how Dr. Adel might be confused. I knew, though, that the end of anything is inevitable. I did not blame anyone.
After we leave the island, Ron and I dine on Vietnamese food at a local cafe. I pour on some sauce and the first bite is fire. I grab the water. The water doesn’t help.
“Try these Tums,” says Ron, and he’s laughing so hard, his face red like my parka. I can’t stop chuckling either, it’s ingrained from all those Forensic Hospital meetings. Sometimes we had to run from the seminar room with our mirth, and let it out next door, in the spare seclusion cell.
I’m whooping now, with the spices, my whole chest hurts, hope I don’t have a heart attack. Then again, if I do, I’d join Cara. Would that be so bad?
When the soft spoken, tired police inspector arrived to do the routine, which was clear me of involvement, he said “you shouldn’t stay alone here. Not after what happened tonight.”
I guess he was worried about me doing the deed too. I told him I was too much of a coward.
I found Cara in the attic, on her knees, leaning forward from the rope round her neck, the rope that stretched tight to the rafters, I prised my fingers between the rope and her throat and loosened. She was cold then. She wore her blue sweater. My favorite. The coroner later estimated the time of death at 130 pm. I arrived home around 430. 9-11 said try artificial respiration. I lay Cara on her back and did the CPR til the firemen arrived, bumped their heads on the ceiling, and applied the defibrillator.
I spent the night in the house. Took two of Cara’s benzodiazepines. They helped a lot. But I didn’t sleep, of course. I kept reading her short red felt pen note, over and over “I’ve had enough.”
I look up and Ron’s still laughing about the hot sauce. We wipe the tears from our eyes. He pays the lunch bill. “It’s the least I can do,” and even that sounds funny now.
“You know,” I tell Ron, “The officers were waiting for the coroner, and there’s a knock at the door and I answer it and there’s this tall gangly long faced woman.... my naturopath.”
“And she’s also the coroner,” says Ron.
“Yes,” I say. “That was the second biggest surprise of the night.”
After she examined the body, Dr. Van Loon told me “This is tragic. Your life will never be the same.”
And on my walk with Ron, I think about that. Yes, your wife’s suicide can change you.
In the months after the walk, I also think about Ron.
He came to be with me. What he did showed who he was. Maybe he thought of his brother, maybe of all the suicides we knew from the Forensic Psychiatric Hospital, not just by patients, but also staff. Yes, he thought of me. I knew he was a person I could trust.
A year later, Ron’s sitting at my kitchen table. I’ve been diagnosed with “major depressive disorder with psychosis” and I’m telling Ron that gangsters are sabotaging my furnace. I tell him that my FPH work is sending people to spy on me, and they think I’m faking my illness. I don’t want to go outside, because they’ll cut me off sick leave. Besides that, I’m suffering from serious sciatica., I spend most of the day lying on the floor. I stand up to light pieces of paper on fire, then decide if I should let them flame, or stomp them out.
Ron tells me I’m exactly like his alcoholic brother, and so much like my wife, paranoid before she died. He tells me that I have to decide. Do I want to waste away inside my head, burn myself and the house down also, or exorcize my craziness, and live?
“I’ll never forget how you listened to me out on Barnston Island,” I said.
“So let’s start walking again,” replies Ron.
He starts putting on his boots.
I think about it. “O. K.” I reply.
I know this guy, for sure, is real.
Harrison Kim
Ron called me up two days after my wife killed herself.
“Hey, I heard the news from your sister. Cara finally did it.”
“Yes,” I said. “It could’ve happened any day the last thirteen years.”
“Let’s talk about today,” he said. “What are you up to today?”
“Well,” I paused. “I did my laundry yesterday. Cleaned the kitchen floor. Not many plans, actually. Maybe pay for the death certificate.”
“Well, let’s move an agenda,” Ron said. “I nominate a walk.”
We met out at Barnston Island ferry. It’s a three-minute ride across the river to the island. Just remember to hang on tight to the side of the boat. Barnston’s a circle of green in a sea of city mean, arcadian and lush, organic dairy farms and climbing blackberry vines. Fraser river flowing on all sides, stroking it down towards the sea.
Ron and I go way back. We worked 25 years together at the Forensic Psychiatric Hospital for the criminally insane (FPH). I ran the education program, he managed the potato factory. I worked my teaching degree, he finished high school.
Smiling, red faced, wrinkly eyed Ron stopped drinking just after his retirement.
“He’s a conversation genius.” That’s what I told everybody. “The guy could charm Medusa into dropping her snakes.”
Now we’re walking the circle route at Barnston Island. I tell Ron about the events two days ago. Not a regular shift at work, a big computer change. A huge flabby guy with giant tattoos of fish all over his arms and neck burst in to the school room without notice and insisted the computers be upgraded. A mandatory government policy. He even shook his fish. I shut down the class and escorted irritable patients back to their wards. Then I cooperated with the big techno switch.
Cara called early, her anxiety rising, she said. The dog next door yelping. She didn’t know what to do. I said “maybe turn on the radio so you don’t hear the noise. Take a bath, go out for a walk.”
I became so busy with the computers, I didn’t call her back. Before she hung up, she said she’d listen to CBC.
Ron nods and chats, he says “Was that the neighbours' dog?”
Cara believed the neighbours concocted a conspiracy to drive her out of our house. That included their extended family kidnapping a dog that they tortured in their basement.
I like the way Ron asks for details. Guys like to do that. I notice a lot of details myself, such as Barnston Island’s old dairy farm fields being converted to cranberry production. There’s steel armed backhoes digging up pastures and scooping out soil. Hills of black peat line deep new ditches. We hear more machinery chugging in the distance. Maybe that was how Cara heard the dog’s crying. Distant, yet relentless, and she couldn’t do anything. She’d called the SPCA many times, and the police.
I tell Ron that Cara’s apocalyptic visions of earth’s end seem reflected in these giant soil shifters.
“Yeah,” he says. “I remember last time at your house she talked nonstop about all the changes, retail clerks laughing at her, no one understands English, people cell phoning, yelling loud on the buses.”
“Yes, she’s terribly sensitive to noise,” I say. Then I realize it should be “was.” I pause. Then start again. “But sometime after she called, she did run the radio and the bath. A half full tub of water, still clean when I got home. The radio on.”
“She never took the bath though?” Rona asks.
“That’s right,” I say. “She had the radio cranked up. Classical music.”
Ron’s brother Ed’s a hoarder. He drinks all day while leaning forward in a lazy chair towards his one uncovered window, observing the street. Ron visits, tries to talk him into walking to the park. Ron’s good at selling anyone anything, but Ed prefers to sit and gaze. Years go by, and Ron tries the park walk suggestion every visit, never gives up. The brother piles up newspapers, appliances, bits of wood and iron, until he can barely peer out his window. It’s the same with Cara. For years, I tried to change her mind. I preach that the world’s not unceasingly negative, her best friend’s a loud, cell talking Filipino, and she’s mistaken about the dog. The whining and howling’s from a different animal, an anxious hunting hound. The owners, who live two doors over, often leave it in the back yard by itself, and it has separation anxiety.
Cara’s reaction: “No one believes me.”
The SPCA and the cops investigated her complaints several times. No tortured animals discovered. The police said the Sikhs next door felt angry and humiliated by these false accusations. Cara kept tossing notes over their fence.
“Can’t you get her into some kind of day program?” one policewoman asked “Next time she throws those notes, we’ll have to take her in.”
This same officer is one of the three who investigate Cara’s suicide. When she sees the body, the officer looks away and remarks “Oh, I think I know her,” and she steps backwards down the attic ladder, and says it again, with upturned face. “I’ve spoken with her.”
Ron chuckles grimly. “Yes, I guess she did.”
Our black humor could be from decades of experience at the psychiatric hospital, though I think dry is a pre-requisite for working there. Otherwise, a person couldn’t handle events. You’d be too darn serious and idealistic. Then you’d burn out and become bitter and cynical. I see it all the time. Ron and I have always been dry, parched on the wit front. Wizened, even. So we never crashed. We continued laughing together, both of us drinking kombucha in the cafes, after Ron quit the booze.
At the endless work meetings, we’d construct secret rounds of “twenty questions.” I’d be white board writing fellow workers’ suggestions re “continuing the greenhouse program” or “whether to switch to rubber pencils.” and at the same time Ron and I talked our secret code, using nods and signals. We played, right in front of the boss, while pretending serious surface dialogue. No one ever caught on.
It’s around high noon on Barnston, and two dogs bound out to follow us. There’s a short haired German Shepherd cross and a jigsaw puzzle patterned Rottweiler. I throw them a muffin. They gobble up and drool for more. Ron gets friendly, offering them rubs and doughnuts. The sun’s even warm, on this February day. In the field beside us, there’s picturesque vintage dry-docked boats, used to fish the river. And the river rides powerful, forever pushing, we walk upstream beside it.
“So, was Cara still on her medication?” Ron asks. He wears a big green parka. I wear a big red one. Ron gave it to me, from a stash in his car. I don’t ask where he finds these things.
“Yeah, she’d even obtained an increase last month,” I say. “I talked to her doctor yesterday. He’s really shaken up.”
Doctor Adel said he never saw this coming. “She seemed happier lately.”
But I did. Cara made her first attempt in 2003, using pills. I found her passed out, a note beside her. Emergency services and the hospital saved her life. After she came to, she said “Why didn’t you let me die?”
“I care about you,” I said.
Cara frowned, and looked away. “I’m just a millstone around your neck.”
Twelve years later, and two weeks before she chose her final ending, she smiled with what I interpreted as joy. “I love you so much, dear. This house and I would be empty, lost without you.”
So I could see how Dr. Adel might be confused. I knew, though, that the end of anything is inevitable. I did not blame anyone.
After we leave the island, Ron and I dine on Vietnamese food at a local cafe. I pour on some sauce and the first bite is fire. I grab the water. The water doesn’t help.
“Try these Tums,” says Ron, and he’s laughing so hard, his face red like my parka. I can’t stop chuckling either, it’s ingrained from all those Forensic Hospital meetings. Sometimes we had to run from the seminar room with our mirth, and let it out next door, in the spare seclusion cell.
I’m whooping now, with the spices, my whole chest hurts, hope I don’t have a heart attack. Then again, if I do, I’d join Cara. Would that be so bad?
When the soft spoken, tired police inspector arrived to do the routine, which was clear me of involvement, he said “you shouldn’t stay alone here. Not after what happened tonight.”
I guess he was worried about me doing the deed too. I told him I was too much of a coward.
I found Cara in the attic, on her knees, leaning forward from the rope round her neck, the rope that stretched tight to the rafters, I prised my fingers between the rope and her throat and loosened. She was cold then. She wore her blue sweater. My favorite. The coroner later estimated the time of death at 130 pm. I arrived home around 430. 9-11 said try artificial respiration. I lay Cara on her back and did the CPR til the firemen arrived, bumped their heads on the ceiling, and applied the defibrillator.
I spent the night in the house. Took two of Cara’s benzodiazepines. They helped a lot. But I didn’t sleep, of course. I kept reading her short red felt pen note, over and over “I’ve had enough.”
I look up and Ron’s still laughing about the hot sauce. We wipe the tears from our eyes. He pays the lunch bill. “It’s the least I can do,” and even that sounds funny now.
“You know,” I tell Ron, “The officers were waiting for the coroner, and there’s a knock at the door and I answer it and there’s this tall gangly long faced woman.... my naturopath.”
“And she’s also the coroner,” says Ron.
“Yes,” I say. “That was the second biggest surprise of the night.”
After she examined the body, Dr. Van Loon told me “This is tragic. Your life will never be the same.”
And on my walk with Ron, I think about that. Yes, your wife’s suicide can change you.
In the months after the walk, I also think about Ron.
He came to be with me. What he did showed who he was. Maybe he thought of his brother, maybe of all the suicides we knew from the Forensic Psychiatric Hospital, not just by patients, but also staff. Yes, he thought of me. I knew he was a person I could trust.
A year later, Ron’s sitting at my kitchen table. I’ve been diagnosed with “major depressive disorder with psychosis” and I’m telling Ron that gangsters are sabotaging my furnace. I tell him that my FPH work is sending people to spy on me, and they think I’m faking my illness. I don’t want to go outside, because they’ll cut me off sick leave. Besides that, I’m suffering from serious sciatica., I spend most of the day lying on the floor. I stand up to light pieces of paper on fire, then decide if I should let them flame, or stomp them out.
Ron tells me I’m exactly like his alcoholic brother, and so much like my wife, paranoid before she died. He tells me that I have to decide. Do I want to waste away inside my head, burn myself and the house down also, or exorcize my craziness, and live?
“I’ll never forget how you listened to me out on Barnston Island,” I said.
“So let’s start walking again,” replies Ron.
He starts putting on his boots.
I think about it. “O. K.” I reply.
I know this guy, for sure, is real.
