by Rebecca Silver Slayter
“I'll never forget going to see the film Magnolia as a young twenty-something,” says Margaree resident Susan Paddon, “and needing to stay for half an hour afterwards, basically until I got kicked out of the theatre, because I was so moved by the film. Since then, all I’ve wanted was to move one person the way I was moved seeing that film. That’s what enabled me to write this book, thinking about the one person that might find some kind of release or peace reading it.”
Paddon’s first book, a collection of poetry entitled Two Tragedies in 429 Breaths, has just been released by Brick Books. Paddon, who grew up in St. Thomas, Ontario, and moved to Margaree two and a half years ago, describes the book as “a novel in verse.” Unlike some poetry collections that lend themselves to being read a little at a time, in no particular order, Two Tragedies tells a linear story. Two, in fact. The first is the story of Anton Chekhov’s last days, as he dies from tuberculosis, under the care of his sister, Maria, and wife, Olga. The second story is about a young woman caring for her mother, who is also dying from a pulmonary disease.
Two Tragedies was inspired, in part, by a tragedy in Paddon’s own life. After high school, Paddon attended McGill University, studying English, and then transferred to Concordia University to study creative writing in her final year. Following graduation, she moved to London, England, and then to Paris, where she met Matt Parsons, the man she would marry. In 2008, Paddon and Parsons returned to Canada; she planned to begin a creative-writing masters program that fall at Concordia. And then she learned her mother had been diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis.
In the months that followed, Paddon became her mother’s caretaker, and in a sense, her co-conspirator. Her mother wanted no one to know how serious her illness was, including her other daughter, Susan’s older sister, Pam. “Our house was set up so that she could get from one chair to another,” Paddon says. “I mean, she took three steps and she basically collapsed. But she would collapse into the next chair and sit with a smile, and you wouldn't know the difference if you weren't looking for it.” Reading about the end of Chekhov’s life as all this was unfolding, Paddon found many points of intersection with her own experience. Like her mother, he took elaborate measures to conceal how sick he was, sleeping in his clothes so no one would notice how much he struggled to dress himself. And his sister, Maria, helped him keep his secret, as Paddon reluctantly helped her mother keep hers. “When one of my mother’s best friends at one point said to me, “Your mom's really not well,’” Paddon recalls, “I said, ‘Oh no, she's okay.’ I was like Maria, I suppose. I was kind of complicit.”
Caring for her mother changed Paddon’s relationship to breath itself, in a complicated way that her book explores. “I felt like there was this limited capacity to breathe and it was just running out. Breathing had gone from being this beautiful thing to becoming something very clinical. The reality of it is that sleeping next to her was so horrible, because I would count her breaths, just making sure that the next one was going to follow.”
A Russian professor told Paddon, “In Russian we say Chekhov is Happy. Happy. Sad.” Her own book has the same complexity of voice and experience, encompassing the fullness of lives lived by both Chekhov and the mother character, and by those who loved them. For a book ostensibly about the dying, there is an extraordinary vitality in these poems. Insight, joy and compassion bloom throughout the book, alongside grief, as when Paddon describes the older sister character, briefly and exactly: “She rescued butterflies / from windshields, transported house mice to the woods. She never forgets / anniversaries, goes home for birthdays, knows the inches of our father’s / collar, what Royal Doultons our mother still doesn’t have. When she / has dinner parties for thirty people, it is a failure on her part if a guest / has to ask where the bathroom is or where to put his coat.” As much as this is a story about the dying, it is even more a story about those left behind to continue on with life. About the strength they find for each other’s sake, about how they love, how they grieve, and how they endure.
On August 13th, 2008, Paddon’s mother died. Two weeks later, Paddon began graduate studies at Concordia. “I wasn’t dealing with her death very well,” she reflects now. “I wasn’t in denial, I don’t think, but I was with all new people. I wasn’t talking about it or telling anyone. I was just trying to carry on, because I felt like that’s what she wanted me to do.”
One of the most difficult aspects of Paddon’s mother’s illness was that it prevented them from talking about what was happening. “She said to me, ‘If I cry, I cannot breathe,’” explains Paddon. And so to protect her mother, she had to keep silent about things that might upset her. “We had so many things that were off limits, that we couldn’t talk about. So I’d say, ‘Okay, I’ll just sign up for my courses, then, shall I?’ Or, ‘Oh, I’ll go to the drycleaners and get these blankets drycleaned,’ all these really mundane things, when really what I wanted to be saying was ‘I love you so much, you're dying, what are we going to do, this is awful, this is the end of the world.’” While caring for her mother, Paddon began to write what became the genesis of Two Tragedies, and her thesis project at Concordia. Maybe these poems were, in some ways, a chance to voice some of what had gone unspoken between her and her mother. While Paddon cautions readers not to look for facts in her book – “I sewed certain details together and created a world, and I let myself imagine. This is based on experience, but it’s a work of fiction” – writing the book became a great comfort for her, as she struggled with the loss in her own life. “Every night, because I wrote every single day, I got to spend time with my mom in a way that I wouldn’t have otherwise. And now even when I read back over the poems, I can feel her presence and I still feel like I’m spending this time with her.”
A year after completing her studies at Concordia, Paddon and her husband moved to Margaree. They live on the Coady Road and are currently renovating a home in Big Brook. “We were looking for a place to spend our lives,” she says. “We wanted to move to a place that wasn’t my place and wasn’t Matt’s place, and was just a place somewhere between.” Since then, she has been working on editing Two Tragedies and finishing a novel, which she says is very different (“miles apart”) from the poetry collection. Though she is creating a life several provinces away from the home where she grew up, she feels a connection with her mother here. “My mother said, ‘Go East,’” she says. The summer she died, long before Paddon had considered moving to Cape Breton, Paddon’s mother happened to look at real estate on the East coast with her. “She kept saying, ‘If I could do it over again, I would live out east. She really loved the east coast of Canada.” Moving to Inverness County to build a life, Paddon says, “I felt like I was doing something that she would have wanted...Sometimes I walk around Big Brook and think, Oh you would be so happy here. And it’s sad to me that she can’t see how beautiful it is.”
Two Tragedies was published on August 16th, six years and three days after Paddon’s mother’s death. “I always wanted my mother to be proud of me,” Paddon says, “for whatever it was that I was doing. It’s strange now, coming out with a book, because my mother was always so supportive of my writing, and as much as it’s a work of fiction, it’s also a work of truth, and she is in a lot of ways centre-stage. After hiding so much of what she went through, to kind of put her out there – I don’t know how she would respond to that. I’d like to think that she would like the book. I would really like to think that she would like it.”
Though Paddon’s shipment of books hasn’t yet arrived, her father has already received his copies. “He’s been really positive,” she says, “and has actually, I think, found some comfort in it.” Some time ago, she sent a copy of the manuscript to her sister, which made her very nervous. “But I think,” she says now, “one of the best moments I’ve had in this thing was when my sister wrote to me after reading the book and told me that she loved me and said, ‘Thank you.’ Maybe,” she says, looking thoughtful, “that was my one person. Maybe she is my person.”
Paddon leaves for a month-long cross-country book tour on September 22nd. Those here at home can hear her read from her new book at the Margaree Library on October 29th at 7:00 p.m., and she will offer a poetry workshop for adults afterwards. A workshop for high school students is tentatively planned for the next evening.
