Abandoning hope, finding each other

My eyes prick with tears in the darkness of the little theatre in the Parish Hall in Trinity, N.L.

Onstage is a powerfully raw performance of a play — Abandon Hope Mabel Dorothy — about a family tragedy.

When a man is lost at sea — along with all hands aboard the schooner Mabel Dorothy — and his wife dies of cancer a couple of months later, the nine children left in their wake find themselves scattered in different directions. While eight siblings remain in the bosom of the family, the youngest ends up adopted outside the clan and transplanted to Ontario.

He returns to Newfoundland as a young man, trying to find answers about his father’s death and bitter about the biological family that he feels cut him adrift without a backwards glance. He meets a woman who turns out to be one of his sisters, the youngest girl in the family, who has her own agonies about their fractured lives and the brother she never got to know.

It’s an intense two-hander and the actors are fully immersed in the roles. You forget that they are acting and that this is a script, so real is the unbridled emotion, the palpable anger, with each one unleashing the pain and trauma that has carried them through decades.

I hear shocked gasps and muffled sobs from the audience, mostly an older crowd who may have experienced their own hardships. Two rows in front of me, my sister sits rapt and straight-backed, wiping her eyes. My husband is somewhat verklempt beside me.

Only grains of the story have been taken from real life, but the family at its heart is our family, and my uncle Wayne is the playwright.

● ● ●

When I was a child, my mother was often depressed. Sometimes she would take to her bed before the sun had even gone down. If my father and older siblings were out and I was the only one home with her, I would wander through the empty house, bereft without quite knowing why. Inevitably I would end up in my parents’ room, pushing the sheer curtains aside to look out at the sea as my mother softly cried.

At dusk, the water would darken, becoming unfathomable. What lurked beneath the surface, I wondered. Something unknowable. Even when the stars began to wink in the black blanket of sky, they could not dispel the darkness.

“What’s wrong, mom?” I would ask.

The answer was always the same.

“I don’t know where Wayne is,” she would say.

● ● ●

Wayne was her youngest brother. With the loss of both parents, he was taken in by one of his older sisters and then by an aunt, both in Nova Scotia. Each one passed away while he was in their care.

Eventually he was adopted and his new family moved to Ontario.

My mother was the oldest, married with a young family when their parents died. She raised one of her younger brothers and, for a time, her younger sister — the one portrayed in the play.

The family had contact with Wayne early on. His school photo sat on top of our television for years, clipped to a photo of his house in Ontario. The house looked well-kept. He was unsmiling.

I don’t know when or why the contact stopped, but I was 18 years old before I got to meet him. My uncle had found his name in a phone book. Wayne was 28. We all gathered in a circle at the airport to greet him when he flew to St. John’s. He looked just like mom’s crowd, but with a mainland accent.

● ● ●

They say that trauma passes down through generations and I know that to be true.

Although Wayne’s play takes liberties with real events, I now have a better sense of some of the turmoil and uncertainty he experienced in his youth. All his siblings were cast adrift in their own way, but they still had each other, and he did not. He had another family.

Now I can see past my own perspective, my own resentment about the mother who tried her best but was not always present for me, because her thoughts were often with the brother she had lost.

We move though resentment, reconciliation, reconnection.

● ● ●

We find mom in the lounge of her retirement home.

“You have visitors,” I say, introducing Wayne and his wife, Barbara.

Mom kisses us all, tells Wayne he is a good man. I don’t know if she knows us, but she is happy we’re there.

Over a game of Scrabble, Mom sings in the absence of being able to carry a conversation.

She chooses The Alphabet Song, her reedy voice carrying the simple tune she probably taught her children and grandchildren.

Her worries are gone now, along with her memory.

The family trauma still reverberates, but it helps that Wayne is with us again.

Pam Frampton lives in St. John’s.

pamelajframpton@gmail.com

X: @Pam_Frampton

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