Who Killed Mom? by Steve Burgess
Published On Fri May 06 2011
Steve Burgess, Vancouver writer, broadcaster and author of Who Killed Mom?
I’m not sure who is responsible for the title of Steve Burgess’s new memoir, Who Killed Mom?, but it’s a silly name for a marvelous book. Reading the title, I had visions of a memoir laden with slapstick-style humour and never-ending streams of guffaws.
But Burgess doesn’t dally with the former and Who Killed Mom? has very few of the latter, despite an exuberant endorsement from one blurb provider who apparently “howled” during parts of the book. I did not howl. I chuckled here and there, but more importantly, I kept turning pages — as very good, engaging memoirs will make one do.
Who Killed Mom? more closely resembles a poignant, darkly humorous but very loving memoir of his parents, his mom especially, and the kids who had to let her go, not an easy thing to do. I found it hard to let her go too.
Burgess, 51, a writer and broadcaster based in Vancouver, begins his story near the end, in 2009. His mom, Joan, is almost 83 and suffering from “everything short of Lou Gehrig’s disease.” Mostly, Parkinson’s disease is hurtling her toward the white light, but there are other ailments as well.
She is a woman not unaccustomed to medical maladies. Since well before the age of 13 she has been unable to keep food down because of achalasia, a disorder of the esophagus that leaves her unable to swallow. A doctor once sliced through one of her vocal cords while operating on her thyroid. (Though she could still speak, Joan Burgess was nonetheless a woman accustomed to suffering in silence.)
Married to Bill, a United Church minister more focused on his own life than hers — Burgess takes pains to show he was a well-meaning and loving husband, just clueless — Joan gives birth to five children in a six-year span in the 1950s. She plays the dutiful wife to perfection as Bill’s job takes the family to remote areas of Saskatchewan and Ohio (where Steve was born).
Always in control, and being all things to all people, Joan struggles mightily to be on top of things. Until one day she isn’t — Steve’s sister Lynn, a nasty piece of work at age 12, has pushed her over the edge — and she succumbs to her overwhelming sense of failure as a mother. “Here was a woman of keen intelligence . . . whose curiosity and desire for intellectual and spiritual connection had been largely sidelined by her primary role as manager of a human puppy mill.”
This happens halfway through the book, and involves her hitting Lynn over and over again on the backside with a wooden spoon. Though she is “sparkling and crackling” with a “level of rage that was new and terrifying,” this is as bad as Joan Burgess gets — which, given this is in 1966, doesn’t seem too bad at all. Back then, hitting your children when they misbehaved was one of the perks of being a parent. (Another ridiculous sign of the times: Bill intervenes by grabbing the wooden spoon and then whacks Joan on the backside, saying, “See how you like it.”)
She will eventually extricate herself from this claustrophobic situation, though not through divorce: She becomes an accomplished teacher and Bill leaves the ministry to work for the department of agriculture.
As for the question posed by the book’s facetious title, props must be given to some of the doctors in her life and her “manipulative, critical, emotionally domineering mother,” an unforgettable character in her own right, now dead thankfully, who could command an entire book herself.
Burgess, however, points the finger at himself. Sort of. “Perhaps she was really too tough to be killed off by the likes of us. But I think it’s fair to say I contributed more stress to her life than any immediate relative except her own mother.”
Drugs, alcohol, petty theft, not so petty theft, and attitude, he figures, did the trick, all of which he delineates in the book. Otherwise, there’s a childlike quality to Burgess that emerges in these pages, and the affection he feels for his mother radiates throughout.
There is grief here as well, subtle in form. You can feel his pain and guilt when his mother finally dies and he’s not in the room with her. Earlier on, when his mother falls in the kitchen at Christmas in the family home in Brandon, Manitoba, it is both excruciating and touching at the same time: “Mom was crumpled on the floor . . . Her fancy red-and-black Christmas outfit was covered in eggnog. Her eyes blinking at the ceiling. I sat her down and sponged off her best black skirt. Ninety pounds at most, shaking uncontrollably, she was like a fallen baby bird.”
Memoirs are never a sure thing. In the final analysis, a reader never knows what’s been left out and what’s been overemphasized. A reader could be forgiven for thinking of Burgess’s mother as Saint Joan. That’s just the way these things go.
Thankfully Burgess had a lot of input from his siblings as well as his father and aunt, and mercifully he didn’t combine any characters, compress time or invent incidents “for narrative purposes,” at least not admittedly. He didn’t have to. He’s been sitting on a great narrative all his life.
James Macgowan is a freelance writer.
In this witty and compassionate debut, Canadian broadcaster Burgess examines the life and death of his mother, Joan, and his own supposed role in her demise. At her deathbed, Burgess ponders how he could be responsible for her deterioration, since, “Generally speaking, important people do not simply expire…Surely her husband took years off her life…Then there are the children. None had motive, but all had opportunity–and time to make it look like natural causes. Damning evidence is easy to find.” Indeed, Burgess provides plenty of it–the youngest of five children in a family of “Christmas fundamentalists” with a “malevolent force” of a grandmother who left lifelong scars on Joan’s psyche, Burgess was a hell-raiser. With impartial veracity, he muses about his experiences with drugs and alcoholism (and resultant prosecution), potty training trauma, and delinquent friends, all set against his mother’s lifelong emotional and physical struggles, and the realities and everyday heartbreak of elder care. Though clearly not responsible for his mother’s death (who suffered from thyroid problems and Parkinson’s), Burgess honestly highlights the great ruthlessness of familial love, and the power of humor and storytelling to cope with life and death. (Mar. 20)
