Speak

This was the first morning I haven’t woken up in a cold sweat in at least a week.

Also, it was my birthday yesterday.

Ah, the little things we take for granted.

I couldn’t get this Friday, my actual birthday, off work so I took Monday off instead, and I have every intention of using the long weekend to get more words in and do some much-needed cleaning up in the apartment. I celebrated my birthday by having a private crying spell (a yearly tradition), and feeling silently grateful that I am still alive — a feat that manages to seem both miraculous and nondescript.

I received messages from family, friends, and acquaintances, wore a favourite outfit to work, and afterwards, went grocery shopping with my parents. When I got home, after having given a very excited Scout his supper, I noticed that I’d just missed a phone call from my grand-mère and so I quickly called her back, hoping she would pick up. She did.

We had a short, but really heartening conversation, laughing a lot about nothing, really. It feels like a privilege to have conversations with her now, because for a very long time, I hadn’t been able to.

When I was really little, before the age of six, maybe earlier, I spoke French quite readily. I am told that French had been my first language, the language that my papa and I spoke to one another in, the only language his side of the family understood and spoke.

I have a crystal-clear memory of being in my grand-mère’s vegetable garden behind her house, and explaining to her that a coccinelle, in English, was a ladybug. She’d been showing me how they were nibbling on the leaves of some of her plants, and I’d been excited to share the word with her. I must have been three or four years old, and we would have been visiting my grandparents on their farm in Québec for summer vacation just before heading on back to Gander, Newfoundland, where were living at the time. She still has that memory too. Because it was the last time I truly spoke to her until I was well into adulthood.

I spoke English with my mom and with her side of the family (who only understood and spoke in English) but I had favoured French in my early childhood, apparently. That changed for some reason (or maybe a host of them) around the time I turned six.

Whereas before, I had spoken in French with both my papa and my other relatives, I suddenly became terrified of speaking in French around them. I understand French, and particularly the thick, Québecois country dialect that my relatives speak, very well. I went to a French school and was completely fine speaking in French there, but in the presence of my close family members or relatives, I could no longer utter a word. I would merely nod my head yes, or shake my head no. After many years, I was able to start saying the words oui (yes) and non (no). Then in my teenage years, I became able to add s’il-vous-plait (please) and merci (thank you) to my yes/no utterances when I wasn’t too anxious.

I always knew what I wanted to say, and the words would form in my mind, but I couldn’t get my mouth to open — or if it did, no sound would come out. And when it did, it was limited to the phrases above.

I couldn’t say je t’aime (I love you), so I’d give my grand-mère a hug instead when she said so to me, and hope she recognized the sentiment being returned in my expression as well.

Though I was never formally diagnosed, I had likely developed selective mutism as a child.

In my late twenties, I began speaking a little more. Just a little, and only when I was one-on-one with a relative, which I had avoided as much as possible as a child and as a teenager, because it had made me feel too anxious, knowing I couldn’t hold a conversation with them.

Knowing they couldn’t understand why.

I… couldn’t understand why.

A couple of years before I turned thirty, after a long, slow decline in health and mobility, after going from being a hardworking, hands-on farmer, to a person receiving round-the-clock hospice care, my grand-père passed away peacefully. The last time I’d visited him, he’d regaled us all with some stories (including one about a time he’d taken my grand-mère on a date), and had been trying to make us all laugh, as he usually did. Just before it had been time to leave, he’d taken my hand and exclaimed, c’est si p’tite! (it’s so tiny!) and started crying through a laugh. Everyone else was crying. I couldn’t, not until later, privately.

I just held his huge hand. Smiled warmly back at him.

It’s how I wanted him to remember me.

So many people packed into the church the day of his funeral, so many more people than I had expected, so many people that I didn’t know. As one of his immediate family members, and as his oldest grandchild, I’d been one of those lining up along the pews to greet each guest who arrived, each one of them stopping to offer their condolences and to shake our hands as they filed in and took their seats. It felt strange, like I should be offering many of them my condolences instead, because some of them had known him far better than I did, even though I only exist because he once lived.

I still spoke very little at that point, but my grand-mère had made a request of me a few days earlier; she had wanted me to read a prayer in French, aloud, during the ceremony. I didn’t know how I would manage it. I didn’t know if my voice would fail me. But it was important to her, and I’d given her so little over the years, given my grand-père even less, maybe, so I accepted. The night before the funeral, my grand-mère handed me the prayer which had been printed on a sheet of white paper, then folded twice. It was long. It took up the entire page. She took my hands and thanked me for agreeing, told me how much it meant to her that I would read it. I believed her. I didn’t know how I would do it, just that I needed to. Just that I wanted to.

I read it over several times, but didn’t memorize it. Couldn’t.

There were butterflies in my stomach.

I had an accent now when I spoke in French, my first language.

It was sad, but it was reality.

Partway through the ceremony, the priest called me up to the front of the church, and I held the paper in my hands, stood up, and went up to the microphone, smoothing the paper out on the little stand in front of me, holding my tears in check the way I had been the whole day, while everyone else cried.

I began to recite the prayer, and my voice worked.

It was amplified by the microphone, echoed throughout the hall.

I said the words for both of my grandparents, and then I returned to my seat, shaking, finally.

My relatives all expressed their gratitude afterwards for my having recited the prayer, my grand-mère most of all. I was glad — am glad — that I could do that for her. That small-huge thing.

.

The weather that afternoon was perfect. Sunny, warm, but with a nice breeze.

We went back to my grandparents’ house, to their farm with its little mountain view in the distance, and stayed outside till supper, most of the cousins (and some of the aunts and uncles) playing catch and football on the lawn near the vegetable garden, while I sat under a tree in front of the house and read a book, my close relatives stopping by in ones and twos to comment on the book I was reading in Japanese, and to talk to me a little, while I did my best to respond in shaky French.

I like to think that my grand-père was gifting us that perfect outdoor weather as a final goodbye.

It’s such a good memory, and incredibly bittersweet.

After that day, I started being able to have conversations with my grand-mère, even ones over the telephone — which is saying a lot, because for most of my twenties, I couldn’t even have conversations on the phone in English.

I initiated a ten-minute conversation with my grand-mère on the phone yesterday.

And we laughed, and caught up, and chatted, as though we’d been doing it all our lives.

That does still sort of feel like a small miracle.