Generally, I like funerals better than weddings with all their folderol and embracing of new family members whose names you can't remember. Especially for a well-lived life, funerals are a time for sharing memories – and revealing secrets. In the telling, t he deceased often acquire added dimensions – a truth I realized with sorrow at my own mother's funeral when a couple of her friends, bearing anecdotes like caskets of myrrh, offered me their impressions of the woman I thought I knew so well.
As an obituary writer in an electronic age, I have found that the Internet can replicate that gathering of far-flung relatives and colleagues. The conversations, which are virtual rather than face to face over a teacup, upend the notion that publishing an obituary is the "final" word on somebody's life. They are supposed to be chronicles, but like biographies, they are interpretive pieces shaped by the mindset of the writer and the known facts. as more details are unearthed, or social mores change, so too does the life story.
After the fact, when it is too late to add a paragraph or revise an opinion, I have heard deliciously unvarnished tales from disgruntled stepchildren, long-lost friends and, in one case, a painter convinced he had been swindled by his celebrated art dealer. What other secrets are buried with the ashes, I always wonder.
Back from the dead
Three years ago, for example, I wrote an obituary of Scott Symons, the author of Place d'Armes and Helmet of Flesh and the establishment scourge who had scandalized Toronto society in the 1960s when he abandoned his wife and child to run off to Mexico with John McConnell, an underage member of a branch of the philanthropic family that had once owned The Montreal Star.
I had tried to contact Mr. McConnell, but was told by book publisher Marc Côté, himself a former lover of Mr. Symons and a pallbearer at his funeral, that he had died of AIDS in the 1980s. Imagine my surprise when Mr. McConnell e-mailed me after the obituary had appeared. Not only was he alive and living in California, but had kept in touch with Mr. Symons and knew his former lover had ended his days in a publicly subsidized nursing home. I went back to Mr. Côté, who told me that Mr. Symons himself was the source of the "died of AIDS story." Presumably, he didn't want his younger lovers comparing notes.
Now that he was no longer around, that is exactly what they did. "We kept in touch for a while," Mr. Côté said, "but it petered out because we really didn't have anything in common other than Scott Symons."
Sometimes new information surfaces as an anguished missive from someone who has waited too long to reconnect with the deceased and is seeking a conduit to the next of kin. That happened recently when a reader sent me a two-page handwritten fax adding an unknown chapter to the life of poet, scholar and teacher Jay Macpherson – a woman revered by friends and colleagues but barely known outside her coterie of literary admirers when she died at 80 on March 21.
A student and colleague of Northrop Frye and a mentor and reader of Margaret Atwood's early fiction and poetry, Ms. Macpherson was a primary link between two of our foremost literary figures. She was also a distinguished, if not prolific, poet who won the Governor-General's award when only 27 for The Boatman, her first commercially published collection of poetry. Yet, she was so self-effacing that she asked somebody else to accept the award and later declined an honorary degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto, where she had taught for four decades.
I had read her poetry and met her years ago at a wedding where I was a guest of a guest and knew very few people. She had alabaster skin, dark hair pulled back from her face and a custom, as I learned from the bride, a single mother, of befriending waifs and strays. I never studied under her, but I knew plenty of people who had. They all admired her intellect, her generosity, her poetic talent and her wit. Close friends described intimate conversations about ideas that were as intense as they were memorable. About her own life, however, she was curiously reticent. She never married, she had no children, her parents and only brother had predeceased her, so in preparing to write her obituary I searched through clipping files, biographies and literary encyclopedias and spoke to her niece, Diana, and to close friends, including Ms. Atwood and Eleanor Cook, a professor of poetry at U of T and a friend since she and Ms. Macpherson were graduate students.
It didn't take long to ferret out a common theme in these conversations: Jean (Jay) Macpherson, who was born in Hampstead, London, on June 13, 1931, had survived a Dickensian childhood. Her father, James, was indifferent and her mother, Dorothy, an ambitious careerist whose cold and ruthless maternal style emulated Joan Crawford's in Mommy Dearest.
That is partly what prompted Fred A. Reid of Oakville, Ont., to contact me nearly 70 years after he had last seen the back of someone his own father had described as "a rather outspoken selfish woman, an opportunist" who "made no secret of the fact she had little use for her husband James nor much love for their daughter Jay."
In 1940, Dorothy Macpherson sailed the treacherous convoy route to Newfoundland (then a British colony) with her children to become "war guests" of a family in St. John's. Her husband, a First World War veteran, stayed in England, the beginning of a marital separation. Mother and children stayed a few months, long enough for Mrs. Macpherson to realize that she had no appetite for a steady diet of fish or wartime life in an outpost of Empire. Early in 1941, she decamped with Andrew, her favoured child, for Ottawa, where she found a job with the National Film Board.
Or so everybody thought, until Mr. Reid provided a slightly different version. Apparently, Mrs. Macpherson headed not to Ottawa, but to Montreal. She found a job with the International Labour Organization, ensconced herself in an apartment and deposited Andrew with the Reids, a Westmount family who had applied to house two children as war guests.
"We were thrilled to have a new member of the family," Mr. Reid wrote, "but always wondered why Andrew's sister had not come too, as we had lots of room." Andy, as the Reids called him, was a "war hero" because he was their age and "had survived German bombings and had lived in an air-raid shelter."
Through Grades 4, 5 and 6, Fred and Andy lived, played and studied together. It all fell apart after the Normandy landings in June, 1944. Mrs. Macpherson, or "Aunt Dorothy" as she insisted Fred and his sister, Mary, address her, was planning her next move and appeared to be short of funds. According to Mr. Reid, she demanded that his father hand over the stipend the Canadian government had paid them to house, school and clothe her son for three years. When he refused, she ordered Andrew to pack, and stormed out of the house, never to return. "It was a real shock to us," Mr. Reid recalls. "We really enjoyed him. He was a brother."
That, he says, is when Mrs. Macpherson moved to Ottawa, launched her career at the NFB and summoned her now teenaged daughter from Newfoundland.
Another piece of this chapter in the future poet's life came into focus at a memorial service this month in the chapel of Victoria College. In her eulogy, Ms. Cook read from an article Ms. Macpherson wrote for the U of T Quarterly in 1992, explaining that listening to the BBC news on the radio was her "main link, if mainly symbolic, with home" while she was in St. John's.
After "gloomy" reports, the BBC tended to air an actor reading Milton's Lycidas, a poem the 10-year-old knew because it was included in the Oxford Book of English Verse her mother had left with her before heading to the Canadian mainland. "From then on, it became, in effect, my book of exile. It had England and the countryside in it, and it had all those enthralling names that one could spend time in the library looking up, or in my window seat on the stairs looking over Duckworth Street turning over pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica," she remembered more than half a century later.
A fascinating 'What if?'
So, that lonely sojourn may have nurtured both Ms. Macpherson's poetics and her predilection for caring for others rather than promoting her own talents – including ministering to her mother before she died of Alzheimer's disease. Some day, a literary biographer may add to this never-ending life story. Until then, who can say how different Ms. Macpherson's life might have been, how much more confident she might have felt about her abilities as a poet, scholar and teacher, if she had been nurtured by a loving, supportive mother.
What we do know is that for nearly 70 years – a lifetime for most people – Mr. Reid had longed to be in touch and had followed Ms. Macpherson's career at a distance. Now, after reading her obituary, he felt compelled to ask if I could connect him with any of his "brother's" children.
Why did the retired insurance executive want to get in touch now? "Just to finish off an episode in life where we had a very close relationship," he said when I called, perhaps anticipating his own mortality.
So I put in a second call to Ms. Macpherson, who said, it would be "interesting to talk with him" about a period of her father's life that either she never knew or had forgotten. and she has something to tell Mr. Reid as well: "My father definitely didn't like being called Andy."
The last time I checked they still hadn't connected. Maybe they never will. That's up to them. I've done my part.