PUTTING ON A BRAVE FACE
Jennifer White shares what she has gone through dealing with daughter’s death and, now, her husband’s condition
Jennifer White launched the Princess Ball to honour her daughter Olivia, who died suddenly. And then came the news from doctors about her husband’s health,
On a bleary November day I found myself face to face with Ryan Gosling in the emergency department of Markham Stouffville Hospital. I looked at him, swore some of my most choice British swears and put on the bravest of all the brave faces I had.
It was a look I had practised long and hard over the past few years following the death of my 5-1/2-yearold daughter, Olivia, who passed away on Boxing Day 2012 of an undiagnosed blood infection. Now, I wore it again while I shot glances between the CT scan and my husband lying prone on the ER gurney.
You see, “Ryan Gosling” is what I would later term the enormous mass they had just found in my husband’s brain. It was a Sunday afternoon. And I was being brave, as always.
When Olivia passed away, I heard tropes pulled out time and time again: “You can have another child” or, “It’s all part of a plan you don’t understand,” and my personal favourite: “Everything happens for a reason.”
What, pray tell, is the reason for the loss of your precious baby?
The problem with being infinitely resilient and capable is that the world constantly tests your breaking point by throwing more bad things at you. Those well-meaning (but in reality heartlessly insensitive) people eagerly say as if it is a badge of honour, “God only gives you what you can handle,” which, if you have ever heard such claptrap firsthand, you know makes you murderous. However, you smile and nod and thank them. But inside you know that there is no God, because no one being would be so infinitely cruel.
There are a few things that I learned in the dark days that followed Olivia’s death. The first being the world does not stop for earth-shattering grief. It actually stops for nothing. I learned that you are granted two paid days off work for the death of your child. I learned how to put my feet on the floor, get dressed, and go to work 10 days after burying her, because who else was going to keep the lights on? My husband had fallen apart in his grief, and as he was self-employed there was no one else to turn to for that mortgage payment. In those weeks and months that followed, I learned how to press my nails into my hands when anyone gave me a pitying look, or asked that delightfully normal question, “How many children do you have?”
If there was crying to be done, I did it in the shower because that was fairly practical, or in the car on the way home from work because I wouldn’t have to redo my makeup. My day-to-day was spent desperately trying to stay employed, trying to soothe my husband’s broken heart and trying to give my youngest daughter (who was only 18 months old) a healthy and happy family. I was all they had, and I let my own shattering grief fall away in order to save them. To be the person they needed me to be.
Being constantly brave is exhausting and upsetting, but it does give you something you can at least pretend to control. In one such act of bravery (or deflection) I founded a not-forprofit fundraising organization called Wishes for Olivia, to raise money for the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Canada, which grants the wishes of children with life-threatening medical conditions. So far we’ve raised nearly $200,000.
Our gala event is the annual Princess Ball. It gives Olivia the legacy I knew she would have had and I see her in the faces of all of the brave Wish children who attend.
Every year, we invite several hundred guests to don their finery and celebrate in true princess fashion. In light of all that’s happened in my family this year, it’s particularly fitting that the theme of the gala this year is bravery. On April 17, we will celebrate just how brave the children and their parents can be. Every year, the event sells out in just a few minutes; this makes me proud.
In this next chapter of my life (which a friend calls “Chapter 5: More Bloody Character”) there isn’t just a “Ryan Gosling.” I called it “Ryan” because, if you are going to have an unknown brain mass, you want it to be as delightfully benign as Ryan Gosling. But when the doctors at Sunnybrook Hospital went into my husband’s brain to excise Gosling, they also found a small, cancerous tumour in my husband’s left frontal lobe — a mass now known to us both as “Stephen Harper.” “Ryan” was simply an innocuous roommate, whereas “Harper” was termed for his more devastating and less charismatic qualities.
Both Ryan Gosling and Stephen Harper were removed, but their effect remains. And so, at this year’s Princess Ball, my husband will be there, fresh from radiation treatments and between rounds of chemotherapy, looking dapper in a kilt (if a little bald around the temples), to celebrate his own bravery. He will be charming and he will dance with our daughter Aurelia, who’s 4-1/2 years old now, and our new addition Griffin, who, at 1 year old, is the most visible legacy that Olivia has given our family.
I’ll be brave, too. I have to be. I know that Olivia gave me the gift of bravery so that I will, by sheer force of will, keep him with me. I will be strong for us all, and I will carry us home.