Exits and Entrances: A Journey Through Many Landscapes by Dave Jaffe: Chapter Four

    Chapter Four: Part One.


    The media dubbed the summer of 1967, "the Summer of Love." I called it' "The Summer of Death." While hippies grew their hair long, smoked dope and poured into places like Haight Ashberry in San Francisco, and Kitsilano in Vancouver, I wrestled with grief.
   I last saw my sister Valerie in the spring of 1967. She lay dead in a room in a Vancouver hospital. She was only 21 but she was killed by a massive cerebral hemorrhage. I placed my fingers on her cold dead lips and muttered to myself, "Poor Valerie." In her so short life, my younger didn't find much joy. She was too young to remember the good times in Willesden. She hated living in my shadow as she made her way through the  halls of Iona Avenue School and then Northmount High.
     "I'm always known as your sister," she told me once. "Always people say, 'Oh, you're Jaffe's sister'. I hate it. And then there's all those snobs at school." In high school, with the exception of Grade 10, I always scored reasonably high marks. Valerie consistently got C's and C+'s, but no higher.
  Yet she had a very fine voice and should have gone to a musical academy. But my parents had no money to make that happen.
     Once out of high school in 1962 which was  two years after I graduated, Valerie trecked to work in offices to file, type and answer phones. Her blonde brownish hair always looked nice. Yet sadness often glazed her blue eyes. The men she went out with, often abused her. I did too and we often fought. After a disastrous stay in London, England, Valerie came back to Montreal. Here, she met a short ambitious Englishman named Dave Trowbridge. "Get on the birth control pill," this native of Hoxton, England insisted. Valerie did for she was scared of getting pregnant.
    Taking those estrogen-packed pills I believe killed Valerie with a stroke. Dave left shortly after her death, and went back to London England.
    Still grieving my dead sister, I ended up in the Vancouver General Hospital in August 1967. I watched one afternoon as my unconscious mother lay in a white sheeted bed. She had now shrunk down to 35 kilograms. Bruises and red marks ran across her skeletal body. For the past two years my mother had struggled with breast cancer. Now on a sunny afternoon in late August, she died.
     In the past two years from 1965 to 1967, my mother saw her mother die, and one of her daughters. She had struggled for the past 15 years to hold our family together through pain and poverty. My mother had never gone through the poverty that she did with my father, for she came from an upper middle class family.
   And then came more deaths that I'll deal with shortly. This for me was a tough time.