After the death of my father – he was 43 – at St-Joseph Hospital on January 6, 1953, two weeks before my 14th birthday, my already shaky grasp of a parent’s responsibilities, reality in the raw, suddenly became even more fuzzy.
Now, who was going to pay the rent ($6.00 a week) plus the electric, telephone and heating oil bills? Who was ready and able to pony up to the bar to pay Monsieur Ouellette, the undertaker, for his services? Who might find some extra cash to defray the costs of my Dad’s medical costs in the final week of his life? Questions, questions floated everywhere!
In sharp contrast, the harsh facts of the day slammed us hard against the red brick wall of real life. All our relatives, the Bolducs and the Charbonneaus, in the area were already struggling and living hand-to-mouth, just to stay above the water line. So, except for some possible help (dollars and cents type of help and not simply prayers and good wishes), which several, out-of-town, modestly successful aunts and uncles might offer and provide, the prognosis was quite clear: DOA, financially, dead on arrival. All that remained was for the State of Massachusetts and the City of Lowell to ship us all, my mother and her four children, out to the nearest poor farm, workhouse or debtor’s prison to expiate for our societal sins or misdeeds.
A Free, Valuable but Unpleasant Lesson to Learn
Sometimes, even as you are making nice progress in an English-speaking world while studying in harmony with other, eight-grade students at l’Ecole Saint-Louis de France, an unexpected life event, a surprise, can innocently bounce into your pathway bringing with it an urgent need for a major alteration of daily expectations. Today, that change might be called an attitudinal adjustment, but for my Franco-Canadian family and me in the winter of 1953, it meant fear, emptiness, chaos and despair!
After dying due to complications from more than a decade of postponed, medical care required for an untreated double-hernia and a bleeding stomach ulcer, my father, Ben Bolduc, literally abandoned his parental responsibilities to his wife and family of four urchins so as to die quietly (I hope) as a rather young man of 43 at St-Joseph Hospital. He, apparently, simply, could not go on working at four jobs with no future. He just gave up!
and also enjoying neighborhood friends like Claire Beauparlant, Donald Bergeron, Leonie and Cecile Valois, the Antefenario kids plus the Robillard boys,
as a 13-year-old, suddenly, there appears an ogre, who was, apparently, hiding in plain sight and in the bushes by our favorite “banana tree” on Ludlam Street to deliver