Finding faith in tragedy.

Despite all the trials and sorrows of her 60 years, Amy brimmed with optimism. Her smile was warm and welcoming as she greeted me in her tiny, cheerful apartment in downtown Vancouver, where walls are hung with paintings, collages and photographs. Each painting has a story. Each collage serves as a memory board. Together, they illustrate Amy’s life and beliefs: in herself, in the power of the arts, and in something bigger too.

Amy’s tribulations started when she was quite young. “I was a chubby child,” she recalled. Her mother, concerned about her weight, took her to a doctor who prescribed strong diet pills. It was 50 years ago, but she still remembers her unhappy bat-mitzvah, when her mother deemed her too fat for a photograph. “Since then, I was obsessed with my weight,” she said.

I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t see an ounce of extra fat on her slim, compact body; maybe because she exercises diligently. Half of her miniature living room is occupied by the exercise machine. She doesn’t take any pills now, not even Aspirin, but it was a long and bumpy road from her medication-steeped childhood to her current lifestyle.

Amy told me that she was on weight medications for a long time. Some of those pills required increasing dosages over the years to keep working. Others had serious side effects. To counteract those effects, more drugs were introduced. As Amy grew older, she was forced to use a battalion of different prescriptions. After a while, she couldn’t live without drugs, the stronger the better. She had become an addict.

When she got married the first time, cocaine was the drug of choice at her wedding. The needles followed soon, as both she and her husband were hooked on drugs. He belonged to a very wealthy family, so the young couple didn’t lack money or leisure. Even after their son was born, the wild parties with their junky-friends continued unabated. The couple lived in a haze of constant high, while their son was cared for by a nanny.

Amy was unhappy with the entire setup. “I almost died three times,” she said about this period of her life. “I actually died once. I saw the white light. My friends revived me.” She desperately wanted to stop using drugs, to be a real mother for her baby, but she didn’t know how. “I blamed the money,” she said. “My husband wouldn’t stop, so I left him. I never wanted the drugs, not really. I just wanted to keep my weight down.”

Finally, she had had enough. She gathered her courage, took her son and fled – from her family, from the money, from everything she knew, plunging into the terrifying new life of self-reliance. “I didn’t even know how to do laundry for my baby,” she confessed with self-deprecating laughter.

She was determined though. For her baby, she had learned to be a mother. She got clean and then met a man she fell in love with. “He was the Jewish man of my dreams,” she said. She got married a second time.

Unfortunately, the ‘happily-ever-after’ never materialized. The relationship with her new husband didn’t work out the way she had hoped. Nevertheless, she kept on reaching out. “I didn’t like myself much in those days,” she admitted. “I wasn’t sure I deserved any better. So I stayed.”

Then a disaster struck and the awakening came. In 1998, her son died. Brilliant and full of creativity, he died in an “accidental suicide,” according to Amy. She was devastated. When she returned home to Vancouver from the funeral in Toronto, she couldn’t find a place for herself. Her grief almost swallowed her.

Her Jewish roots came to her rescue. She went to a rabbi – Rabbi Yitzchak Marmorstein – who introduced her to the healing secrets of Jewish Yoga. “Rabbi Yitzchak and his friend Aaron did yoga with me for 6 months,” she said. “They supported and guided me. The rabbi told me: ‘Pretend that your son is alive. You’ll meet him one day.’”

The advice had stabilized her and helped her cope. The fact that the names of the rabbi and his friend just happened to be her son’s first and middle names implied some deeper spiritual interconnections. Although several members of her family, past and present, were rabbis, Amy herself had not been overly religious until the tragedy. In the months following her son’s demise, she began exploring her faith in earnest. “My beliefs grounded me,” she explained.

She also sought healing from a grief councilor at the Jewish Community Centre and from the First Nations community. One of her Native friends offered her traditional sweat healing. Right after that session, she found a yellow happy face – a plastic coaster– in the street. “It was like a greeting from my son. Since then, every time I see a happy face, I think it’s a signal from my son. He is somewhere close. He is trying to help me.”

Strong and resilient, Amy wouldn’t break under the mountain of her grief.  She  turned to the arts to heal her injured soul. With the objects found in her son’s pockets after his death, she created a collage, which hangs in the hall in front of her entrance door: a memorial to her son. He is always there with her.

Afterwards, she started rebuilding her life as a single woman. She also moved into a new apartment, the apartment of happiness, where she lives now. “When I first came to the door, there was no number on it, just a happy face. It was like my son greeting me. Another coincidence of many in my life.”