Tales of My Cubawan, XI: More Meaningful Memories
Hi there! For those who don’t know, this is the continuing story of how I met and lost my adoptive son a few years ago.
Some of these stories involve discussion of drug use and addiction, depression and mental health issues caused by abuse, and death by overdose.
Consider thyselves warned and thanks for hearing his story 💞🐻
Welcome back or welcome if this is your first time reading! As of right now, I’ve covered a lot of my time with my late adoptive son, Otso, but I want to share a collection of my favorite memories of him before I finish this series for the moment, because ultimately, he was only an active part of my life for 9 months and after that, things got messy and then eventually he passed away. So before the big reveal of how I actually ended up getting him off drugs, I wanted to share some of the smaller moments that meant the most to me.
Movie Nights
We often watched movies in the evenings when Otso came over. I loved our movie nights because (A) it gave me excuses to cuddle with my kid, and (B) it was a way for us to bond. He had a really silly sense of humor and was still full of that 20s immaturity, so I was able to share the stupid movies that I liked when I was young with him, like Happy Gilmore or Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls.
What cracked me up the most, however, was his movie choices. Yes, sometimes he picked some goofy Martin Lawrence films or that new Baywatch movie (which was actually fairly entertaining), but he was also responsible for Legally Blonde, Legally Blonde 2, and the Twilight movies.
The fun part about that last one is that we only ever got through Breaking Dawn pt. I. As such, after he passed away, I had to have a memorial for him (since I was very specifically not invited to his funeral). I very definitely absolutely watched the final Twilight movie that night and roared at him, accusing him of dying to get out of watching that utterly and disturbingly terrible film. I felt like I could hear him cackling from the afterlife about it.
However, my favorite memory of this was when we had a family movie weekend: each night, either me, my partner, or he picked a film. I forget his choice (it was probably one of those Martin Lawrence flicks or Legally Blonde); I think my partner picked Captain Fantastic; and I picked the 1985 made for TV Anne of Green Gables movie. It is one of my most beloved all-time favorite films despite its 4-hour runtime. To my surprise, at the end of the weekend, when I asked him what his favorite movie had been, he replied Anne of Green Gables.
Truly, his willingness to accept such a female-coded story was beautiful to me, but I think he also resonated with her story—that sad, lonely, creative girl who dreamed of finding a family that loved her as much as she loved them surely left a mark on my cub.
The Stranglehold
It was funny how sometimes I wondered if something might happen and then it would happen. For example, due to the way he sleep-walked, ate, and occasionally thrashed around and did weird things, I wondered if he would ever try to cuddle me in his sleep after falling asleep watching a movie together (or whatever).
Then, one evening as he was napping on the couch and I was… well, I don’t remember, but surely sitting next to him and watching something, he grabbed me like I was a teddy-bear and pulled me up close to him.
Then, just to add to the fuzzies this gave me, our oldest cat decided to come cuddle up on top of us. T’was a proper cuddle puddle and I’m happy I have a picture of it to remember that moment (even if I look ridiculous in it).
Will You Hold My Hand
The worst years of my cub’s life were the ones spent in the town next to mine, north of his hometown. These were the toughest and scariest parts of his life, because he was out on his own and had no idea how to survive. He eventually found a flat and realized that his neighbors had similar lifestyles to his.
Unfortunately, these were more like the drug dealers you see in movies. This was the same time he got into opiates and told me that when you take those, you stop being cognizant of what’s going on. “It’s like burning holes in time,” he said, because he would wake up, take an opiate, and then it might be a couple days before he’d “wake up” again. That’s why he ended up changing his artist name to Burning Holes in Time.
Eventually, these neighbors roped him into their business. They’d bring him along when they were shaking people down for money, and since he was big and tough-looking, they’d give him the job of, say, keeping the girlfriend quiet while they beat someone down who hadn’t paid their debts.
He didn’t like being that person, not in the slightest, but it was better than being the guy who actually beat people up. But when he found out that they were planning to kill some guy, Otso warned the fellow and told him to get out of town. This dude repaid him by ratting him out when he eventually returned.
Talk about gratitude (yes, sarcasm).
From then on, he was always scared of that town, though from what I could tell, he had way more on those people than they had on him and if I were to place a wager, they were more scared of him than he was of them. Either way, he was never comfortable in town.
Once, we were getting some groceries for the weekend and he saw some of the people from his past at the grocery store. We were on our way out, walking through the mall, but he just looked at me and whispered, “I’m scared, will you hold my hand?”
I am tearing up writing this, because again… this is my son →
He was a big, beautiful boy with a big broken heart. He didn’t want to be who he was. He didn’t want his past to be his reality. His heart was a pure one, if damaged.
The fact that he—a 186 cm big burly guy, covered in tattoos—somehow felt safe and secure with me? A chonky little hippy artist? He was terrified, and I was his comfort. And I would’ve done anything to keep him safe. Perhaps he felt that. Either way, that moment, wherein he felt like I could protect him from his fears, meant more to me than anything, truly. I will never forget taking his hand in that moment and leading him out of the store, promising he never had to come back if he didn’t want to.
The Gift
Admittedly, my cub always struggled to show his love to me, even if the words came easily enough. Words and actions are not equivalent, and while he said it frequently enough, he showed it far more rarely.
There was, however, one instance where he gave me a gift that seemed like a nothing thing to him, but was more meaningful than any gift I could have imagined.
You see, I had always wanted to ask if he had photos from his youth or anything really. I wanted to see the little boy I missed out on raising with love. I never dared as though, in case the answer might hurt him. And one day, without me ever asking, he decided to bring a shoe box over with him.
This shoe box, which (as suspected) barely had anything in it, was his childhood. It had a few scraps of this and that, and somewhere between twelve to sixteen photos. Amongst them was a set of three photos in a paper display frame, that were taken when he was, I believe he said, about 3 years old, before the abuse had set in proper. Real cheesy sorts of photos, like you’d get at a Sears department store back in the day. But one of them caught my eye and I could not for the life of me stop staring at it and tearing up: the one on the left.
There was just something about the look on his face. Such a cute little guy, but there’s just a hint of that sneer that he had later in life. Like this little cub’s gonna fuck you up if you cross him. So cute, so innocent, and yet, a hint of who he could become.
He had been puttering around, doing something else, as I became enamored with the photo. When he realized that I was having a bit of an emotional mamabear moment with it, he warmly told me to keep it.
I opted not to return the center photo when I gave him back his things. The other two, yes, of course I included them, simply because he had so few mementos of his life that I didn’t want to rob him of them. But this photo? This was a gift, a deeply meaningful one, and you will pry this photo from my cold, dead hands.
He’d Have Fought an Old Man for Me
At one point, we were on our way to a grocery store via a parkade, at which point we encountered an older couple. The two of us were already as close to the cars as we could get without walking into them, yet this couple—specifically the old man—refused to move out of our way and then shoulder-checked me as we passed. I watched Otso’s face go livid and his hands ball into fists. This was so genuinely heroic to me that I put a soft hand on his arm and smiled, gesturing my guardian to stand down. It was okay… the fact that he was willing to go to war with anyone who so much as mildly disrespected me was too precious for that stupid old man to matter to me in the slightest.
The Wheelbarrow
There was one afternoon, perhaps in June or July, when we had a summer family day. My partner was on the grill, and we were all out in the yard. I don’t have a whole lot of memories of him from the yard. He was an indoor kid, as I’ve said, and was a little scared of nature because he didn’t understand it and he was pretty avoidant of anything that might hurt him. But, he was also allergic to cats, so we spent a lot of time in the garage, and occasionally we’d go outside or for walks.
The funny part about this is that I don’t remember how or why this happened. All I know is that at some point, I was in the wheelbarrow and he was behind the wheel, so to speak, running around the yard as we were both laughing like children. He was just as asthmatic as I was, if not worse, but neither of us had a reaction. We were acting like teenagers and having the time of our life.
That night, after a fantastic meal, the three of us curled up on the couch together and watched the whole first season of Heartbreakers, a British series about queer boys in high school. At some point, a few episodes in, he looked up at me with a very child-like, innocent face and asked, “Why does this exist?”
To be clear, he was having an emotional reaction to the incredibly sweet love story. My memory tells me that I gave him my warmest mama smile as I told him, “Because, sweetie, gay boys deserve to have nice love stories told about them too.” He nodded sagely and snuggled back up to me and we continued to watch the show.
The Art of Happiness
I always tried to keep my expectations of my cub reasonable. As in, I tried not to give him too much homework. His mental state was so messy and chaotic that he didn’t have a lot of time or energy to put into things. He was always working on aspects of himself and he was always doing his best to heal from his inner pain, but it was a constant, never-ending uphill battle.
As such, when I started reading The Art of Happiness—a book by a psych professional who did many interviews with the Dalai Lama—I wanted to share it with him. But I knew it was ludicrously unreasonable to expect him to read anything on his own (he had ADHD too), especially in English.
So, whenever we felt the inspiration, we’d cuddle up together and I’d read him a chapter. However, the only instance of this that I have a clear memory of was the chapter on the subject of compassion.
After we finished, he was staring off, looking rather perplexed, if not perturbed. When I asked if he was okay, he looked up at me and said, “Is this what you’ve been doing the whole time?”
I wasn’t sure what he meant. “Compassion?”
“Yeah… is that why you’ve been so nice to me?”
“I mean, yeah, of course. Why did you think I was being nice?”
“… I dunno. I figured you had some sort of savior complex and you maybe didn’t feel good about yourself unless you were taking care of someone else,” he admitted.
I was speechless. “You really thought that was my motivation? So why did you allow it?”
He shrugged. “I liked it. It felt good. The motivation didn’t really matter.”
I pulled him in close. I told him that no, I wasn’t looking after him for me. I was looking after him because he told me about his life and I genuinely believe with all of my heart that nobody deserves what he went through, and I just wanted to give him a chance at something else, if I could, because I felt so deeply for him.
That poor boy told me that he very literally did not understand the concept of “compassion” before he met me, which is horrifying… but I’m glad he got to experience it for a while, before the end.
Of Letting Go
That photo I posted above of my cub weeping is one of my favorites. A bit weirdly, I’ll admit, because he was in a very emotional state, but it’s also one of the only photos I have of him when he was looking the way I most remember him. It’s also from the time period wherein he was doing about as well as he ever had. You can even see it a bit—beyond the emotionality, his skin was much better, his hair was much thicker, and the dark bags under his eyes are pretty much gone.
I often sent him songs that I thought he’d relate to or that I thought would help him heal. One of those songs was “Of Letting Go” by Ember Falls. The thing was, he didn’t often actually pay attention, unless we were driving somewhere and I gave him the lyrics, which was what I did on this occasion.
I had hoped it would give him some strength to let go of things, but apparently he connected to it because it reminded him of his suicidal days. Don’t get me wrong, he did feel like he deeply connected to the song (he was clearly having a very emotional reaction to it, as you can see), but the funny part was that he liked that sometimes. He loved to feel seen, even if it was for the “bad” parts of himself.
“Take a picture of me, right now,” he said, “and tell them this is how hard their song got me.”
So I did.
Karhu
Sometimes things just feel like they were meant to be. I mentioned that I got the nickname Bear from a high school boyfriend. I always liked it. Loved and still love being called that with full affection.
Otso had me in his phone as “Bear Tuonela,” because I was still working for Tuonela at the time. You can see it in his tattoos too, he was also a bear totem—had one on one of his hands. But when we were talking about names, I had been thinking about potentially finding a family name for us. I always liked the idea of changing my last name to “Viisasmies,” which is simply my last name translated directly into Finnish.
Bears were something we always connected over. If you’ve ever followed me on Instagram and noticed that I occasionally post a #bearoftheday in my stories, there’s a reason for that: I used to send him bear videos all the time. Cute little bears, often with their mamas. It was one of our things. When he cut contact with me, suddenly I found myself with a homepage full of adorable bear videos that I couldn’t send to anyone… so I just started posting them to my feed.
I wanted to offer him to be a Viisasmies, but was waiting for some inclination that he wanted to change his name. And in the meantime, it seems he looked into his family’s ancestry because he, too, wanted to distance himself from his family name and found that their name had changed at some point due to their musical talent.
Their family name used to be “Karhu.” That’s an easy translation to English. It literally means “Bear.”
If I wasn’t convinced that the universe wanted us to be together before, that was the moment that clinched it.
From there on out, we referred to him by two names: Karhu was my son, and his birth surname was the “old him.” We also used his last name as a red flag word, if he was falling into old patterns.
“I’d Like to Be Adopted”
I offered to adopt him, officially. I don’t remember when, but it was long before this conversation happened.
June/July 2022 were probably the best months of his life. He was happy, he was largely drug-free, and he was healing actively. He had a psychiatric nurse, he was in some programs where he got to talk to people who had survived similar lives to his, and finally—I can still remember exactly what road we were driving on, though I haven’t the foggiest idea where we were going or why—I asked him why he hadn’t worked on that song about his family anymore.
You may recall the one I’m talking about, “Bear It.” We had holed up in the guest room and I was writing lyrics for him. The vocal sample he used as a basis went like this:
“I don’t know what else to do / when I close my eyes all I want to see is you / and my heart’s still open from the knife you left in…”
It was a song that was all about reaching out, endlessly, to your family with an open heart, willing to forgive, if only they will meet you halfway… only to have them stick a knife into that heart every time.
It was meant to end with catharsis. Here’s the final line I wrote for him:
“Burning bridges ain’t enough
I’ll tear this temple down and call its bluff
Torch the trail left in my wake
So you’ll never find the new road that I take…”
We agreed, as did many of his friends, that this song was going to be a masterpiece. It was going to be one of the best things he’d ever done. Listening to the demo, just now, brought back so many memories…
But sometime in 2022, he stopped working on this song. It was January or February when he was in the thick of working on it, but by summer I hadn’t gotten a new version of this demo in what felt like forever.
So as we were driving, I asked him about it. I had a theory but didn’t want to hope. But he confirmed my theory immediately.
“I’m not that angry anymore,” he said. He told me that I had healed the hole in his heart left by his birth family enough that it wasn’t causing him so much pain anymore. The song didn’t mean as much to him as it had earlier that year.
Then, he told me that he was planning for the future for the first time. “I want to go to rehab,” he said, “And I want you guys to be two of my allowed guests.”
“Really?” I asked. “You’ve been off drugs for a while now. Why rehab?”
“I want to stay off them. I think rehab would help. And then, after that,” he mused, “I think I’d like to be adopted.”
That was the first time he’d actively asked for it, and it was everything I’d ever wanted to hear from him. I only wish we’d explored it more. All I understood was that it’s much harder to do in Finland than it is in North America (where essentially, all you need is for both parties to consent). So we didn’t get looking into it, because we were estranged a mere month or so later. But the fact that he had wanted it at some point enough to ask for it meant more to me than words could possibly express.
I might have more of these, if I were to look into my document of memories, but I think I’m tapped out for the moment. Thanks again for hearing his story. Next week, I’ll tell you how I accidentally sobered him up.
Until then, stay balanced, my friends 💞🐻
READ MORE: I also wrote a fair bit of fiction inspired by my cub. The Bear Forge was written about our meeting, its sequel, The Broken Anvil, is about our estrangement, and the finale, Everstrong, is a poshumous letter written from him to his mamabear.
Note: the latter two are only available to paid Substack subscribers.
I See You was inspired by a F(r)iction prompt, “unseen.” Elegy for a Lost Soul was written after he doubled-down on the path of destruction for the final time.
