A Kidnapped Mind

by Pamela Richardson

  But somewhere along the way Dash changed his plan. As he was crossing Granville Street Bridge, right above Granville Market, Dash stopped, took off his toque, laid it down, and climbed the handrail of the huge steel bridge that spans the water there. At four in the morning on New Year’s Day, 2001, that silent, sober, and endlessly brave boy opened his arms wide and threw himself off.

  The coroner on duty got the call and went straight to the scene. A cyclist had seen a body fall; the police had been called and were already there. Dash lay face down on the ground. The coroner walked up to his body and whispered, “Please, God, let him at least be in his twenties.” She turned him over and saw he was just a kid. My Dash. More than three and a half years shy of twenty, he was only sixteen. The police officer on duty called it one of the clearest cases of suicide he’d ever seen. No alcohol. No drugs. Arms wide open. No noise. The coroner, who told me there had been an altercation after seeing Peter’s freshly bruised and bleeding eye, would later say what Dash did was “a final statement to his father.” Dash’s broken body lay in the morgue for three days. Peter didn’t look for him until January 3. Dash carried no ID. The John Doe suicide had been mentioned in the Province newspaper, but it was vague, suggesting only that the teenager might have been an aboriginal boy.

  The same day that Peter finally started looking for our son, my family and I came home from Whistler. Dave had gone into work and Colby was at a friend’s place. I’d spent the day unpacking, doing laundry, settling the boys back into our home, and thinking, as always, about Dash and how his Christmas had gone. I was going to call Stephen Thomas and Rick Brennan first thing the next morning. I was in my study checking the mail that had come while we were away, when, at two o’clock, the phone rang. It was Ken Westlake.

  “How are you, Pamela?” he asked. He had his professional lawyer’s voice on. Flat, emotionless.

  “You know exactly how I am, Ken,” I replied icily. I was suddenly incredibly anxious. Why is this man calling me?

  Ken’s voice was devoid of any emotion — utterly matter-of-fact — and when he said, almost lightly, “Well, I have some bad news,” I knew. I knew my son was dead. Reeling straight backward from where I was standing, I shouted into the phone, “I will hold that child’s death over your head as long as you live!”

  “But I didn’t do anything! Dash jumped off Granville Street Bridge!”

  Oh, my God. Oh, Dash. You jumped. Oh, God. You poor boy. I’m so sorry. Oh, my God. I had lurched over and leaned on the back of a leather armchair, a million tons of weight suddenly pressing me to the floor. “You facilitated his death, Ken. Peter is sick, but you’re not! You could have stopped this and you didn’t. You didn’t do anything!”

  Ken hung up on me, and I dropped the phone and screamed. Mimi came running. “It’s Dash. He’s dead,” I sobbed. “Call Dave. Oh, God. Dash. Mimi — don’t let Quin hear me. Go be with him. I have to go and pick up Colby. Oh. Oh, no. Dash is dead.”

  Mimi tried to hold onto me, but I was too consumed and confused to be comforted. My hands shook so violently I misdialled Dave’s number. I got through the second time and wailed, “Dave. Dave — Dash is dead. He jumped off Granville Street Bridge three days ago.”

  He said, “I’m on my way,” hung up the phone, and ran out the office door for the car before his emotions could catch up with him and render him as incoherent as I was. I called Sandy. Terry answered, and he couldn’t understand what I was saying. My voice was jagged and inarticulate.

  “Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no,” he said, relaying what I was saying as best as he could to his wife, who called from the background, “I’m coming right now, and I’ll stay over. I’m just grabbing a few things.”

  Mimi called our neighbour and dear friend Molly, the boys’ old babysitter, and she ran out of her house and down the road to me. My friends Joan and Lois were in their cars within seconds. From his car Dave had called my brother, who was working on a house just a few minutes from us in Southlands, and he was coming, too. Dave pulled up and jumped out of the car. With the phone still clutched in my hand, I ran through the house, opened the front door, and fell into him.

  “Oh, Pam. We lost him. We lost him,” he cried, holding me as tightly as he could. His body enveloped mine as his grief poured out and mixed with my own.

  “He’s at the city morgue,” I got out. “Jamie called Ken. Dave, I need to see him. I need to put my arms —” I couldn’t finish. Dash is gone. “Help me dial, Dave. I can’t dial, I can’t —”

  When the coroner answered, Dave passed the phone to me.

  “I need to see him,” I sobbed. “I need to see Dash.”

  “No,” the coroner said, as gently as she could. “Don’t come. Pamela, he is not viewable.”

  Epilogue

  How do we even begin to describe the size and shape of the great love we feel for our children? And what would we do if we couldn’t use the word “love,” and instead had to describe that overwhelmingly large feeling without using adjectives? Could we ever get it right? Each time I try to define my love for Dash, I end up feeling suffocated, as though I had ten dictionaries bound to my back, all utterly empty of words. Dash was made up of a million sights, sounds, and smells, all of them as life-sustaining as air and water. Big brown eyes, long lashes, milky skin, join-the-dots freckles across his nose. Silken threads of tousled, mousy hair, long graceful arms, perfect fingernails. Even caked to the elbows in dirt and muck, he was a beautiful boy, and his fresh-out-of-the-bath little-boy smell was so soothing I can still conjure it up. He had squeals for excitement, squeals for delight, and squeals for happiness, each one different. He had a particular singsong voice for story time and a sharp shout of surprise when his favourite dinner appeared on his bunny plate in front of him. The effervescence that he saved for Dave, in the early days, gave me my greatest joy each day. Dave would arrive home from work and call out, “Little Buddy!”

  “Big D!” Dash would shout.

  Dave would crouch, so his six feet four-and-a-half inches were nearly halved, and say, “How was your day, my friend?”

  “We went swimming and then to Granville Island for ham-and-cheese sandwiches!”

  “Wow — that sounds like a full day. Any energy left for me?”

  “Yeah!” And off they would tumble.

  I had watched Dash’s personality grow from the day I first met him, thirty seconds old. I had seen his first step, heard his first word, watched as he formulated his first questions, and observed him calibrate his responses and reactions to stimuli and emotions. I was there at his swimming and music classes, I was there cheering him on at his pre-school sports days and baking cookies for his kindergarten class. He had come with me to the fashion shows and luncheons I’d organized as part of my work and been strapped to my back as we traipsed across the Italian countryside during a year abroad. I came to know that boy’s heart so well. I spoke for him in court when he lost the ability to judge what was good for him — because I knew him. A mother’s knowledge doesn’t just disappear as her child grows up and away. Even after all that time apart, I still knew the spirited young man who leapt off the dock into the icy waters of Alpha Lake or flew down MacKenzie Street on his skateboard. That same boy played gently and happily with our Westie Bobbi’s new puppies when he was sixteen years old. His fronts only thinly covered the son I bore, and no matter what happened, I knew how to make him laugh, smile, and melt. The essential Dash was still there, quieter and dropped into shadow, but there. I focused on the boy I knew, not the boy his father created, and he responded as I always knew he would, faded and worn out as the years went on, but the amber flame of the little boy who shouted “Wheeeeeee!” from the apex of his swing was still burning.

  In the black months after Dash’s death, I cast about for ways to release the soul-splitting rage. I needed to find something to work hard at, something physical, something that hurt, something that would release my poison. With Dave I signed up for the Vancouver half-marathon and began trainin
g. And I hate running. I always have. It’s boring and repetitive. It’s hard on my body. I signed up because I had to do something. I had vented a tiny portion of my rage writing angry, broken-hearted letters to Justices Brenner and Sigurdson (Brenner never replied; Sigurdson wrote a one-liner), and I had howled in tears till I was red and puffy, for days and weeks in a row. I knew I had to work through my anger, not dwell in it. I didn’t want to become bitter or vengeful. I wanted it to leave me. I wanted a full recovery for me, for my children, for Dave, and for all those whose lives had been touched by Dash’s life and death. And it had to start with me. Colby had said, during a grief-counselling session, with Quin nodding hard in agreement, “Mommy, when you are sad, we are sad. But if you are okay, we are okay.” So Dave and I ran. Me, always alone, running and crying, for three months.

  I didn’t know what would happen to me, or my anger, or my grief, when I began training. I didn’t know if I would heal, if running would release or relieve me, I just laced up my running shoes each day and believed in the process. Its usefulness was in its utter lack of creativity. My mind floated free. It wasn’t consumed with intricacies. It wasn’t working. It just was. The emotions my runs brought out were at times vast, exhilarating, and painful. Sometimes I ran and was filled, just filled, with euphoria, and with a calm, quiet mind, I ran on, drinking in the scenery, smelling the ocean, admiring the diverse houses that lined the streets. At other times I was undone by my grief. I would clench my fists hard as I pumped my arms, and my thoughts were black. I went to the questions that had nagged me for years: Why? Why? Did I do too much? Did I do too little? Why hadn’t I seen it earlier? If I had been in Vancouver that Christmas and New Year’s, instead of Whistler, would he have come to me? Did it pressure him when I called when he was five, six, eight years old? Should I have called more? Less? Should I have broken the law for him? Why didn’t I get a child advocate earlier? Should I have never gone to court? Should I have gone back again and again until I got him? I had been working blind for years, until I was supported by professionals who believed in what I was doing. But, nevertheless, each time it was me making the decision. To pick up the phone. To not. To call my lawyer. To not. To have him escorted to Ascent. To let him stay lost in his bedroom. When the worst of it came during those runs, I cried and cried as I saw my little boy, lying in all his clothes, crushed on an empty street at four o’clock in the morning on New Year’s Day, his dead body still warm. To this day when I sense the warmth of my son, it triggers that thought, and I convulse. When I make up the boys’ beds in the morning or pick up their recently discarded clothes from the floor, I feel the warmth of their bodies within the cells and fibres of the fabric and I think of Dash, the life left behind after the spirit and breath were gone. Running was my time to grieve. It was scheduled, permitted, encouraged, and fully acknowledged — and then, when I got home, I had a shower and moved on. The demons were exorcised for that day.

  While my Walkman kept the pace and my sunglasses hid the tears that streamed, without cease, down my cheeks, I ran and cried for two and a half hours on the day of the half-marathon. My lips were set in a grimace, and I knew that, if I loosened my face just the tiniest bit, the whole thing would collapse and I would drown in grief. I had just turned fifty-two years old. Dash had been dead four and a half months. And I ran the whole way. At the end, wrapped in a silver blanket by Dave, who had finished half an hour earlier, I felt worthy, accomplished, and cleansed.

  Peter Hart was found dead, at home, in August 2004, just as I was finishing the final draft of this book. When he failed to appear in the court of appeal, the Law Society tried to contact him. They called and called and finally someone was sent to his house. Peter had been dead, undiscovered, his dog sitting beside him, for at least a week. He was sixty-one years old, and the date of his death was put at August 11 — the day after what should have been Dash’s twentieth birthday.

  To me it was just as Dash’s undertaker, who had spent time with the Hart family, had quietly said: “I give Peter Hart two years. He will spiral. He will never acknowledge what he has done nor will he recover. But it is only someone wracked with guilt who would insist on seeing the body, like Peter did. No matter how hard I tried to persuade him not to, he had to see Dash. He and Greg.”

  When I called Peter after Ken’s phone call, Peter had seen Dash at the morgue and asked if I wanted to go, saying: “You know, really, he’s not that bad.” Where do you go inside yourself to rationalize that? Essential parts of both Peter and Dash had died a long time before their bodies did. I had fallen in love with Peter in 1981 because he had elementally loveable things about him, but they were lost along the way to emotional problems and drugs and alcohol. And my therapist told me a few months after Dash died that “the little boy you brought into this world was gone a long time ago, Pam.” His words were a comfort, my reality acknowledged.

  The minister at Dash’s funeral told me, “You don’t have to forgive Peter. There are some things in life that you cannot do, and that is okay.” I don’t forgive Peter for what he did to Dash. I don’t forgive Ken Westlake. I don’t forgive the judges who saw their hands as tied. Maybe it was too early. Maybe it will never happen. That’s okay. We all move on. When Dash was still alive, I was often asked, “How do you deal with so many years of struggle, and how do you stay strong?” I am not always strong, and I certainly never used to be. But you make your mark as a human being not by your wins and your successes but by the choices you make in the face of loss and failure. Do you choose condemnation or understanding? Inaction or action? Vengeance or compassion? Bitterness or peace? I choose peace. I choose peace for my family. Peace for me. Peace for all those who went through this. Dash has found peace. Even Peter has finally found peace. And I am getting there.

  I co-exist with a beautiful beast — my rage, mostly tamed. I don’t feed it and I don’t try to keep it alive; it is just there, a part of me. Sometimes it paces its cage; but at other times it dozes in the corner, now and then languidly opening an eye and showing its teeth in a smile at some memory or other. Like when I got a small win for Dash in court. Or when I got him to Ascent. Or today, when I told Colby, now fourteen, nervous about standing on Granville Street Bridge to take pictures of the city with his photography class, “I think you should rise to the challenge and face your fears.” I enveloped all five foot seven of him in my arms and whispered, “I am giving you all my strength with this hug, and I want you to remember that the strength you feel from me is inside you, too. I want you to think of that when you are up there on that bridge.” Colby called me, proudly, afterward. “I did it, Mom.”

  We all go on. One thing I have learned over the past fifteen years is that there is a particular kind of energy that comes from properly managed anger, healthy anger, listened-to anger, that can and always has been put to good use. That energy, used in a positive way to get constructive results, fuelled the women’s movement; it fuelled and continues to fuel velvet revolutions and social-justice movements all over the globe. Change takes energy. Peace takes energy. But the beast can pace and I am finding my way. It is uneasy and fractured at times, but peace has a perch in the cage of my soul and its territory is growing.

  The death of anyone close, let alone a child, makes us sense our own immortality. Dash’s death has made me more alive. I have a keenness to me now, like the sharpened senses of those who do not see. I am sensitive to and respectful of the fragility of life, and how quickly things can change, and Dash’s death has taught me that. I was always conscious that the time I spent in court, or trying to see Dash, or shutting myself in my den to cry when I thought no one would notice, took time away from my family and they suffered not only from my absence but from the pain they saw in me and couldn’t help. I know it ripped Dave apart to be able to do nothing for the woman he had married but to keep pouring money into the legal coffers. I always knew I had to stay as strong as I could for me and for Dash, but also for them. It had taken an enormous, seemingly insurmountab
le toll on my family. Dave and I don’t talk about it much in this way, but we both cherish the fact that we survived as a couple. The whole experience, from the beginning of my marriage with Peter to the end, with Dash’s death, taught me what a fine art it is to choose, as opposed to being chosen. I choose my family. I choose love.

  I’m the child who went to seven different schools and can walk into any room with confidence — but once I’m there, I’m still trying to be liked by everyone. I try so hard to please, but I know now that the whole crowd won’t like me. And now that’s okay. I’ve done what I can. I tried so hard. I no longer have to “prove” Dash was an alienated child — the family advocate knew it and a coroner’s investigator, after a year-long case examination, confirmed it (even though the department report was subsequently changed to “not point fingers at a parent”). I bumped into Donna Andrews, Dash’s Grade Seven teacher, at Costco one day, and she told me, “No one is surprised Dash committed suicide.” I’m not surprised either. I had feared it for years before he did it, I just always thought I would have more time to turn it around. My missteps and mistakes nagged at me like an ulcer. What more should I have done? Should I have kidnapped Dash? If so, I would have taken him away from a parent he loved. I’d never let it happen again, though. Next time I would grab my children and run. Australia. France. And disappear. I wouldn’t go near the court system that failed Dash. I saw things in the last fifteen years that have stripped away my innocence. Do right to others and they will do right by you. Tell the truth and you will be heard. If you go to the courts for help, you will be helped. I believed that children came first above all other considerations. I believed that judges were courageous and wise and that people would break rank to speak out if a child was in danger, no matter what. But there are no people coming out of the woodwork to say, “I saw this. I did nothing.” None.