28 Seconds

by Michael Bryant

  So what I did as soon as I was arrested, cuffed, and bent down to sit in the squad car was to suspend belief, suspend disbelief, levitate amid the chaos. I did the same thing when they put me in the cell at the Traffic Division station. When I was released from the police station, I affected the same stance. Upon seeing a demonized photo of me in a newspaper looking like a deranged road rager, I did the same thing again. The gods, or maybe just an overactive mind, were playing tricks on me, tricking me into assumptions that were unfounded and misguided. Rather than accepting or rejecting them—impossible, as long as one is caught up in the chaos—I just embraced the trickery with a few of my own tricks. Sometimes the aftermath of a tragedy, itself a moment of tragic consequences, requires astute trickery of the self, by the self, to the self.

  Is that really me in that photo in the newspaper, or is this not quite real? Am I really being arrested for a homicide, or is this an illusion? Am I really the first former Attorney General to sit in a jail cell for allegedly killing someone, or is this not quite a bad dream? This is not a trick that can be performed by an 11-year-old after committing imaginary euthanasia. But a sober 44-year-old can do it sometime around midnight in a jail cell.

  I’ll lay me down and bleed awhile,

  and then I’ll rise and fight again.

  —Richard, first Earl of Cornwall (1209–1272)

  There is no way to turn trauma around quickly. Delude yourself all you want, if that’s how you outfox insanity. But delusion and repression should be used sparingly, for they are boomerangs that come back to whack you, no matter how far or how hard you throw them. The harder the boomerang of delusion is hurled, the longer you repress, the harder the whack at the end of the cycle.

  Repression is a technique that my mother uses spectacularly in her battle with multiple sclerosis. That effort prolongs her life, decades after being told she would die young from the disease. She has outfoxed the disease throughout her life, never fully accepting its pain and incapacity. But outside of ducking a mortal illness, repression is a really bad idea. After the 28 seconds, I deluded myself that I could make my experience an exclusively positive one. I refused to entertain the notion that it was painful.

  My wife, Susan, was the opposite: she wanted to familiarize herself with the tragedy before us. She sought to write the screen-play for the horror flick to come; a pre-screening was a necessary part of her recovery. She wanted to think through all the worst-case scenarios.

  “Life imprisonment?”

  “That’s ridiculous to think about,” I replied. “I won’t be convicted and therefore I won’t be sentenced.”

  “But anything can happen—”

  “No. Nothing bad will happen like that.”

  “Will we go bankrupt paying legal fees?” she asked.

  “Impossible. I’ll go into debt and pay it off. It’s just money.”

  “How much money?”

  “Not too much. It will be fine.”

  “But what if it isn’t?”

  “It will be. And I can’t talk about this anymore.”

  And that was that.

  I went through a few weeks of this. And then one day I woke up and put on a suit. It was the first week of October. The sun was still warm, but I wasn’t too hot in a jacket. The shirt was pale blue, the tie was tasteful: green and blue, no big polka-dots, no fuchsia stripes. Just green and blue and thin white stripes, like your dad wears. The socks were boring: navy blue. The shoes were brown, matching the belt. A light-coloured suit with tan and mauve and some lime. A little boxy for my liking, but I didn’t want to look … good. Just properly dressed.

  I came down for breakfast.

  Susan stared at me.

  “What are … Where are you going?”

  I was unemployed. I’d resigned as CEO of Invest Toronto the day after I’d been charged. Now here I was, less than a month later, looking extremely employed. Except that I wasn’t. I was extremely unemployed, looking extremely employed.

  “Where are you going?” Susan repeated.

  “I don’t know. I just thought I needed to get busier today. Look the part.”

  She looked very sad, suddenly. She was dressed for work, and she was going to work. In fact, she’d gone to work the day after I was charged. She had to, I understood. In a life suddenly without any order, and an unemployed husband, her employment, her brilliant law practice, had to continue. It just had to.

  “If you want to help, send me work,” she’d emailed her clients, who’d all offered to support her. They did.

  I had no clients, however, or office from which to serve clients. This was the zenith of my repression. My delusion. That all would be well. I’d just put on a tie and a happy face. Then off I’d go. Nowhere.

  So, Lesson Two: minimize the repression of the direness of your trauma. If it floats your boat, repress away for a few hours or days. But then stop. Lay down and bleed awhile. To paraphrase Joseph Campbell: once you’re falling, might as well dive. It’s the only way to rise and fight again.

  How does that work? Well, I spent time with people, thinking that I was helping them deal with the 28 seconds. Friends told me they’d lost a lot of sleep, were worried sick about me, and found themselves having a minor existential crisis. I thought that I was doing pretty good (I wasn’t), but I’d nothing to do with my day, so I’d hang out with them. Help them out, I thought. Show them how okay I was.

  Just being with people, even if for delusional reasons, is a way of surviving one of life’s hard freezings. The other thing I did, already mentioned, was write thank-you notes. Hundreds. I thanked people who’d sent me letters of support, or food, or emails, or for having Facebook friended me. I went through a lot of stationery. As I said, everything I did took ten times longer than it needed to, so this filled up a lot of my days.

  Otherwise, I don’t really know what I did with my time, other than the time spent in Marie Henein’s office. I do recall, however, being aware, every day, that I was alive and Darcy Sheppard was dead.

  Thy will be done, not I will be done.

  The hardest part of a traumatic life event, for the egomaniac, is the complete destruction of one’s will. It’s also the best part, assuming one is an egomaniac with an inferiority complex.

  About six months after Sheppard died, I was discussing this subject with a close friend, whom I’ll call Mack. Mack was an alcoholic and an addict, recovering. He’d not touched the stuff for more than 20 years. We were drinking tea, as part of my World Tour. I was the solo act on the tour, visiting the living rooms and nearby coffee shops of friends and strangers wanting to talk to me about the nightmare of August 31st.

  “For people like us,” he said, “the ego is the enemy. The ego needs to be crushed, really, killed, in order to find serenity. Peace comes not from our own will. The prayer says ‘Thy will be done,’ not ‘I’ll figure it out.’”

  I was entranced. So right, I thought. I wanted me some of that ego-killing potion. It seemed like an antidote to insanity.

  “How do I do that? Kill the ego. How—”

  “That’s what has happened to you. Your ego has been killed, under terrible, terrible circumstances.”

  And this was quite true.

  Not that I hadn’t tried an egomaniacal approach, for a short time in the jail cell, when Darcy Sheppard’s death had barely been confirmed to me. In that cell, I’d gone through all the stages of grief—fear, anger, denial, etc.—in a tidy few hours.

  At one point, I’d gamed out a comprehensive strategy—a 360, in the consulting parlance. I thought very clearly and then a wave of murky, dirty, kelp-filled water washed over that clarity. I’d plotted how perhaps I could manage this. But I couldn’t. It would take lawyers and experts and a prosecutor and a judge or a jury. And that was just the leading cast members. There would be people who came to my rescue: friends and family and strangers, loved ones and people who’d not liked me so much before August 31st. Besides, I’d no choice in the matter of my rescue. I’d been laid
low. I was inoperative, incapacitated; batteries removed.

  I couldn’t will my way out of the trauma, the tragedy. There would be brief flashes of ego in the coming months, but they probably added up to a total of less than an hour of egomania. The rest was out of my hands, and I came to accept that as my fate.

  This was, for me, new territory. I’d willed success, I thought, in the past. God hadn’t written my LSAT, it seemed to me. Nor had He wooed a Supreme Court of Canada judge for a clerkship. Nor had He knocked on thousands of doors to get a nomination, then win an election. I’d made all that happen, I’d always thought. The cast and crew along for the ride were very much supporting actors, not the headliners.

  In hindsight, it wasn’t that way at all. Yes, there is a role to play, for the self. One has to show up, as Woody Allen says, to succeed. But beyond that, maybe Woody’s right. Maybe one just has to show up. Maybe success is a collusion of forces beyond our control, and we fool ourselves into thinking that it’s about who you know, what you know. Without my mom and sister, without my profs and a handful of librarians, and my father, I’d never have learned how to write a good essay, a good exam. Without the hundreds of volunteers, I’d never have tasted political success. Without the confidence and appointment by the Premier, I’d never have become Attorney General.

  So in the aftermath of Sheppard’s death, I handed everything over to others. My criminal defence was undertaken and executed by my lawyer. Employment came after a coffee with John West, the managing partner of Ogilvy Renault’s Toronto office, set up by someone else (Richard King). An opportunity to teach a class at the University of Toronto arrived as dessert during a lunch with Professor David Cameron. A phone call from Ryerson University opened up an empty office for me to go to just weeks after I was charged. Recovery from post-traumatic stress disorder came thanks to supervision by my therapist, Dr. Sutton. My relationship with Susan was governed by our caretaker and marital therapist, Dr. Cohen. All this help was originated by or provided by others. The path was written by a Thee, not by me.

  Be humble.

  Embrace humility. When faced with a nightmare, the best strategy is humility before, during, and after. When in doubt, on your knees.

  In war, surrender involves a crossing over to the winning side. When I admitted I was powerless over alcohol, and that my life was unmanageable, it was a complete surrender. I’d lost my war on booze. I crossed over to the winning side. In my life, that lesson of humility, a giving over of oneself, and a surrender of my will, best prepared me for the 28 seconds. That said, I’d lost much of that humility between the time I stopped drinking and the night that changed everything.

  The corollary to surrender is humility. Having handed over my will to the care of others, what was I to do? The answer was to embrace humility, as if I had no choice. As it turned out, during the first couple of years after the 28 seconds, I really was powerless and humbled. I embraced humility out of an incapacity to embrace anything else.

  “Whatever truculent means, if it’s good, then I’m that,” Muhammad Ali responded to Howard Cosell. The sportscaster was verbally sparring with Ali, as ever, with Cosell seeking to demonstrate his superior intelligence (low humility) with an ornate vocabulary. Heavyweight champion Ali was riffing off his “I am the Greatest” rap (no humility), to which Cosell said: “You’re being extremely truculent.” But Ali, the undereducated boxer, outsmarted the overeducated commentator through mock humility: “Whatever truculent means, if it’s good, then I’m that.”

  That always stuck with me. At the time, as a teenager watching the highlight clip of Ali–Cosell exchanges on a Betamax cassette, I thought it was riotous. Muhammad Ali’s immodesty combined with cornball humour. I would think of this when watching clips of Senator Sam Ervin Jr.’s “simple country lawyer” routine during the Watergate Commission, notwithstanding Ervin’s status as a Harvard graduate. Ali and Ervin were engaging in mock humility, I thought, with Ali being explicit about his irony: I may not have a big vocabulary but I’m a great boxer, and you’re a pompous poser.

  Faux humility, of course, is vanity squared; it’s über-pride plus a bonus put-down. And yet Muhammad Ali would know humility better than most human beings. Once America’s greatest athlete, now Ali can barely lift a finger due to Parkinson’s disease. Decades earlier, an Olympic gold medal around his neck, he couldn’t enter some restaurants in the South because he was a “Negro.” Later he was charged with crimes, stripped of his heavyweight championship, and of his boxing licence, his very raison d’être, it seemed. All for refusing to be drafted. He said his Muslim faith prohibited him from fighting in a war. “I ain’t got no quarrel with them,” he said. “No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.” For the best three and half years of his boxing life, he couldn’t fight.

  When the U.S. Supreme Court vindicated Ali, he must have been a changed man. He must have tasted humility and grown from it. Physically, he was not the same fighter, yet in many ways, he had become more formidable. He used his noggin, often literally—by taking punches in order to tire out his opponents, the so-called Rope-a-Dope—to outstrategize his opponents at a level never seen before or after. And yet Ali’s routine didn’t really change at all. It was the immodest stuff, mixed in with faux humility, the mocking kind, the boomerang kind, the kind full of pride.

  Long ago, I decided to adopt the Muhammad Ali style because he was my hero, both for being a superhuman boxing icon and for his courage to “face machine guns … before denouncing Elijah Muhammad and the Religion of Islam. I’m ready to die.” I still get chills when I see that clip. I’m ready to die. Who doesn’t wonder what we’d die for? Even if Ali’s hyperbole could be questioned as just that, the man did walk away from his world and forgo much in the name of his faith and his conscience.

  Ali was loved and hated but mostly loved. Those who hated him, I bet, didn’t understand the part of him that actually was humble, the part that was ready to die for something greater than himself. They only saw the “I am the GREATEST” routine. Or, the shortest poem in the English language, authored by Ali: “Me, Whee!”

  And yet, what would happen to this man in his latter years? A reckoning. He would be rendered all but mute and physically almost catatonic, as a result of Parkinson’s disease. No doubt it was partially caused or exacerbated by his physical beatings, by the boomerangs he launched against himself, taunting his opponents to pound him on the ropes, tire themselves out, only for Ali to spring back and finish them off in a knockout.

  So can it be said that Ali was humbled? Did these physical ailments render a vain man humble? What of his pride, in this radically altered state? The physically perfect boxer reduced to the mute mummies he used to mock as his opponents. (Ali called George Foreman “The Mummy” for his plodding, frightening, quiet attacks. Foreman would later express gratitude to Ali for not hitting him when Ali had a free shot to hammer the already falling Foreman, en route to being knocked out. The Mummy was falling slowly like a tree—timber!—yet Ali had the humility and the humanity to not overdo it.)

  Or was Ali always a humble man who put on an act intended to fool people, engage people, enrage people? The Vanity Fair that was Muhammad Ali perhaps was just that. Maybe he was a humble man, all along. Or maybe an insecure man, fearful, who projected his fear through a façade of bravado.

  In any event, I’ve learned that humility is the most serene, happy place to be, for me. The Ali Act, on the other hand, I find exhausting, anxious, and unreal. I feel almost hungover afterwards. The best advice I got when I needed humility, and wished to shake the darkness, was to stop focusing on myself, and instead focus entirely upon others. Be outwardly focused, I was told. Engage in service to others. So I did.

  I learned the meaning of true altruism from my brother, Alan. He helped people without taking credit for the help, and if he could help people without them discovering the source, that was ideal. He did it for the joy of helping, not for his ego.

  So it would be wrong-headed to brag ab
out my new life’s altruistic activities, if any could be described as such. I’ve come to see that I need everyone, to reach out to everyone, to connect with people, to help them, in order to find humility and serenity in my own life. In so many ways, as the French poet Paul Claudel puts it, “There is not one of them I can do without.”

  All of which stands in contrast to where I was before the 28 seconds, and explains, for me, why I left politics when I did.

  Don’t fool yourself.

  As one recovers from something dramatic in a life, sometimes we cling to familiar platitudes rather than grow. Our capacity for repression, denial, and mendacious thinking ought not be underestimated. I learned not to trust my first thoughts, my knee-jerk reactions, my instincts. Building the muscle of self-appraisal, the ability to take a moral inventory of oneself, also allowed for some sober reflection upon my past.

  In hindsight, I think that I came to fool myself about my political motivations. To be sure, many of my intentions were laudable. But not all, and the failure to be rigorously honest with myself led me astray from the best original reason for entering politics: to help others. Being rigorously honest with oneself is easier said than done. It requires a level of skepticism of one’s own instincts, which we’re typically told to follow. For the recovering alcoholic, however, our first reactions are usually the ones not to follow; we learn to look before leaping. It’s called “the next right step.” That said, some people in recovery find themselves facing more of a blank slate than they ever imagined. I had to reach back, often, to second-guess many of my assumptions.

  So I now see that I went into politics because it seemed like a glorious calling. I went into politics because my dad was my hero, and politics had been his calling. And I went into politics for reasons that defy logic and description. I also went into politics with a host of solutions, looking for problems. And that was arrogant.

  Sometimes a mixture of intentions can land one in a very good place. And that’s what happened with politics and me. I learned that the only way to get elected, truly, was to do it yourself, and then get people to help you help others.