Mourning Has Broken

by Erin Davis

  After six years of marriage, the couple separated, although Margaret continued to live in an attic suite at the prime minister’s official residence. In 1984, their divorce was finalized. Margaret, who is convinced she’d have had better care—and likely been diagnosed properly, sooner—had her name not been Trudeau, sought and seems to have found the treatment she needed to regain her health and her equilibrium. In time, she remarried—this time to a real estate developer, someone out of the political spotlight—and had another son and (at long last) a daughter. She also continued to write and would embark upon a career as a television host.

  For a time, all seemed well, and it appeared that Margaret Sinclair Trudeau’s tumultuous life had finally found a measure of balance and tranquility. And then tragedy struck: in 1998, Michel, her twenty-three-year-old son with Pierre, was struck by an avalanche while skiing in a British Columbia provincial park. He was swept into a lake and drowned, causing much of a nation to mourn alongside the Trudeaus. After all, many of us had grown up right along with Justin, Alexandre (“Sacha,” as he was known) and Michel (nicknamed “Miche” by Cuban dictator Fidel Castro). How could this be?

  At a speech she gave in Ottawa in 2017, I watched as Mrs. Trudeau’s otherwise lively, sparkling eyes filled with tears when she told the gut-wrenching story of the passing of her “Miche.” For her, that loss brought on a spiral of depression so deep and long-lasting that it threatened her own life.

  Only one year after Michel’s death, Margaret divorced from businessman Fried Kemper. Then, just the following year, prostate cancer claimed her first ex-husband, the former prime minister, at age eighty. In the traumatic aftermath of both the passing of her son and her first husband (she claimed that even though the marriage had ended, the love had not), Margaret’s health continued to decline. In fact, doctors warned her she was possibly subconsciously emulating Pierre Trudeau’s refusal, in his final days, to take nourishment.

  In an interview that appeared in the October 8, 2010, issue of Maclean’s magazine, Margaret describes her state of mind at that time:

  “I didn’t want to breathe. I had to remind myself to breathe,” she says, tearfully. “I felt I had to go with Michel. I couldn’t see any other way. I couldn’t have him alone.” She pauses. “Maybe I should put it another way: I didn’t want to be alone. In my grief I was so focused on the loss of my boy that I forgot that I had a full life and lots of people who love me very much who are alive and well and here.”

  It was a family intervention and a complete breakdown that finally led Margaret to get the professional help and medication she needed in order to survive the loss of her son, her marriage and her ex-husband in such quick succession. Today, she travels across North America, an honorary patron of the Canadian Mental Health Association and a popular public speaker, advocating for openness about mental health issues like her own bipolar disorder and manic depression, the same ones she writes about in her book Changing My Mind.

  Not one just to talk the talk, she tries to make a point of meeting with all those who line up to speak with her after an engagement, regardless of whether they’re holding a copy of her book in their hands or simply want to clasp hers. Margaret Trudeau’s need to connect and to help seems entirely genuine, and it is touching and reaffirming to behold.

  Another high-profile bereaved mother is Susan Bro. You may not remember her name, but you’ll remember the circumstances under which the spotlight was turned toward her. Susan endeavoured to turn the death of her daughter, Heather Heyer, during the protest of a 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, into something positive; in her words, to “help make Heather’s death count.” She founded a non-profit anti-hate organization to provide scholarships and help others join her daughter’s fight, and announced its formation at the MTV Video Music Awards just two weeks after Heather was run down by a speeding car during the protest.

  Like Susan Bro, a great many parents use the grief that follows the death of their children as a catalyst for change. Whether it’s those who raise their voices for tougher gun laws or lobby City Hall for a crosswalk where there was none, these parents often, like Heather Heyer’s mother, feel a deep desire to make their child’s death matter. One day, Rob and I may become two of them, but in our case, it’s not clear what caused our daughter’s death. Do we suspect that the drug she took to help her to lactate may have contributed to the stopping of her heart? Yes, we do. But was Lauren one of the estimated ten thousand Canadians who die every year as a result of taking prescription drugs exactly as prescribed? We just don’t know. And as parents who suspect a prescription took their child, we most certainly are not alone.

  Nancy and Shaun McCartney have tried—often in vain—to bring the attention of Canadians to the potential dangers of a drug their son was taking after being given a sample at the doctor’s office. The Bolton, Ontario, family lost their dear son, Brennan, at age eighteen, after he went to the doctor for symptoms of a chest cold. Sounds innocent enough, right? Asked about his spirits, the usually outgoing Brennan admitted to feeling low about a breakup and was given a sample of an antidepressant called Cipralex. Four days later, after having left the house the day before and not returning, he was found dead in a park near his home. Brennan had hanged himself. Nancy and Shaun McCartney became proactive in their search for a link between their son’s death and the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) he had been taking.

  The McCartneys didn’t seek media attention. Instead, it came to them through an investigation into a possible link between SSRIs and suicide. Their motivation is not a long, drawn-out and costly lawsuit.

  When I asked Nancy McCartney, who was an elementary school principal at the time of Brennan’s death, how long it took after losing her son for her grief to turn into anger and action, she responded:

  We were not immediately angry. We were seeking to understand and seeking answers as nothing made sense; there were no red flags. We [Nancy and husband Shaun] were going for individual counselling with Dr. Leslie Balmer, and I remember saying to her, “I can’t help but wonder if the medication had something to do with Brennan’s death.” Leslie had been wondering the same thing.

  It was at that time that they learned from the coroner that no toxicology testing had been done because of the manner in which Brennan died. Nancy says that’s when the anger began.

  We felt that the Coroner was not interested in determining the cause of death as they knew “he had died from hanging.” They had no interest in examining any mitigating factors. We knew that many people died from suicide and we naively thought that the Coroner’s Office and Health Canada would want to know why. We thought they were in place to protect the citizens of Canada.

  The McCartneys have been motivated to find another way to make a difference. Their mission is to inform Canadians in general—but especially youth—about the dangers not only of this particular drug but also of taking any prescription without reading the fine print. The biggest challenge they have faced is maintaining the energy needed to sustain advocacy, as well as balancing their battle with their need for healing and personal wellness.

  We did not want anger to consume us. We did not want to be bitter, angry people. We both felt that Brennan would want us to feel joy. I also have the personal belief that I will meet Brennan again and he will ask me, “So, Mom, what did you do with your life?”

  Today, in addition to their work trying to bring attention to the possible deadly side effects of Cipralex, the family honours Brennan’s memory as a fighter for the underdog with the ARK Award for “acts of random kindness” at his high school. Nancy is also endeavouring to open people’s eyes and minds to suicide and the role medication can play.

  I find the platitudes to be very draining. . . . People are very skeptical when you speak of medication and suicide. I keep going because I keep hearing about other people losing their children in similar ways. I reach out to bereaved parents if it feels right (hence my contacts with you). Being
a bereaved parent is a very lonely experience.

  Thank you, Nancy, for teaching me that we don’t say “committing suicide.” Rather, it’s “completing suicide,” or saying instead that someone “died by suicide.” “Committing” implies some sort of a crime, like larceny or perjury. And that is not the way that parents whose children died by suicide want their family stories to be told. Give them that small and tender mercy, for God’s sake.

  There’s a quote I absolutely love, and Nancy and Shaun are another example of the feeling that Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote about when he said, “Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.” But what happens when your world is so blown apart by the loss of a precious child—a person that you and your loved one brought into the world together—that there’s no horizon, no hope of normalcy or anything good ahead even to imagine?

  Of course, we all evolve during the course of a marriage (given enough time), but nothing could be as huge a change as suddenly losing a child. It’s a doorway you enter through knowing there’s no going back. So do you move ahead together, or take separate paths?

  Fortunately, Rob and I have always been “the other half of the sky” to each other, to quote a well-known saying. And so it was that when those skies turned black for weeks and months on end, we found ourselves holding tight, trying to keep our quicksand-thick grief from taking us both under at the same time.

  How did we survive when so many other couples succumb? There is really no answer, except that perhaps we were and are at a point in our relationship where there has never been more steadiness or strength. Had we lost our child earlier in our marriage and in her life, however, I am almost certain the outcome would not have been the same.

  I remember telling Rob, when Lauren was in single-digit years, that if anything happened to her, we wouldn’t survive as a couple: we’d feel so much guilt, blame, anger and sadness that there would be no room for us to function individually, never mind together. Part of the certainty of my pessimism stemmed from knowing that I would probably climb into a bottle and never come out. A lengthy lifespan would definitely not be in the cards for me, not that I would have wanted one without the daughter whose light illuminated our entire existence.

  The fact was, we had said our goodbyes to Lauren as our “child” when she moved away from our home and city. When she died, we didn’t have to endure the torture that so many parents do: having to pass a nursery that was not going to be used, or a child’s or teen’s bedroom that was suddenly empty and unnaturally still, bereft of joy and the noise of life. I had only the slightest taste of that sort of loss when she moved away: after we had packed up a U-Haul to help Lauren settle into a townhouse in Ottawa so that she could begin college, I cried every day for a solid week. I ached from missing her joyful voice, her cheery presence and just the contentment that came with knowing she was around. Rob took it differently: he’d already said his goodbyes to the preteen child with whom he’d been so very tight. As a stay-at-home dad, Rob had had an unusually close relationship with his daughter. Lauren wrote about it this way in a grade-school project:

  Our family doesn’t exactly fit the stereotype. My mom is the provider and my dad is the caregiver. That’s where I head into talking about how close my dad and I are. Dad’s at all of the practices, recitals, lessons, games, you name it and he’s already there. He’s truly more than I could ever ask for.

  In theory, I’m close to both of my parents. But naturally, since my mom worked in the morning and wasn’t home for most of the day, I’d grown to know my dad a little better. I’m just about as close to my mom as any girl my age, sure, I like to go to the mall every once in a while for a girls’ day, shopping for shoes or going to the weekly yoga class to loosen up, but I’m probably more close to my dad than the average 12-year-old girl.

  In the years that passed after that oh-so-honest portion of her “Who I Am” school project was written, I felt blessed to be given a chance to grow closer and forge stronger ties with our daughter as an adult woman. So you see, losing Lauren wasn’t the challenge to our relationship that I’d once feared it would be. Lauren had grown to become a wife to someone and mother to someone else, which meant that this young person had already left us in one way.

  Perhaps that is why, when she came home for a visit, I would be filled with an anticipatory joy I could only compare to those Christmas mornings of my childhood. As I emerged from the warm fog of sleep, I’d realize that Lauren was in the house, and I could hardly contain my excitement. At what I thought she would deem a decent hour, I’d knock on her door, a cup of tea in my other hand, and call out with all of the subtlety of an ambulance siren, “Little Dee . . . !” (another one of the many nicknames we had for her). Lauren would always indulge me with a half-smile and a groan, as we both knew I was crazy. Crazy for her. I never hid how truly overjoyed I was when she was with us, no matter how often I ran the risk of Lauren’s eyes rolling so far back in her head that they stayed that way.

  One of my fondest memories will always be the day of my fiftieth birthday. The three of us had spent my fortieth in New York City, dining at the iconic Rainbow Room in Rockefeller Center on a rare night that there were tables open to the public, dancing to a live orchestra and enjoying one of the finest views and meals we would ever have, but it was the homemade surprise she gave me a decade later that will always be at the very top of my life’s-favourite-moments list.

  Rob and I had planned a small get-together with our friends from our years with a rock tribute band (I sang and played keyboards and sax; Rob played bass). About twenty of us in all were going to gather at our cottage north of the city to enjoy a casual dinner and birthday cake and to make some music. In the late afternoon, with an hour to go before the first guests were to arrive, the doorbell rang. I immediately went into panic mode. A towel on my head, I’d been finishing up some last-minute kitchen chores, so I hadn’t dried my hair and was definitely not ready for company.

  I went to the door, Rob right behind me, and when I opened it, I couldn’t believe my eyes: it was Lauren, who had come all the way from Ottawa! She and her dad had planned it all. She’d taken a small commuter plane to the downtown Toronto waterfront, took a cab several blocks to our condo, got the car key that awaited her at the front desk and then drove our car an hour up to the cottage to surprise me.

  I stood there at the front door, and as if in a scene out of I Love Lucy, I just bawled. In fact, yes, I’m quite sure “WAAAaaaah . . .” was the sound that came out. Ugly cry and all, it was simply the best surprise, the best birthday ever. She stayed just that one night and sang and made music with our friends who had known her since she was a baby, when she’d sleep peacefully in a playpen in an adjoining bedroom as we worked out the harmonies and chords on rock hits for a few hours each week. Growing up around them, she forged close ties with our Generations bandmates, and even got an extra grandmother out of the deal. As delighted as everyone was with this surprise visit, I still regard it as a gift I’ll always cherish. It was also the last of my birthdays we marked together. If it had to be the last, I’m grateful it truly was the best.

  And you know, perhaps that is what has saved us: that perspective and gratitude we try so hard to let envelop us, even when the unfairness of it all threatens to sink in. That’s not to say Rob and I are always on the same page at any given time or on any given day; people do grieve differently, and when a couple has seemed so “in sync” in every other way, the strange language of sadness can hamper efforts at communication. There are instances when we’re reluctant to share with each other our true feelings, so afraid are we both of pulling the other down in case they’re having a “good” day.

  One night in a teary exchange, Rob shouted that he was so tired of me being angry at him.

  “I can’t help it, I can’t help it!” I shouted back. “I’m not angry at you, I’m just so angry!”

  Not that I often needed one, but that rare loud exchan
ge was a timely reminder that I wasn’t the only one suffering; Rob was just better at keeping his emotions and pain inside, so I didn’t minister to him or offer a soft word as often as he did to me.

  Often, it is just an unfortunate fact that, as the old tune goes, “we only hurt the ones we love.” They’re always within figurative swinging distance of our pent-up emotions and—if we’re lucky—are most likely to forgive us when we treat them unfairly. It’s not right, but it’s the way it is . . . until it isn’t. Walking away from the anger, the sadness, the unbearable darkness that comes day after day is, I’m sure, not just to be expected but a form of self-preservation. After all, other parents and siblings are suffering too. Sometimes that act of walking away turns into another loss: that person never coming back.

  Instead, when we lost Lauren so finally, so entirely, on that dark Monday morning, Rob and I grew closer, which is something that after (then) twenty-seven years of marriage, we didn’t think would be possible. It’s as if we were holding each other up: one helping the other when he or she stumbled, and pulling each other from the depths of depression and sadness whenever one of us descended. We count ourselves extremely fortunate to have been able to weather our loss, as we know that some couples cannot bear the weight of the pressure and hardship that accompany the death of a child. Couples like Ellen Hinkley and her ex-husband.

  As parents and survivors, all we can do is just keep going, trying to find any bit of joy in each day. We mine the memories for ones that make us smile more than they make us melancholy, and find it gets a little easier with each passing year. We try to live in ways that honour our children or we feel would make them proud of us.

  For Ellen Hinkley and her family, this attempt to honour comes via the Christopher Skinner Memorial Foundation, whose annual golf tournament supports several local charities with an emphasis on kids, since Ellen says Christopher was “a big kid at heart.” For Barbara Cassells, it’s the joy of sharing the hope that comes with each dragonfly keychain she makes and gives away. For Susan Bro, it’s spreading a message against the kind of hate that resulted in her daughter’s death. For the McCartneys, it’s the award given out at their son’s school saluting random acts of kindness. For Margaret Trudeau, it’s spreading a message of hope for those who suffer mental illness; each, in its own way, is an effort to be a living example of proof that we can survive even the worst tragedy if we seek and get the proper help.