Kickboxing helped, from an anger-expunging perspective. So did the reminder she still had two living girls to care for. Fear her daughters will emulate their older sister keeps Marcella on alert, changed her parenting. Puts work second, now, always. “After the suicide I began to start coddling my children—my kids that are alive now….It feels almost like you’re walking on eggshells. Like, ‘Okay, I don’t want to make this mistake again. What am I going to do different so I don’t make this mistake again?’ And it’s awful, because it’s a guilty feeling.”
“It’s easy to say” that it’s not her fault, Marcella tells me, a uselessly empathic reporter. “I think that’s what we all struggle with.”
Her daughter’s death granted her involuntary entry to a world of suicide she hadn’t known existed. “I wasn’t introduced to suicide when I was younger….I had two family members, before my daughter passed away, that had committed suicide. And nobody in my family ever shared that with me. It was like a hidden secret.” An aunt overdosed on pills. A cousin drowned himself and his mom couldn’t countenance it. Even after her other son was found hanging, strangled, years later, she still would not acknowledge what had killed them.
“She won’t talk about it….I can’t ask her, ‘How did it feel?’ She lost her kids—both her kids—to the same thing….And she won’t talk about it. She won’t acknowledge it at all.”
Now Marcella derives purpose from smashing that walled unwillingness to confront suicide.
“My role now is I need to make sure that people are aware of this and people understand what this can do to a family if it’s not talked about.”
Now she has friends come to her for advice. She’s often the only person they’ll tell. “One of them had a son that was beginning to cut himself and he started to leave notes for his dad saying he’s going to do this. And he approached me, he asked me, ‘What should I do? What should I listen to?’
“It is really huge on the reservation. Nobody wants to talk about it. Nobody wants to say, ‘Oh yeah, they took their own life.’ And nobody sees that there’s a need to heal that pain. They just bear it and the pain is passed on and they just bear it and bear it and bear it and basically it ends up eating them up….I was guilty of that, too. Because the first two years [after] her passing away I didn’t acknowledge her suicide. I didn’t even tell people that she killed herself. I just said it was an accident or I wouldn’t really go into it. It’s something that needs to be talked about. Because if we don’t say anything, nobody is going to say anything, and nobody’s going to understand anything. And, to me, I felt I had a personal responsibility to make sure that nobody else goes through this.”
* * *
—
AGAIN AND AGAIN and again, I find, the people who feel most keenly depression’s and suicide’s toll are those who’ve been there. It hits home for Arielle Sheftall, who now researches child suicide: she was fourteen years old when her mom died and her world just about fell apart. “It was a very, very tough time. And thoughts of suicide, absolutely. I would have thoughts of suicide.” But she was lucky, she says: she told an older cousin who got her the help she needed.
The knowledge that not everyone has that luck helps drive her.
“I’ve kind of lived that experience and I just want to, from my own experience, help others and say, ‘There is a light at the end of the tunnel. And there is a lot that’s unknown, but there are things we do know that do work. And if that doesn’t work, maybe we try this….So, I think,” she says to me, “that’s why suicide really is one of the topics that I’m very passionate about.
“It’s something that hits home, but it’s preventable.”
22
“More Children Do Not Have to Die”
Human beings have a finite capacity for outrage and at some point Canadians ran out of outrage at twelve-year-olds across the country killing themselves for lack of care. It was the litany, I think—one child suicide after another, sometimes in suicide pacts, in Indigenous communities few could find on a map, in situations that boggle belief and numb the mind. States of emergency became constants but the urgency never seemed to last long enough to produce lasting change; inaction left crises unaddressed and robbed those crises of their power. And it was the degree of systemic deprivation behind the awfulness—not just lack of mental health care but also lack of housing and clean water and opportunities for hope, and the legacy of residential schools and centuries of concerted genocidal attempts to stamp out entire peoples and their cultures.
JOLYNN
Kerri Cutfeet met his daughter for the first time when she was twelve years old in the cafeteria of Thunder Bay hospital’s pediatric psych ward. Jolynn Winter had been there two weeks after running away from her foster home—the latest of many foster homes in small communities all over Northern Ontario. Just weeks earlier, in the wake of a close friend’s suicide, she’d tried to hang herself with a T-shirt from a bathroom stall coat hook. While she was held as an inpatient—“they just locked her up in there”—in a city where she knew no one, her case worker at Tikinagan Child and Family Services was calling around, trying to find her somewhere to live.1
Kerri was living with his partner and two young kids on the Wapekeka First Nation reserve in Northern Ontario, a fly-in community hundreds of kilometres from the nearest mid-sized city. He’d discovered Jolynn was his daughter just four years earlier, he told me, but had kept his distance: she was enmeshed in the foster system and he wasn’t sure she’d appreciate this stranger inserting himself into her life. Now, though, was different. Now the eldest child he’d never met needed a home.
“My partner, she said, ‘Kerri, you should do something, already.’…Hearing that, from her, that was awesome.”
It took all of a week to sort everything out. He met with Jolynn’s caseworker to hammer out a plan for when she was released—the structure she would need, what he would provide, the options she would have if she needed additional care.
And then Kerri was in the Thunder Bay Regional Health Centre psych-ward cafeteria. Terrified.
“I was so nervous and so scared but so excited. I was afraid she was pissed off at me—disappointed in me, you know? For not being there all her life. She didn’t even really look at me right away. And she kind of gave me this nervous smile and I got up and hugged her and I texted my partner right away, as soon as I seen her, just saying, ‘Oh, she’s beautiful.’”
They went from the hospital to the mall, where Kerri bought Jolynn a winter jacket and a rose-gold-coloured heart-shaped necklace, then flew home, where they had a room of her own all ready for her.
His younger children, nine and ten, were ecstatic at the prospect of a brand-new older sister. “What I felt so bad about was that one question: ‘Where was she all our lives?’…They were just so happy to have her.”
He remembers, right away, trying to talk to Jolynn—about herself, and what she’d been through; about her mom, and why she’d ultimately had to give Jolynn up to family services; about why he hadn’t gotten in touch earlier. “Anything to make her feel better.”
And she was happy, he said.
It wasn’t until afterward that he learned she’d stopped calling her doctor and her caseworker after she moved in.
Kerri’s voice glows when he talks about the way Jolynn became comfortable with him, made demands of him a daughter would of her dad. “She’d text us and say something along the lines of, ‘One of you come and get me while one of you starts cooking! I’m hungry!’” The thing she requested most was cupcakes. “And then, as she got more comfortable with me, she’d say, ‘Get me cupcakes!’ That felt good, you know? She didn’t ask, she demanded.”
Christmas was a joy. A house full of children and Xboxes and children squabbling good-naturedly over Xboxes. By winter break Jolynn had already made friends and Kerri figured it was cool for her to stay out a bit later—there was no school to worry about waking up for. And he knew readjusting after the holidays to the schedule they’d
agreed to follow would be a challenge. He tried to nudge Jolynn gently toward self-discipline. “My very last message to her on Facebook…I told her, ‘It’s about time that you start coming in earlier, sleeping earlier, because you’ve got to go to school. We both signed a paper saying we would follow that safety plan.’ That was part of it, going to school.”
There was another death, right when school was starting up again: Jolynn’s cousin in Lac Seul, several hundred kilometres away, was found frozen to death outside one morning. Jolynn wouldn’t talk about it, Kerri said.
“She must have taken it pretty hard. She said she was sad about it but I didn’t see her expressing it, you know?”
His daughter didn’t express sadness much at all, for that matter. The only time he’d seen her cry was at a silly video her friend posted on Facebook. She laughed and laughed but suddenly was sobbing. “And I asked her, ‘What are you laughing about?’ And she said, ‘I’m not laughing, I’m crying.’”
But she seemed happy, he said. He did everything he could so she’d be happy.
They’d developed a morning routine: he’d get up and sit on the couch and watch her bedroom door, which opened out to the living room.
“She’d poke her head out, look around and then scurry to the washroom. And every morning I’d wait for that to happen.”
“I didn’t want to go bug her—she was a young lady and I didn’t want to invade her space too much. But I’d make sure I heard something, at least. Like, if I didn’t hear anything from the room for a while I’d go knock or something and say, ‘Hey, what’s up?’”
That Sunday, Kerri decided to sleep in. Didn’t rush to the couch to check for that head poking out, for the scurrying out to the washroom. It wasn’t until close to two o’clock that his partner’s shriek yanked him awake.
He raced through the living room to Jolynn’s bedroom door and saw his partner on the floor, Jolynn in her arms. A string—a shoelace, he thinks, or the pullstring of a hoodie—tight around her neck. She’d hanged herself, sitting, from the doorknob. Her body’s weight had pulled the door ajar, which is when Kerri’s partner saw her. And screamed.
“I could still feel some life in her, but just barely. She was all pale, there was no colour to her skin, and she was all blue and purple around the mouth and lips.”
He cut the string off, started CPR, did whatever he could think of to try and breathe life back into his blueing daughter.
And, hysterical, called the clinic—a nursing station that would send paramedics round in an emergency. The agonizing slowness of their response hasn’t lessened in his mind. It took an eternity for a driver to come, an eternity for him to come in, to try to resuscitate his little girl. He covered his two younger children’s eyes to try to spare them the image of their sister’s strangulation, the way the sight of an uncle’s suicide had burned itself into his eight-year-old brain decades earlier. “I just didn’t want my kids to have that image.”
They finally put Jolynn in the back of the truck and brought her to the clinic, to try to save her there. For hours they tried, before pronouncing her dead.
Later he learned she was bullied online—messages telling her, “Kill yourself.” And that she was part of a suicide pact with a number of other young girls from the community—a pact community leaders had gone to the federal government to try to stop. Months later, her brother, ten years old, was a target: “This person made a video about my son, poking fun at him, telling him to kill himself, too….It might even be the same person. I don’t even know.”
There’s no good way to ask a dad what could have kept his little girl alive. Would it have helped her to have supports in the community—a therapist, a doctor?
“I’m not sure about that. There were people to talk to.”
* * *
—
TWO DAYS AFTER twelve-year-old Jolynn Winter hanged herself from her bedroom doorknob on a Sunday in January 2017, her friend Chantell Fox, also twelve, took her own life. Both were members of the four-hundred-person Wapekeka First Nation. All suicides are preventable tragedies but theirs feel particularly so because they were predicted. Jolynn and Chantell were both part of the suicide pact community leaders had discovered six months earlier, prompting a plea for funds—$376,706 for salaries, benefits, training and rent for a four-person suicide prevention team. “There have been many suicide attempts by youth in the past year and it is believed that there is a suicide pact with a group of young females,” reads the request, submitted to the Canadian federal government, which is responsible for health care on reserves, in July 2016.2
The proposal met with radio silence save for rote acknowledgement from Health Canada.
Days after Jolynn’s and Chantell’s suicides, Nishnawbe Aski Nation grand chief Alvin Fiddler called out Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau for his inaction in a letter all the more damning for its lack of bombast.
I write not to embarrass you, not simply to make a political point, but to plead for the sake of our youth and, as a matter of life and death, that you immediately act on these solutions….
Canada has run out of excuses for these tragedies.3
Trudeau met with Grand Chief Fiddler and other Indigenous leaders; was reportedly “receptive” to their ideas but short on promises.
And then in June, twelve-year-old Jenera Roundsky killed herself shortly after returning home to Wapekeka after spending months in a residential treatment facility hundreds of kilometres away. The community had opposed her discharge, said Wapekeka council member Joshua Frogg, who was Chantell’s uncle and who, in the wake of the preteen suicides, became something of a community spokesperson.4
These girls were Michael Kirlew’s patients.
In an affidavit before Canada’s Human Rights Tribunal that year, the family doctor laid responsibility for the children’s suicides on government failure to provide basic health care—preventive or urgent—to these kids and their communities.
“In my daily medical practice, I can draw a direct correlation between the lack of access to early medical interventions leading to compounded mental health problems and youth suicide….This recent suicide crisis in Wapekeka is not the first suicide crisis that has occurred and I fear that it will not be the last suicide crisis if the status quo remains. Wapekeka has routinely identified what they need to address the high rate of youth suicide. These tragedies are preventable and more children do not need to die.”5
This is one small remote community.
Similar scenes play out in Indigenous homes across the continent.
Stateside, Native American children aged ten to seventeen are killing themselves at a rate 62 percent higher than white people of the same age. The disparity is worse for adolescent girls, who are killing themselves at almost three times the rate of their white counterparts and whose suicide rate increased almost 90 percent between 1999 and 2015. The suicide rate for eighteen- to twenty-four-year-old girls more than doubled in that time and has been, consistently, more than double the average. (Among young Indigenous boys the suicide rate, while still higher than average, has dropped or stayed steady.)6 And these are probably significant underestimations, because deaths of Indigenous Americans tend to go under-reported.7
It’s easy to lose hope, to feel the systemic injustices plaguing North America’s Indigenous communities are too deep-rooted to tackle. But the people making the most difference in that epidemic of despair are Indigenous communities themselves, picking up the slack left by government bodies that are actually responsible for providing services. Or look at the We Matter campaign—because that needs saying!—a Canadian initiative started by Indigenous youth meant to instill a sense of hope where it’s lacking.8 Countless organizations and initiatives seek to fill in the fatal cracks too many people fall through.
* * *
—
GORDON POSCHWATTA GOT a suicide call while we were talking on the phone.
Luckily he was already in his car on his way to Burns Lake, partway
through that day’s two-hundred-odd-kilometre odyssey from one remote British Columbia community to another. Unseasonably muddy November roads made a long journey longer. “I’m gonna blame today on global warming,” he says from the side of the road, where he’s pulled over to chat in a pocket of forest with decent mobile reception. I can hear the quiet clicking of his hazard lights in the background between sentences.9
I’d phoned him because he heads clinical practice at Carrier Sekani Family Services, an organization dedicated to bringing badly needed mental health care to Indigenous communities in northern BC that would otherwise have none. Their aim is prevention and ongoing treatment, but suicide attempts and suicidal ideation are their bread and butter. A couple of weeks before we spoke, he told me, he got four calls in one day from four different communities. In one case, they arrived too late. The year before they got a call from the RCMP about fourteen kids (“well, kids under thirty”) who’d tried to kill themselves in one area in a single weekend.
“We were running around at night trying to find them and trying to stabilize….Some people, their relatives had taken them to hospitals in a nearby town; some people were there; some people were hiding; some people were drinking in the bush. Everything. We had a team. We brought in, I think, six people that night. We went door to door and one at a time knocked them off the list.”
Stabilizing these crises is about as bare-bones a triage as you can imagine. If the person is relatively low-risk (thinking about suicide but not concretely or imminently planning it), Poschwatta’s team will make sure they have ongoing supports and leave them at home.
“If it turns into moderate risk, where there’s a fairly detailed plan, and they haven’t done anything and they don’t really want to, but it’s there, then we need 24/7 mature, sober people…doing shift work until we get enough mental health work in to reduce that risk down to minimal.”
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