The job itself turned out to be fascinating and intellectually rewarding, involving bank financings, production and co-production financings, sale-leaseback transactions, establishing an independent distribution company in partnership with other producers and distributors, studio co-productions, talent deals, a building lease and build-out in Los Angeles.
We had acquired Fireworks from an independent producer who had only recently taken his company public but who still controlled it and continued to act as an owner. I had met him while doing our acquisition of his company and knew it would be a rocky road given his chafing at thoughts of input or control from above. I was also suicidal and unconcerned about my own well-being. Working with him would be a perfect match for the state of my mental health.
When I left CanWest’s head office, the company was valued at approximately four billion dollars and was virtually debt-free. The Asper family held approximately half of the equity value. We were planning to use the newly acquired Fireworks as a test vehicle for larger expansion into the film, TV, and emerging online content industries. I left head office with the idea that I would be a part of something important for years to come.
But I could also see that there were storm clouds on the horizon. The executives who had driven the recent growth in value were slowly losing ground to the old-timers from Mr. Asper’s era who were coming back, all wanting in on the action. Leonard had been handed the reins, but Mr. Asper was still very much present.
Shortly after I arrived in Toronto the corporate strategy changed. An old-media view of the world took over back in Winnipeg as CanWest invested heavily in newspapers—in 1999. The model for a successful and vertically integrated media company with content creation and distribution across multiple platforms with content creators working for both old and new media at the same time had been the Tribune Corporation, based in Chicago. It sounded good in theory, but it was a step backward, an effective reinvestment in old media, not new. On announcing the deal, which was a very public and important moment in Canadian business history, Leonard Asper and Lord Conrad Black, then an international media baron, shook hands, and the image was splashed across media outlets worldwide.
Conrad Black shaking hands with Leonard Asper? My Spider-Sense started tingling. The Lord Black I had heard of would have insisted on shaking hands with nobody but Mr. Israel Asper (no matter that Leonard was now the head of the CanWest businesses), unless, perhaps, he was getting the much better end of the bargain? On seeing that handshake on the news, I immediately called my dad and told him that I thought CanWest had just been taken. That handshake told me all I needed to know about that deal.
CanWest’s focus was now elsewhere. It was unhappy with Fireworks’ management and quickly lost interest in it in the face of other deals it was chasing. Beyond newspapers, the company pursued bizarre corporate development opportunities that didn’t seem to fit into any coherent plan of attack. I received a call from an old friend who had made his way to Turkey and who found himself on the other side of a deal with CanWest. He wanted me to try to help him understand what he saw as the irrational conduct of the CanWest corporate development executives he was dealing with. It wasn’t a good sign.
CanWest was increasingly seeking out opportunities for cash, no matter where they were. As before, the company was making bets based on its ability to see what it perceived as opportunities being missed by others. Believing its phenomenal press from its past decade of success, CanWest thought that it was smarter than its competitors and that it would never make a mistake.
CanWest is no more—four billion dollars in equity value wiped out after I left. It didn’t even last ten years after the second generation took power. And that makes me very sad, because it was positioned so well to take advantage of what was to come. But the world can change quickly. Tribune, the model for a modern entertainment company? Bankrupt. CanWest was far from the only media company not to make the transition into the digital era, but it had the misfortune to make all of the wrong moves at all of the wrong times.
I wasn’t at head office for CanWest’s demise, and I’m grateful for that, for it would have been too hard for me to witness. Things changed at CanWest after I left. Not because I left, just after. Still, I think having somebody like me there, somebody who could and would speak truthfully and clearly to power without thinking politically or with any self-interest, had been important. Some believe that in medieval times that role was played by the fool. At CanWest, nobody would ever deny that I was certainly a fool. CanWest benefitted when Mr. Asper sat at the table and encouraged people, anybody, no matter how young, to come at him with an opposing view. He didn’t just love to hear different voices, he needed to hear them.
There are many lessons to take from what happened there, and there were many good people who worked very hard at CanWest who deserved better. Leonard deserved far better from so many of those highly paid professionals around him who in the end chose self-interest over the family that had given them so much. Leonard, like the rest of us, is not perfect, and like the rest of us he too made serious mistakes along the way, but he deserved a far better fate. I know he’ll find great success again.
CANWEST WASN’T THE only one making bad choices.
Relationships? I had dated on and off and off and on again ever since I got to Princeton, amazing women, each of whom deserved much better than I could ever offer them. I cared too much for every one of them to ever bring them into my chaotic world of pain and self-abuse. Each and every one of them gave so much to me: they all tried so hard in their own ways to help me without knowing exactly what it was in me that needed fixing. Because I knew that, and because of their deep love and affection for me, it simply wasn’t possible for me to sustain a serious relationship that I could take through to marriage.
But then through friends I met a tall, beautiful, strong woman, one who struck me as a sort of überwoman—lawyer on partnership track, dynamic, and utterly charming, someone who seemingly had it all. And that single blind date led to our getting married several years later, in 2002, me now thirty-eight years old. We went to the Toronto City Hall and got married on a Monday over lunch, and we both returned to work later that afternoon after a celebratory lunch. I’m not one for being the center of any attention, so no wedding ceremony for me.
Part of my reluctance to celebrate was that deep down I believed that she had no idea who I really was. She had only seen the me you see when you look at my résumé. She hadn’t seen the other me, the me who was troubled, who self-destructed, who lacked any sense of self-worth, because I hadn’t shown that to her. But she wanted me, and that was good enough for me.
Amidst all of this personal upheaval and in the midst of my increasingly worsening state, it was difficult for me to maintain consistent employment. As CanWest crumbled I took a position with an emerging children’s television production and distribution company as its senior lawyer, again involving myself in the business end as well. We made acquisitions. We expanded into product licensing. We became an industry leader. We acquired a historic Los Angeles–based competitor and expanded our market presence. Initially I did very well, but from the moment a senior executive reneged on a promise that I thought had been made to me, those fears latent inside of me raged. I felt exploited and betrayed. I no longer cared, and although the job called on only a small amount of my skillset, I now gave it even less than that.
None of this really mattered anyway. Ever since Sheldon had come forward and I hadn’t, my life had had no meaning. And with each day, things got worse. New job? New wife? New life in the suburbs? They barely registered and hardly seem worth mentioning because in so many ways I wasn’t present to experience them myself.
I was still alive, but I wasn’t living.
Who are you? You know exactly who and what you are. And you know that none of this is ever going to change. This is your life. There’s no escape. You deserve this. You did this to yourself.
I tried very hard to connect with my co
mmunity. I was coaching minor hockey, but I wasn’t really in the moment. I was commuting into work and then coming home consumed by thoughts of failure. I kept trying so very hard to lead a normal life while skirting around my emotional black hole. We had a nice home in a sought-after neighborhood. We vacationed overseas with friends. Yet all of this meant nothing to me, this false dream, none of it made me feel any better about myself. Forget about what we have. We only are who we are, and I knew exactly who I was.
I was, of course, tormented by what I saw as my life’s wasted potential, the professional price I had repeatedly paid through my bouts of underperformance, my inability to enjoy any success, my loss of friends because they couldn’t understand my actions, my bloated body abused through overeating, a new and already faltering marriage. Everything I ever had that was good in my life I had broken. Everything.
There was no room in my life for success. Anything good I destroyed. Anything bad I fed. And this relationship, this marriage, was bad for me from the start, bad for both of us from the start. My wife was in many ways that überwoman, so beautiful, strong, and accomplished. When she met me, she saw only my good. But when she found out everything about me, her first instincts were to protect herself, and I don’t blame her one bit for that. I wasn’t good for her, for what she wanted out of life, and that’s fine by me.
I COULD SEE what was coming. We had drifted apart. My dad’s death in 2003 gave me increasing perspective on the life I had lost, my own life. In many ways his life ended the day he dropped out of school after Grade Eight. I could see with greater clarity just what I had lost through the abuse, what it was doing to me, what I had done to myself. The more I thought about him, the more I missed him, the more I understood him. And the more I understood him, the more I worried about what kind of impact I would have on those closest to me.
My father died just after my wife and I had married. Although my dad and I had always fought, he was still my dad, and I knew he was, at heart, a sweet man. We never really connected until he was on his deathbed, when, fortunately, we had a chance to say all the right things to each other. I was so sad at not having had him by my side throughout my life, so sad we couldn’t have had a loving relationship during all those years when I was growing up, when it would have meant the world to me, when I needed him.
My dad couldn’t help me with the same old questions that had haunted me for so long, that continued to haunt me. They would awaken me in a sweat, making it impossible for me to fall back asleep. They would come up while I was working on a legal file. They would be front and center during a handshake or a seemingly normal conversation. They would be there during intimate moments with the one I loved.
Why did he pick me? He must have seen I was weak. People must see me as weak. I must be some sort of joke.
Why didn’t I stop it? I must have wanted it. I deserve what I’m feeling now. I deserve to feel like his leftover garbage.
How could somebody like him control somebody like me? I’m worthless and weak. I’m not the strong, tall, intelligent, athlete people see on the outside. I’m a fraud.
Who am I? I’m his garbage, his enabler. I’m somebody who doesn’t deserve to live.
I knew that I had killed myself many times without actually taking my life. The only thing left to do was to complete the job, one I had been working so hard on ever since the abuse. Enough was enough. It was time to end things.
EIGHT
CHOOSING TO LIVE
NOTHING FOCUSES YOU on life like the reality of death, and I was about to die.
I hadn’t circled a date on my calendar. I hadn’t made any personal deals with myself like “If I can make it until Wednesday and still feel the same way on Thursday, then Friday will be the day,” something I had done before to get through rougher periods of time. I just got to the point where I was in too much pain and I knew that it was time, that things had finally deteriorated to the point where I couldn’t deal with life anymore, that I was too tired to fight on.
So, one night—a night just like so many others, a night in August 2008—I crawled onto the edge of the bridge over Sixteen Mile Creek in Oakville, Ontario, the safe suburb just outside of Toronto where I was living, with the intention of ending my living hell by jumping.
I was incredibly calm and ready, ready in a way I’d never been before. I’d researched suicide and made plans many times, and I’d even taken steps to act on those plans. The suicidal thoughts tended to come in waves. I was in the midst of another such wave and had been searching out alternatives. I’d narrowed my choices down to this bridge, another bridge, and the railway tracks.
There is an art to figuring out the best way to kill yourself. With trains you have to study the schedules to determine when the faster trains will be coming through without stopping. Some spots along the tracks have better hiding places than others, cover you need so the engineer won’t sound an alarm and slam on the brakes, lessening the chance of a successful death but increasing the chance of an unsuccessful maiming. In fact, you always think of the negatives, as living in the aftermath of a failed attempt can be much worse than succeeding.
I finally decided that jumping in front of a train was too risky. Given my immense size and the shape of the front of the trains, I was afraid that I would just end up seriously injured, and I couldn’t take that risk. Jumping off a bridge made much more sense to me—my size and the increased force of hitting the ground on contact would improve my chance of “success.”
Try explaining that thinking to your therapist.
In some ways, making the decision to die gave me peace of mind, a sense of control over my own destiny. I carried on for a while longer, fighting the hardest I’d ever fought, without anybody ever knowing or even suspecting that there was a fight going on. I carried on as best as I could until I couldn’t carry on anymore. And when I couldn’t carry on anymore, when I couldn’t fight anymore, and when I knew, absolutely knew, that things would never change, a calm came over me. I was fine with things. I accepted defeat. I was ready to die.
I didn’t say any goodbyes. There would be no note this time, nothing. It was impulsive in the moment, but it wasn’t impulsive in concept. Simply stated, I had an opportunity—it was late at night and everybody else was asleep—and I took it.
I left the house in running gear. I was horribly overweight and was not doing any running at the time, but that’s what I put on that night to leave the house and take my own life. Read into that whatever you will, perhaps a cry out to the lost athlete within, maybe a twisted homage to the poem “To an Athlete Dying Young”? Whatever it was, I tiptoed through the house as quietly as a morbidly obese giant could and made my way out the door.
It was a quiet, still night. I lumbered slowly down the street, down the hill, and then over to the bridge crossing Sixteen Mile Creek. My thoughts were all over the place as I approached the bridge. Although I had been planning for the event and had dreamed of the release I would get from ending all of my pain, I hadn’t ever thought through the very act itself, the climbing up, the pushing off, and the letting go.
I crawled up and balanced myself on the guardrail, which was in itself a most indelicate act given my size. I imagine that it would have been amusing to watch but for the fact that I was in the process of killing myself.
As I looked down, I did indeed feel the anticipated rush of freedom. It was so close to being all over.
Freedom.
I was as lost as I could possibly be, desperate, hopeless, believing I had no other way out. I sat there rocking back and forth on the rail, considering the pros and cons of life. I sat there for hours. It was a beautiful night, the trees dark against the night sky. I was as awed by nature’s beauty that night as I had been awed by the Princeton campus. Memories flowed, memories of dreams, of laughs, of joyful moments. Then reminders of the horrible moments, dark moments, where life failed to have meaning. Back and forth, in my head, my life played out before me. Great memories, phenomenal memories, then
crushing defeats, moments of having been shunned, shamed, of having lost at life. Life’s great pageant played out upon the midnight sky of my mind while death beckoned below me, not for the first time, but this time more loudly than ever before.
And then suddenly, a moment of clarity. One so intense that it was, as it had been with the one I had at Princeton, as if I were separate from my body. A wave of emotion grabbed me and focused me on one thing and one thing only. I needed to live. I took one long last look at my world, at my life, at my past, at the abuse, and at what had become of me. I cried even more deeply than I had after first being abused. And in crying so hard I realized something very important. I still wanted to live, to live my life, but not the life I had been leading. I had lost track of what it meant to live and be me. I had no idea who I was anymore. I wanted to live so that I could find out who I was, I needed to find out who I really was. I was able to choose life over death because I could see that in spite of it all there remained something in my life that needed to be developed, nurtured, coddled, and loved. In many ways I had stopped growing and living all those years ago when the abuse first happened. I needed to meet, understand, and accept myself and then bring myself back to life. In effect, I had to bring another human being into this world, teach him all of life’s important lessons, provide him with all of the support necessary to sustain him against outside threats. I had a reason to live—to love this other person—this new me—as much as possible.
I slid off the rail and crawled back to a safe spot. I sat there for a while and then walked home and went to bed, exhausted. I felt no sense of salvation. I felt only that I’d failed. I had lacked the courage to jump, had added one more failure to my long list of failures, displayed my weakness and my unworthiness again. But those feelings gave way to an incontrovertible awareness that I had made a choice. I had chosen life over death.
I Am Nobody Page 16