Two days later, he phoned.
“Mom, I have to come home.”
I was relieved. I knew intuitively that Kelty wasn’t okay, that he needed to be near us, that school didn’t matter at that point. He flew to Vancouver on February 14. Our friends the Thomases, who had been on our recent family trips, picked him up at the airport and kept him overnight. Kerry and I went down to get him the next morning.
Whistler was caught up in Valentine’s Day fever when Kelty got back, and Riley was looking forward to a big party planned for that evening. She knew Kelty wasn’t doing well since we had talked to her about it, and although she seemed to understand, she was immersed in her own life like any teenager. Her uncle Clancy, a terrific photographer, was coming to town and planned to take pictures of Riley and all her friends. Being a fifteen-year-old girl, that was all she could think about.
Kelty was happy to be home. He had brought his books from school because he wanted to study, and it cheered him up to reconnect with his pals. On his first day back he called Pat and Trevor, and the whole gang converged on our place, playing pool and having fun. A kind of normalcy had taken hold, but only for a moment. Kerry and I were in our bedroom watching television when suddenly Kelty was standing in the doorway, tears streaming down his face. “Mom, I don’t want to have these terrible thoughts. Please, please help me not have these terrible thoughts.”
We asked his friends to go and then tucked him into our bed with us. I hugged him as he cried, wanting only to take away his pain. I kept saying, “I will take care of you. I will take care of you. I promise. I promise.” I sang him “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” and hung on tight to him all through the night.
The next day, Kerry took Kelty to the Whistler medical clinic. The doctor knew about Kelty and the struggles he had been having. He gave him some more medication for his anxiety and recommended he see a local therapist right away. Kelty didn’t want to talk to a therapist again, but Kerry insisted, so he went for a few sessions.
Kerry had been planning to join me on a business trip to Florida, but now that our boy needed us, we decided not to go. Kelty was upset, insisting that we not change our plans. We were equally insistent about not leaving him. Kelty asked me to read his journal, the one his dad had encouraged him to start writing the month before. It was such a private thing to share, and I could tell it was important to him, so I agreed.
I sat on his bed and flipped through the pages. He’d written about what he was going through, about his terrible thoughts and how he wondered if he would ever be normal again. He knew he had to try to get better for his family, he wrote; he would do anything for me and his dad and his sister. He was getting better, he said, and he was looking forward to the future, to going back to school. It was all there in his familiar, confident handwriting.
I was still reading his journal when he came into the room. “See, Mom? I’m getting better. Let Dad and me stay here together. I think it will be good for you to go on your business trip. You’ll call, and we can talk.”
I wrestled with it but then decided it would be a good chance for Kerry and Kelty to bond even more. Kerry agreed. I realize now that Kelty’s intuitiveness was on high alert. Having me read his journal, he knew, would help calm my fear.
Once away, I phoned home every day. Kelty seemed to be having a great time snowboarding with his friends, and that put me somewhat at ease. A few days after I left, on a sparkling Monday morning, Kerry decided to go skiing with the Patersons, friends of ours who were in town. He and Kelty agreed that Kelty would stay behind and study. The agreement with Notre Dame was that as long as Kelty finished his school work for the year, there was a possibility he could still graduate. That meant hitting the books at home.
We later learned that when his dad left for the mountain that morning, Kelty put on his coat and left the house, walking down the block and through the woods to Whistler High School, taking the winding path he had walked so many times with his friends. He spent some time wandering around the school, reconnecting with his friends and teachers, greeting them warmly and chatting about what was going on in his life.
On his way back home he ran into Riley, who was heading to school for the day. He was upset and crying, and it shocked her. “Kelt, what’s wrong?” she asked him, but he simply put his arms around her and said, “Riley, I love you.”
She couldn’t have known it then, but he was saying goodbye.
Riley carried on to school, and Kelty went home. When his dad phoned later that morning to see how he was doing, Kelty assured him he was fine, that he was sitting on the couch studying. An hour or so later, Kerry called again, and the phone rang and rang. When Kelty finally picked it up, he was in tears. “Dad, I love you, I love you.”
He kept saying it over and over, and Kerry knew Kelty was in trouble. He begged him to hold on, said he was coming down the mountain as fast as he could and would be right there. But Kelty just kept saying, “No, dad, I love you, I love you, I love you.”
Kerry phoned 911 and told them to dispatch an ambulance to the house. He asked them not to frighten Kelty with sirens. He skied hard down the mountain, hailed a taxi at the base, and arrived at the house just as the ambulance was pulling up. The paramedics all ran into the house following Kerry, who was bounding up the stairs, calling “Kelt, Kelt, Kelt.” He found our beautiful son limply hanging from the rafters in the loft, a garden hose wrapped around his neck.
They took him down. Kelty was alive but unconscious, and they sped him by ambulance to the Whistler clinic, where it was quickly decided to transport him by helicopter to Royal Columbian Hospital in New Westminster. Kerry had been frantically trying to reach me, and when I returned to my room to get ready for dinner I saw the message light flashing on the phone. I phoned Kerry’s cell.
“Ginny,” he said, “Kelty has had a very bad accident.”
The prickle again. “What do you mean, he’s had an accident?”
“Ginny, he tried to take his life. You need to get home.”
It was as if I was outside my body, listening in on someone else’s conversation. It couldn’t be real. My mind was racing, and I suddenly remembered how earlier in the day when I was lying outside by the pool, I had felt a sudden jolt. I now know that it was Kelty.
I knew I had to get home, but I couldn’t think how I would do that. I called my friend Barb in Toronto’s IBM office and told her what had happened. She arranged a flight for the next morning, then contacted one of our business partners and his wife, who were at the conference. They came and stayed with me through the night. I couldn’t sleep. How could this be? How could this be happening? My beautiful boy. My beautiful boy. A car picked me up at 6 AM and took me to the airport. I had a stopover somewhere but don’t recall where. I was in a fog, anxious to be home but so afraid of what I would find there. When I finally landed in Vancouver, Air Canada quickly ushered me through customs to my sister Cath and her husband, Rick. Cath wrapped her arms around me, her love like a comforting blanket.
We drove directly to Royal Columbian.
I walked into the hospital room, and there was my Kelty, hooked up to tubes and surrounded by machines that were quietly pumping and beeping, breathing for him, keeping him alive. His eyes were closed, and he looked so handsome and peaceful. He had been snowboarding the day before, and his face was sunburned, ruddy and healthy. But when I got closer, I could see the burns around his neck.
Guilt washed over me. I now know that he had planned everything, that he made sure I wouldn’t be there when he chose to end his life. He knew his dad was stronger and could handle it better. He was trying to protect me, even as I was trying to protect him.
Kerry was in the room, and Riley was there with Britt and Britt’s mother, Colleen. I was grateful to know they had been looking after Riley; I was so lost in grief I could barely put one foot in front of the other. Cath and Rick stayed with us at the hospital, and the next day my mom and dad flew back from their vacation in Hawaii to be with us, too.
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The doctors did dozens of tests on Kelty, trying to assess brain damage, but it soon became clear that there was no sign of activity. Kelty was not going to wake up; he was brain dead. I wouldn’t accept it, though, wouldn’t hear of it. Every time the doctors gave us an update, told us there was no hope, I said I knew Kelty was going to pull through. I would pray for him, will him to get better, just like I had done for Riley when she was a baby.
I sat by Kelty’s bedside for hours. I held his hand, stroked his hair and his face, and whispered to him, “Kelts, you can’t leave me. I need you. You are part of me. I can’t imagine my life without you.”
After two days, my dad gently took me aside. “You know, Ginny, Kelty’s gone. The Kelty that we know is gone. You’ve got to let him go.”
I argued with him. “How can you let someone go who is so young and so full of life, someone you love so much? How can you do that?”
“You just have to, Ginny,” Dad said, a sadness in his eyes I had never seen before.
I knew deep in the pit of my stomach that he was right. Somehow, in the fog of grief and disbelief, I had to accept that my beloved Kelty was gone. The hospital counsellor, a lovely woman, sat me down and told me something about suicide that would bring me much comfort in the years ahead.
“Usually,” she said, “people take their lives in the place where they feel they are most loved.”
Kelty had hung himself in my office. He had moved a family photograph of the four of us from a bookshelf in the great room and onto the desk in the office, where he could see it.
I knew we had to let him go. We talked to the medical staff about how Kelty had been such a giving boy and how, if his life had to end, we wanted some good to come from that loss. We had never discussed it, as a family or between mother and son, but I felt intuitively that by donating his organs to those who needed them, Kelty would be giving the ultimate gift. Kerry agreed, and we signed the papers.
They took Kelty off life support on March 2, unplugging all the machines and removing all the tubes that had been keeping his body going. They moved him into a quiet room so that we could be with him, Kerry and Riley and me and his beloved nanny Imelda. We were the ones who loved him most, gathering in sorrow around his bedside to say goodbye.
It was so hard to kiss his cheek and turn away from him and finally walk toward the door, knowing that we would never see our son again; never hear his laugh or catch that twinkle in his eye; never feel his bear hug or the warm sweetness of his breath; never hear him say, as he always did: “Hey, Mom, hey, Dad, what do you think about this?”
A light in the firmament of our family had gone out. We had to keep that light burning, though, and so we decided right there in the hospital that we would fight back against this unforgiving monster that had taken our son’s life and destroyed the lives of thousands of others. We vowed to start a foundation in his name. We didn’t know yet what the foundation would look like or how it would work, but we were so sure about it that we decided to include a note in Kelty’s obituary suggesting that in lieu of flowers we would accept cheques for his new foundation. My friend Barb, once again so helpful, arranged to set up a bank account in Toronto and provide an address for donations. In the face of such unfathomable loss, we were choosing hope.
That night, we gathered as a family at a lovely restaurant in Vancouver’s West End to celebrate Kelty. We did our best to get through it, but we were all in shock, floating through a nightmare from which there was no waking up. Things were made even more difficult when the hospital kept calling and asking us questions about Kelty, information they needed for the organ donation process. I could only hand the phone to Kerry. We would find out later that eight of his organs were used to help others.
The funeral was on March 8, a sunny spring day. Our Lady of the Mountains Catholic Church overflowed with family and friends, dozens upon dozens filing into the pews as James Taylor’s sweet song “You’ve Got a Friend” filled the air. Kerry spoke tenderly of our dear son, of the joy and pride he had brought to our lives and to others. My brother Ted had written a song about Kelty called “He Was Taken,” and he sang it to the congregation, a tender paean to a troubled boy that opened, “The demons came, they came to stay / We couldn’t make them go away.”
The heartbreaking and meaningful tributes from so many brought me a kind of peace. I was grateful to be surrounded by love, by people who mattered to me, like my brothers and sisters, my parents, and my best friend, Clare, who had come out from Winnipeg. Tears and laughter accompanied the many stories and memories of our Kelty shared at the reception that followed. Suddenly, I couldn’t bear to let Riley out of my sight.
Kerry and I had decided to share something very intimate about Kelty’s death: the suicide note he had left behind. Several days before, when the police came to the house to wrap up the details of their investigation, they had returned the note to us. We had made photocopies, then tied each one with a yellow ribbon, and we handed them out as people left the funeral. We released yellow balloons into the air and watched as two glorious white snow geese flew by. From the beginning, we wanted to be open about the deadly disease of depression, which is so often swept under the carpet and stigmatized by society.
Kelty’s note, so achingly mature, said it better than we ever could: “Don’t worry; I will be watching you from the heavens above. Heaven is a better place than earth. I love you Mom, Dad, Rye and family and friends. No research will understand the depression. The depression was in my mind. Peace and I love you all. God Bless. Kelty.”
(4)
The Kelty Patrick
Dennehy Foundation
IN THE WEEKS after Kelty’s funeral, Kerry and Riley and I struggled to carry on. Loss and grief clouded every moment. People told us that time would help, that the pain would gradually ease, the sun would come out again, and the bad memories would fade while the good memories grew stronger. Intellectually, I knew that was probably true. But it was hard for me to see beyond the present, the next agonizing minute in front of me.
It was hard, too, for those around us. Many people weren’t sure what to do or say when they ran into me at the grocery store or out walking. Should they hug me, offer condolences, or refrain from saying anything for fear that I would fall apart? But everyone was so kind. People brought us food and offered to help with anything we needed. Family and friends descended on the house, gathering in a tight protective net as we woke up every day to face life without Kelty.
My side of the family was also dealing with another loss: my brother Rob, who had battled his own demons and illnesses, had died during the week of Kelty’s funeral. I was too numbed by grief over Kelty to be much of a comfort to my mom and dad, but it must have been terrible for them to lose a son and grandson within days of each other.
A group of my Whistler girlfriends would arrive at my front door every morning. I had taken time off work on short-term disability, but my friends didn’t think it was healthy for me to be inside the house all day, so they would arrive in a pack of chattering friendliness, tell me to get dressed and put on my walking shoes, and then off we’d go for a brisk jaunt around the golf course or the lake. Jane Clifford was among them; she was the mother of Tom, who was dating Riley at the time, and she was very supportive of Riley in the early days after her brother’s death. Others were the moms of Kelty’s friends. Some of them I didn’t know that well because I was always working or away on business. But their support was amazing, and it was a natural therapy that helped me heal.
Some days, though, I just couldn’t get out of bed. It was late spring, and all of Kelty’s friends were graduating and getting ready for university. Although I wanted the other mothers to be excited about their children heading off to school and I understood why they wanted to talk about it, sometimes I just couldn’t listen. Kelty would never go to Bishop’s, would never become the lawyer he had dreamed of being. The pain of that reality was like a stab in my heart. I came to know my limits when the social conver
sation turned to children and the future, and I would respectfully absent myself.
Kerry found comfort in his religion, and he began going to church again. I was glad for that. I went with him sometimes but stopped when I could no longer listen to the priest talking about God being good. I didn’t believe that a good God would have taken Kelty, treated our family so harshly.
The grieving process was much different for Riley. She was only fifteen, and as much as we tried to console her, there was no explaining Kelty’s death in a way that made sense. Riley had always been a quiet girl, the kind who would sit back and consider her choices before making a move. Now she retreated even farther into herself. She wouldn’t talk to us about Kelty’s death, and she rejected outright our urging that she see a counsellor. I was grateful that she spent a lot of time with her best friend, Britt. I knew they talked about everything, and that made me feel better. But I was still worried. Worried about how she was doing, and worried that something would happen to her, too.
Shortly after the funeral, Kerry and I had taken Riley on a trip to Hawaii to get her away from the raw reality of her brother’s death. We rented a one-bedroom condo in Kauai and spent a week there. It was so gorgeous and calming. Riley and I slept together because we wanted to be close, while Kerry slept on the couch. I was finally able to get some rest, even though I couldn’t stop thinking about Kelty. The first night there I had a dream that was so crystal clear I can still recall every detail. I was sitting at a bar and Kelty was standing at the other end, looking strapping and handsome and charming. He said, “Mom, I’m okay. Don’t worry. I’m okay.” It was so real that I felt like I could reach out and touch him. But when I opened my eyes, he was gone.
Hawaii, with its sunshine and fresh air, so far away from home, was good for us. We spent a lot of time on the beach and in the water. Even so, Kelty’s death hung in the air like a heavy curtain, and we had to take things a day at a time. On one foray into a jewellery store, I bought whale tail necklaces for all my girlfriends to thank them for their support. Riley and I each bought a cross on a chain, our way of remembering Kelty.
Choosing Hope Page 6