Choosing Hope

by Ginny Dennehy

  One afternoon, Riley and I were sitting on the verandah outside our condo while Kerry snorkelled just offshore. I could hear the people next door talking about spotting sharks in the water nearby, and suddenly I was panic-stricken. All I could think was, “Oh, my God. I just lost my son, and now my husband is going to be eaten by a shark.” It was as if there would be no more in-between for me—I had experienced the worst and now, in a way, I expected it.

  Once we got home, I wanted to know, needed to know, where Riley was all the time. If she wanted anything, I bought it for her. Expensive jeans? Sure. A new jacket? Okay. Her father had always watched our family finances carefully, and while Riley was walking around in $150 jeans, Kerry would be sporting a pair of $30 Levis from the Army & Navy. Riley and I chuckled about it, waiting outside in the car while Kerry was in a store checking out the bargains.

  Riley had been something of a tomboy growing up, with short hair and baggy clothes, but as a teenager she was increasingly conscious of how she looked. She liked nice clothes, and she even modelled briefly—one job had her bungee jumping with a “groom” in a mock wedding ceremony. She was constantly fussing with the colour of her hair, lightening up her natural ash blond and going crazy with the streaks. She wore coloured contacts to make her eyes bluer. It was hard on my bank balance, and I know now that my indulgence with material things was part of my guilt and pain over losing Kelty. Riley wasn’t the best driver, and she managed to smash my car up a few times, which didn’t make Kerry happy. He thought I was spoiling her too much. But I just didn’t care.

  After Hawaii, I had to face Kelty’s room. And not just his room, with his clothes and all his things, but the little pieces of him that could be found in every corner of the house: photographs, notes, his favourite cereal, the chair he always sat in, his hockey gear and snowboard, the movies on the shelf that he would make us watch over and over, the CDs that used to blare from the sports room. Several weeks after he died, Notre Dame shipped his clothing and school items to us. When I opened the first box and found a pile of Valentine’s Day cards that he had received from his school friends, I closed it right back up and didn’t open it again for the next ten years.

  The Notre Dame Grade 12 Spirit of Strength annual, dedicated to “the memory of our dear friend, roommate, teammate and fellow Hound Kelty,” was hard to thumb through, with the photographs of his classmates and friends and the snapshot of a sharply dressed Kelty and his friends at the winter formal, all of them so full of promise. Noah, one of his best friends at Notre Dame, wrote a graduation blurb that said: “Kelty, you were and are the best friend I’ll ever have. I’ll cherish your memory forever. Being around you made me happy to be alive and the impact you’ve had on my life is immeasurable. Peace out, Dr. D.” Neal, his other good Notre Dame buddy, was no less heartfelt: “Kelty was a person who came and left, but will never be truly gone. He will live forever in my mind and in my heart and that is where I will always hold his memory closest.”

  I couldn’t leave Kelty’s room like it was, as if he might just wander in and throw his jacket on the bed. I put some of his clothes in the bottom drawer of the dresser, though I didn’t touch the closet. I moved some of the furniture, as well, but I didn’t want to change the room too much; it was the place I would go to be close to Kelty, sitting on the window seat and feeling his presence. I kept some of his school essays on religion, and reading them helped me to understand that Catholicism had been his friend toward the end.

  One day I decided to commission a family portrait by Kelowna artist Rod Charlesworth, whose work I had long admired. His paintings were colourful and happy. I provided photos of Kelty in his Notre Dame Hounds jersey, Kerry in his Hollyburn senior men’s hockey jersey, and Riley in her Whistler Winterhawks hockey jersey, saying simply that these were the three most significant people in my life. The finished painting, which Rod titled He Shoots, He Scores, depicts Kerry and Kelty exuberantly playing hockey on a frozen pond. Kelty, clad in his red Notre Dame uniform, is scoring a goal against Kerry, who is kneeling in an attempt to stop the shot in his green and white hockey gear. In the background are snow-covered cottages, and at the pond’s edge a woman in a purple coat is watching, a small dog at her side. In the painting’s foreground, on the opposite edge of the pond, a jersey-clad child is brandishing her own hockey stick. I hadn’t mentioned to Rod that I wanted to be in the painting, but there we all were, the four of us together again. The portrait was better than I could have dreamed, and today it is the first thing you see when you walk into Kelty’s room. Later, we would turn it into a note card used by the Kelty Patrick Dennehy Foundation.

  That June, I fulfilled a promise I had made to my son: I went to his graduation. Kelty had always teased that I’d be away on a business trip at graduation time. We would laugh about it, and I would assure him that I’d be in the front row, wearing a new outfit.

  So there I was, with Kerry and Riley by my side, in a brand new outfit, sitting in the front row at Notre Dame College as Kelty’s classmates received their diplomas. There was a photo tribute to Kelty, and that seemed to bring him alive again, if only for a few hours. The school welcomed us with open arms, and at the celebratory dinner we were seated at the headmaster’s table. Before we left, I gave each of his friends a photograph of Kelty wearing his Hounds jersey.

  I learned in those first few months after Kelty’s death that the grieving process was just that: a process. We all handle profound loss differently, and there is no right way to grieve, despite what some experts say. Sometimes I would be sad while Kerry was fine. Other times I would be feeling okay, but Kerry was blue. We talked constantly about what had happened and how we felt. We didn’t blame each other; it was more that each of us blamed ourselves, me for going away, Kerry for going skiing. We know now that it was normal to feel that way. And we weren’t angry—at Kelty or anyone else. We could not have loved our son any more than we did, and Kelty had known that, too. However, the chemicals that alter our brains are more powerful than all the love in the world, and Kelty couldn’t help what had happened to him. Now Kerry and I needed to find a way to go on, for Kelty, for each other, and for our daughter.

  I admit that at first I didn’t want to. I wanted to die so that I would be with Kelty. I thought Kerry and Riley would be better off without me, a wife and mother so immersed in grief that nothing else seemed to register. I didn’t understand at the time that this was part of my own depression. Like Kelty, I couldn’t see past it. One day I went out to our garage, determined to get in the car, turn on the exhaust, and kill myself. But as I sat there in the front seat, it was as if a light switched on in my head. I knew I couldn’t do it, that it wouldn’t be fair to Kerry and Riley, to our family and friends. I had to dig deeper, try harder to cope, be stronger for them. I got out of the car and went back in the house.

  When I talked to Kerry about it afterward, he was devastated and scared. After he confided in Sue Dowler, Kelty’s godmother, Sue insisted that I come to stay with her in California. She took me to a counsellor, and she and I went shopping and ate too many French fries while we talked and talked. It was good for me.

  Once I got home, Kerry and I decided to renovate the kids’ area downstairs. We installed an en suite bathroom in Riley’s room, and she loved having a bathroom of her own, but it must have been hard living down there without her brother. She had never liked being alone. When we first moved into the house, she had hated being downstairs, even with Kelty nearby. She’d come up into our room at night, carrying her favourite blankets, and make a little bed on the floor of our room so that she could fall asleep close to us. She’d eventually grown out of it and come to appreciate her own space. Now, though, she had to walk by Kelty’s quiet, empty room every day.

  About six months after Kelty’s death, and just after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York City, I had to go to Vancouver for a psychiatric assessment related to my disability claim. I had been taking antidepressants, which were helping, but the doctor the c
ompany made me see started asking questions clearly designed to make me feel guilty about losing my son, as if it was my fault. I was a wreck afterward and could hardly drive home. I decided to go off the antidepressants because I’d heard that when you stop taking them, you just go through the grieving process all over again. I couldn’t face that. My family doctor agreed and began weaning me off them.

  Kelty had been cremated, his treasured Todeye teddy bear beside him, and we divided the ashes among three meaningful locations. We scattered some on the golf course greenery right in front of our house. At Lake George, a fishing camp in northern Manitoba where Kerry and the kids often spent time in the summer, we took a boat out into the middle of the lake and let some of Kelty’s ashes drift away gently on the wind. It seemed natural that he was now part of a place he had so loved. And then, on a fall day, we buried the rest of his ashes in a small urn in our family plot at the Whistler cemetery, where the air is still but for the chirping of birds and moss covers the trees. Afterward, Kerry had a surprise for Riley and me: he had arranged for us to go on an ATV tour of Whistler Mountain. It was absolutely the best way to celebrate Kelty. One of our most precious photographs was taken that day, the three of us wearing bright yellow rain slickers, our faces sunburned, wheeling free through the Whistler wilderness. We would have the picture made into a Christmas card that we sent out that year, with an inscription that read in part: We each, at our own pace, continue our journey of healing. It is the support and love from all of you, our family and friends, that have helped so much on this continued journey. Kerry, Riley and I want to wish you and your families a very Merry Christmas and may the year 2002 be one of peace and happiness for all.

  THERE ARE MANY groups for those who want to talk about how suicide has affected their lives, many places to go for parents looking for others who understand what they’re going through. That kind of informal therapy helps many people, but I knew it wasn’t for me. I didn’t want to share my feelings about Kelty’s suicide; I wanted to discuss the reasons for it. I wanted to talk about why suicide happens, why no one thinks of depression as a disease, why there isn’t more general knowledge about indicators and prevention. I wanted everyone to know that depression is the killer you can’t see, that it has no boundaries. It’s about falling into an invisible abyss from which there seems no way out.

  From the beginning, the goal of the Kelty Patrick Dennehy Foundation was to raise money to help prevent depression-related suicide among youth. Beyond that, we didn’t really know what things would look like. Don Jordan, a lawyer who is one of our good friends, guided us through legalities such as registering the foundation as a non-profit charity. We needed a board and members to sit on it, so Kerry and I convened a meeting that summer in the family cabin in Winnipeg, with a big group of friends and family who knew we were on a mission and wanted to help. It was an impressive bunch, representing years of business expertise and ideas about the work ahead. We decided on a mandate and fine-tuned our mission statement: the Kelty Patrick Dennehy Foundation would raise funds for care, education, and research into youth depression-related suicide.

  It was an ambitious credo, and the discussion went on for hours. We decided to form specific committees, with people volunteering to work on areas relevant to their own experience—fundraising, marketing, and so on—but the truth is we were all rather naïve about the process. We decided that Kerry would be president and I would be secretary. Others were board members with specific duties, such as treasurer and directors. We also decided to start an offshoot we called the Kelty Circle. That would allow people who wanted to give more financially a way to do that. To become a guardian of the Kelty Circle, members would commit $10,000 a year for three years. Kerry and I became members, as did many of our friends and associates. Over the years, the Kelty Circle would become an integral part of the foundation’s endowment funding.

  It was August 2001. The Kelty Patrick Dennehy Foundation was up and running, though we had no idea how successful it would become.

  Soon after Kerry and I returned to Whistler, a friend who had heard about our fledgling foundation gave us a call. Rod Cochrane was the general manager at Nicklaus North Golf Course. Kelty had worked at the golf course, so Rod knew us and he knew about Kelty. He suggested we hold a fundraising golf tournament for the foundation in September 2002. He had already given it a lot of thought. It would be a quality weekend event, he said, with a banquet, golfing, first-class auctions, and plenty of marketing to get the word out. We agreed that it was a great idea, so we got to work, putting together a golf committee and assigning everyone jobs. It seemed that everyone we knew got on board. Over the next eleven months, local businesses donated goods and services for the silent and live auctions—wonderful things like trips to Mexico and Maui and Bermuda, as well as golf clubs, art, jewellery, and electronics.

  We dubbed the tournament Drive Fore Life. In our inaugural year, we attracted three hundred people, each of whom paid $100 for dinner or $500 if they were signed up for the whole weekend. Dozens of locals were there, as were friends and family from Vancouver and Winnipeg. It was a rousing success. We raised $125,000, which we immediately invested to start a foundation nest egg we hoped would grow over the years.

  We shifted the tournament to the Fairmont Chateau Whistler Golf Club the second year, following Rod, who had changed jobs. Over the years to come, we worked with a number of general managers at the Fairmont, and each was wonderful. Drive Fore Life, which we also called A Weekend to Remember, would always begin with a Friday night blowout at Buffalo Bills in Whistler, with live music by Don Jordan’s band, a group of rocking baby boomers who called themselves Fabulous George and the Zodiacs. Saturday was the dinner, a full-dress affair that included a fantastic meal, an emotional tribute to Kelty, lots of lively music, and several speeches. Kerry usually said a few words, and we made sure to acknowledge those whose work was helping the foundation to spread the word about depression and suicide. One year, Ali Milner, a talented young Whistler singer who would appear in 2011 on the CBC reality show Cover Me Canada, wrote a song for Kelty titled “My Beautiful Boy” and sang it at the dinner. The weekend wrapped up on Sunday with a rousing round of golf. Kelty’s friends were recruited as caddies for each foursome on the course, and Riley and her friends signed on as volunteers. All of them wore bright red Kelty Patrick Dennehy Foundation bibs. It became a huge annual event for Whistler.

  The foundation’s first year was a busy one. Several local mental health organizations wanted to talk to us about what they did and how they might approach us for specific funding. We were invited to lots of events, giving speech after speech about our story and outlining the goals and aspirations of the foundation. Kerry took the lead on the public speaking at first.

  In 2002, I met Sue Carruthers, the new CEO of the B.C. Children’s Hospital Foundation. The hospital was raising money for a new mental health centre to be opened in the renovated four-storey Jean Matheson Memorial Pavilion. When she and some of her employees took our board on a tour of the hospital’s existing mental health facilities, we were shocked. There were programs spread over different floors of the hospital instead of one dedicated area where people could find the treatment and resources they needed. It was pathetic. There were even offices in broom closets. This new mental health centre was badly needed.

  Our family already had a strong connection to Children’s, having spent so many days there when Riley was a child. As far as I was concerned, they had saved Riley’s life on our first visit. Now we had a chance to give back for Kelty and for our daughter, who had grown into a healthy, vibrant young woman.

  Kerry agreed our foundation should become involved in the new mental health centre, but it was a bit of a challenge to get everyone on the board onside. The problem was that the new centre wasn’t focussed just on depression—it would also be addressing issues such as eating disorders, attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, and schizophrenia. Some board members felt that by joining forces with s
uch a wide-ranging initiative, our cause would be diluted. However, I argued that depression is often the common denominator in mental illnesses, especially in adolescents. The board finally agreed, and suddenly our little foundation had entered the big time.

  We had high hopes that the new mental health centre might be named after Kelty, but we soon discovered that naming rights of that magnitude would require a $10-million donation. That was a bit rich for our foundation’s means. We also learned that the centre needed a significant private donation to get things started, and that quickly became our goal. We committed to raising $1 million, and over the next four years we did that through the Kelty Circle and the golf tournaments. When we handed over the cheque, the hospital foundation told us our donation was the turning point in the provincial government’s decision to provide funding for the centre. The Kelty Patrick Dennehy Foundation would go on to be the top private contributor to the B.C. Children’s Hospital mental health centre.

  The hospital’s official fundraising campaign was launched in October 2004, and by spring 2005 construction on the building had begun. The centre opened officially on January 29, 2007, nearly six years after we had lost Kelty. There was a wing dedicated to our son, with a plaque at the entrance and his photograph. On the day of the dedication, we toured the wing, and then Kerry and Riley and I had our picture taken at the site. We were there for the formal ceremonies, too, gladly sitting through speeches by dignitaries, hospital officials, and politicians. They had asked me to speak, too, and I did, about how important it is to talk openly about mental illness. It was a proud moment for the foundation and for our family.