Changing My Mind

by Margaret Trudeau

  Meeting Mary, Fried’s mother, for the first time, I had discovered how completely inadequate I was as a housekeeper. She taught me how to keep house, to become organized. As a family, the Kempers excelled in celebrations—every birth, every occasion, every season—and Mary took immense pleasure in thinking up perfect presents and making cards out of pressed flowers to go with them. On Friday nights, the men came from the city, bringing steaks and beers with them. We had barbecues and bonfires. Fried’s father had an accordion; every member of the family played a different musical instrument, and at night they played and we all sang. We picnicked, kayaked and canoed. By the age of two, Kyle was an excellent swimmer.

  Then, on Monday mornings, the men would leave again, the boys would go back to Pierre—if it was still school time—and the women and small children would stay on at the lake, the little cousins running backwards and forwards along the tracks between the houses. Sometimes we packed lunch and took off for the day across the lakes, moving from one to the next through the locks. We would anchor the Bayliner underneath the cliffs from which the children could jump into the deep, clear water. Fried used to grumble that I kept hitting the shoals. The plastic kayak was more suited to me.

  I was a keen gardener, and grew strong by planting out vegetables and flowers and moving boulders. Fried’s father kept praising me, telling me how impressed he was by the energy I put into doing everything well. I revelled in his admiration, and I realized that no one had ever really told me that I did anything well.

  In the winter, when the snow came, we spent our weekends up at the chalet, and there the boys would join us after school. Sometimes Pierre came with them and we all skied together; I had once been better than all of them, and now I struggled to keep up. Pierre and Fried got on well, and Pierre was extremely generous at sharing the boys and making everything as easy as possible for us.

  When Kyle was two, Fried taught him to ski by snowplowing down the slopes, pulling the little boy on a leash. Occasionally we took all the children away somewhere hot for a holiday. Fried’s business was flourishing and we seemed to have enough money for everything. We were a little team: Fried and I and the four boys. I felt that I had been given a second chance at life and I was determined to take and enjoy it. There were no more bouts of mania, and the days of medication were over. I had found balance, one that was natural, not drug induced. Life with Fried was so good, and I was eating well, living well, playing well and loving well.

  I weathered even potential disasters without too much fuss. One day, when Kyle and my niece Jamie were two, I was out at the cottage on my own with the boys. We were all in the water, all of us naked, when I noticed that a tree not far from the house was on fire. I put the babies somewhere safe and rushed up, still naked, to the house.

  By sheer good luck, I had insisted that one of the first things we put in when we built the house was a hose on the deck—not to put out any fires but to water my plants. There was no phone to call the fire department. What had happened was this: a friend who had stayed the night before had flipped the butt of his cigarette onto the ground, which was as dry as tinder and rich in decaying pine needles, leaves and twigs. The butt had smouldered, become red hot, and then set fire to the peat, the fire travelling along the roots and then spreading to the dry wood. I trained the hose onto the flames, then realized that I had to soak the peat as well, because the fire continued underground and little fires kept bursting through here and there. The experience was terrifying, and it was an absolute miracle that the house did not catch on fire, but no serious damage was done.

  On February 2, 1989, Groundhog Day, I gave birth to a baby girl. Such a blessing, finally, to get my little girl. I had always longed for a daughter, and with each son had felt a pang of sadness. We called her Alicia, after the older boys protested that our chosen name—Mary Rose—was taken. The boys had studied British history, and they knew that in the sixteenth century, Henry VIII’s favourite warship was one called the Mary Rose.

  I kept Alicia with me in my arms almost every second, terrified that she might get sudden infant death syndrome and that I would lose her. She never cried. She was a sweet, easy baby, with a lot of her father and her grandfather in her, a tidy, well-organized child, who was soon swimming and skiing with her brothers. Like them, she was fearless, and when we went skiing I had to watch her, for she was prone to fly off down the slopes, wild and carefree.

  During the hot summer months, my five children lived in the lake, spending all day in or on the water—water-skiing, canoeing, wakeboarding. Fried was a wonderful cook and I woke each morning to the smell of bacon sizzling on the grill. His sister Tini and his brother Michael’s wife, Lynda, had become like sisters to me. On July 1, Canada Day, we lit fireworks and had a gigantic pig roast. Because the edges of the lake were marshy, we had brought in loads of sand to create a beach, and here, summer after summer, we lived. I could hardly believe my own happiness.

  CHAPTER 9

  SLIPPING

  My mind was fizzing, racing, jumping from thought to thought, scheme to scheme, idea to idea. I felt as if I had a thousand-volt charge surging through my head … I had been here before.

  VANCOUVER, 1998

  A book I cherish is Katherine Ashenburg’s Mourner’s Dance: What We Do When People Die, published in 2004. This is a scholarly book on mourning traditions through the ages and one written by an author with a personal stake in understanding the process: when her daughter’s fiancé died, everyone in that young man’s circle, including Katherine, scrambled to cope.

  What Ashenburg found is that we have become detached from death, unlike our ancestors, who embraced it. Time was that families stayed with the dead from time of death to time of burial, they photographed the dead with the living, and families took responsibility for cleansing and clothing the body in preparation for the funeral.

  During my early forties, a number of deaths and other misfortunes rocked my life, and whatever equilibrium I thought I possessed soon vanished. Anyone who has owned and loved dogs knows how the death of a dog feels, how losing a cherished pet is like losing a member of the family. I have had six dogs in my life and I know the sorrow all too well. But in 1991, the death of our dog felt like a dark metaphor for a life spinning out of control.

  In 1990, we had bought a Labrador puppy for the children. Raven, as we called her, was fourteen months old—a charming, jet-black dog with a sweet nature. We all doted on her.

  That summer was intensely hot. One muggy day in August, we were up at the lake and I had returned from shopping with the children and began to unload the car—we had a Ford Explorer and I was unloading from the back hatch. Raven had come with us, of course, and she got out of the car when we got out.

  After carrying the parcels into the house, I called for the dog. When she didn’t appear, I assumed that she had done what she often did during periods of great heat: wriggled under the raised part of the house, where it was always cool. I shut up the car and Justin and I took the younger children off in the boat to swim.

  We got back an hour or so later and were surprised when Raven failed to greet us. We called and searched. Then I went over to the car. There she was, lying on the back seat, dead, having suffocated in the awful heat. Unbeknown to me, while the hatch was open during the unloading of groceries, Raven had crawled back into the car and under the seat, drawn to the coolness that the air conditioning had offered, and fallen asleep.

  I loved that dog so much, and Kyle, then six, was especially heartbroken. My grief at this death was out of all proportion. I cried and cried. This was just one loss during a time in my life that felt defined and framed by loss—acute, unbearable loss. I had suffered from postpartum depression after Ally (as I called Alicia) was born, but the black dogs of despair had just begun to hound me.

  Not long after Ally’s birth in 1989, Fried began to have financial problems. The business his father had started had grown rapidly and enjoyed some extremely successful years, but now, with the
recession that hit North America in the early 1990s, everything to do with building and housing began to suffer. Fried had moved too quickly in expanding his office, and he had made a few mistakes with his investments.

  At first he said little about it, wanting to protect me. And because I was so engrossed in the family and in bringing up the two small children, I didn’t really take it all in. I had an uneasy feeling that we were communicating less and less, but I didn’t press him. All he would say when I asked him was that there was less money but that he could still provide for us in the same way.

  When the recession deepened, Fried announced to me that there was no choice for us now but to make some cutbacks in our lives. The first thing to go was the ski chalet at Mont Tremblant. Then the holiday trips were given up. We weren’t alone, of course; all around us, friends were striving for the same kind of savings. And we still had my house on Victoria Street in Ottawa, and the cottage on Newboro Lake. But the markets kept tumbling and Fried was forced to sell his main company. Then he went into bankruptcy.

  I had first starting smoking marijuana in the 1960s, and it had always had a wonderful effect on me. Cannabis relaxed me, made me stop worrying and also seemed to help me concentrate better. In my moments of greatest frenzy, a joint was the only thing that somewhat calmed my racing mind.

  With some of my friends, marijuana acted as a soporific. They would sit for contented hours staring at the wall, but the drug had always energized me. I really loved the way it opened up a huge world for me, allowing me to experience sights and smells and sounds that I had never known existed. Marijuana seemed to put me exactly where I wanted to be—somewhere safe and happy, with the past somehow dealt with and the future optimistic.

  I smoked not to escape but for pleasure. And though I felt a great sense of loss whenever my stash got low, I didn’t really see myself as dependent. I told myself that dope never prevented me from functioning, only enabled me to live more decisively, in the moment, perceiving the good things, forgetting the bad. But there, of course, lay the rub. I forgot not only the bad things but much else besides—my chores, the bills to pay, the meals to cook. Later, as the children grew up, I used to say to them, “Smoke pot for fun, but it will never let you get ahead. All ambition will be driven away.”

  While married to Pierre, I had had little opportunity of obtaining marijuana. The occasional joints I smoked, and the occasional experiments with mushrooms, had been few and far between. The cocaine I had tried while on my benders in New York had left me convinced that it was not the drug for me; I had seen too many friends destroyed by it. Cocaine is the master thief: it steals everything, including your life. But with marijuana, which I now smoked whenever I wanted, in spite of Fried’s disapproval, I felt safe. Too safe, as it turned out.

  One morning, as I was leaving to drive Kyle to nursery school, I bumped into our local postman, who told me that a parcel had arrived for me and that there seemed to be quite a fuss about it at the post office. My first thought was that it must be something from my mother in Vancouver. But when the postman delivered it next morning, I saw that it had no address or name of sender. I unpacked it, and inside—as I soon discovered—was the most wonderful marijuana.

  With great delight, I hid this great gift away in a cupboard upstairs and threw the packaging into the garbage. That afternoon, returning from collecting Kyle from nursery school, I found two police cars waiting outside my house. As I put the key in the lock, several policemen surrounded me. I was, they told me, under arrest for possession of drugs. I was clutching Kyle in my arms and felt so terrified that I wet my pants.

  A friend of a friend had sent the marijuana to me anonymously. But this other person had let slip in a public place details of the delivery and the RCMP had caught wind of it. They informed our local police, and the packet had been detected by police dogs that had picked up the unmistakable scent of the marijuana.

  When I had unwrapped the package, I had noticed that it had been curiously marked—by what I now realized were the dog’s teeth. To my considerable embarrassment, I was informed that I would have to appear in court. I was fingerprinted and photographed.

  In the event, we got an excellent lawyer and I was let off with a stay; my lawyer pleaded a defence of entrapment. If ever caught again, I was told, there would be serious trouble. Just the same, the press, which had had nothing scandalous to say about me for several years, now had a field day. Even so, I managed to make light of it all, telling myself that everyone gets busted at some point; I went off to a friend’s chalet and talked it over with friends who managed to make me feel better.

  Bob Dylan had written, “Everybody must get stoned.” Ergo, I reasoned, everyone, at one time or another, must get busted. The whole episode seemed to me more absurd than worrying.

  Around this time, a very close friend, Mary-Jean Green, was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her mother, Mary Mitchell, an eccentric, clever, talented Scotswoman, had been a wonderful friend and mentor to me. Mary-Jean’s father, Sir Harold Mitchell, had been in Winston Churchill’s war cabinet and had married Mary while she was in the Women’s Army Corps.

  Mary Mitchell and I had first met when Pierre and I took Justin, then a tiny baby, for a holiday to Jamaica. Two days before setting out, the Jamaican high commissioner had come to 24 Sussex to ask whether there was anything that could be done for us by way of preparation. I told him that it would be lovely to find a girl who could look after Justin while we had dinner.

  The high commissioner looked appalled. “You’re taking the baby?” he asked. The Jamaica Inn, where we were booked to stay, did not allow babies. However, his good friends, the Mitchells, had a guest house on the beach, an old fort that they had redecorated and made charming and that they now offered to us. I loved Mary from the moment I met her and remained close to her right up until she died, many years later.

  Mary-Jean, her only child, had learned Japanese so she could communicate with business people in Japan, and after the death of her father she had run a multi-million-dollar international coal corporation. She and I had had our children at the same time and spent many happy hours raising them together. Mary-Jean and her husband, Peter, were among our closest friends. She was generous and considerate and never talked about her own problems.

  Mary-Jean was thirty-eight when she first heard about the cancer, and she fought it with everything her strong character and considerable fortune permitted. She had always been very health conscious and constantly made me feel guilty about my eating habits and lifestyle.

  She tried every new treatment, visited every clinic, travelled to places where she had heard of new cures. One thing I really minded was that our financial troubles prohibited me from going with her.

  I could comfort her only with this: some years earlier, I had persuaded her not to send her boys, Alexander and Andrew, then aged five and six, to prep school in England. I convinced her to keep the boys with her in Bermuda, where they went to school on a nearby island. What this meant was that her boys were with her in her last two years. Mary-Jean was younger than me but she was a very close friend and had a huge impact on my life. Now she was gone.

  Two years later, Mary’s turn came. She had bought a house in Boston to be near her grandchildren, and Fried and I often used to visit her. One day she said to me, “I have a little problem in my chest.” She was coughing and coughing. “Chest,” it seemed, meant “breast.” Soon after, she was dead. I bitterly mourned this very dear friend. She was such a cosmopolitan person, very liberated and suffused with extraordinary spirit.

  My losses were now mounting. Not long before Mary-Jean died, I had been at home one afternoon with Ally when Heather Gillin, another close friend, bicycled over to see me. She told me she had terrible news: she was dying. She, too, had cancer. When she left, I was so angry and upset that I kicked a tree. I thought I had broken my toes.

  Heather wanted no visitors and I never saw her again, though we talked often on the phone. One day, I was up at the c
ottage and I went into town to get a newspaper. There I found a notice of Heather’s death. The funeral was that same day, and it was too late for me to get to it. I began to feel that I was never there at the right time for the people I loved.

  Fried worried constantly that I might get pregnant. I was in my early forties but had always conceived very easily. Given our financial problems, and the fact that we already had two children of our own, Fried was adamant that we should have no more. His idea at first was to have a vasectomy, but something in him balked at the prospect and he found he couldn’t go through with it. I, too, resisted the idea of taking steps to eliminate any possibility of conceiving. I was not seriously thinking of having another child, but the idea of making it impossible appalled me. Being a mother had been the essence, the best part of me, the most fulfilled part, perhaps because I felt so very unfulfilled at everything else. Being pregnant had been the happiest times of my life.

  Then fate intervened—twice—to make my decision for me. One day I found myself pregnant, and I was overwhelmed with happiness. But when I made an appointment to see the doctor, he informed me that the placenta—the organ that connects the developing fetus to the uterine wall—had not attached properly. Next day, I had to have a dilation and curettage procedure. That afternoon, when I let myself into the house, the phone was ringing. Justin was calling to tell me that Mary-Jean was dead.

  I felt completely devastated: I had not even been with her, and I had given her no support and friendship at the end. I couldn’t stop myself thinking that while her life had been vanishing, so had all thoughts of another new life growing inside me. Two terrible events had occurred at the same time, and something strange was beginning to happen to my mind. A bleakness was starting to consume me, as if the golden years were over and we were no longer the happy family we had been. I began to slip.