I ate less and less, and began to spend as much of the day and night as I could in bed. I stopped begging for release: I no longer cared what became of me.
Seeing my new tranquility, the young doctor decided that it would now be safe for me to go home. I had been in hospital for two and a half months; it was May 1998 when I was allowed out. I could have left before, but leaving against medical advice would have adversely impacted both my therapy and my relationship with my family.
One of my sisters, Jan, came to collect me, and flew with me back to Ottawa. I felt defeated and very small, but my reunion with Kyle and Ally filled me with delight. Still only thirteen and nine years of age, respectively, they had found my absence confusing; trying to reassure them was now my priority. The older boys, though worried, were now away pursuing their own lives. Justin was studying for his teaching degree at the University of British Columbia, Sacha was away travelling in Africa and Michel was in Rossland. When he saw me, Fried—understandably upset by my vindictive, accusatory letters—was cool.
In order to be released, I had had to undertake to check in, as an outpatient, at our local hospital in Ottawa. I was extremely fortunate not only in the hospital, Queensway Carleton, which was everything that a psychiatric hospital should be, but in the psychiatrist who took my case. The contrast with St. Paul’s in Vancouver was overwhelming. But something else had changed, too: I was more accepting of the notion of treatment, more ready and willing.
Dr. Mary Brown was not only an excellent doctor but an extremely nice woman. The first morning, as I was sitting in her office answering questions, she suddenly stood up and came over to me. “Margaret, come here and stand in the light, where I can see you properly.” I followed her over to the window. She looked at my skin and pulled back my eyelids, which were bright yellow. I had developed jaundice from unmonitored doses of Epival, the substitute I had been given for lithium.
I am hypersensitive to medication, and often need a small fraction of what others are routinely prescribed. I am, unfortunately, also one of those people whose liver function is affected by Epival (valproic acid), and none of the normal tests—on blood cells, liver and clotting time—had actually been done. Tests were now rapidly done and I was informed that I had lost 80 per cent of my liver function and that I would have to stay in hospital for at least three weeks in hopes of getting it back. Doctors at the Vancouver hospital had to have known that Epival may compromise liver function, but the appropriate tests were never taken. I was furious when I found out and months later tried to see that young psychiatrist—who refused to see me.
Seeing how fragile I was, Dr. Brown very gently urged me to stay on the psychiatric ward and not in the ward with people suffering from liver disease, many of them dying. This was the right decision. The psychiatric ward was full of light and gave onto a garden with picnic tables under the trees. Patients were encouraged to take walks outside the hospital grounds. The common room, in sharp contrast to St. Paul’s, offered all kinds of activities and hobbies. But if I was tempted to think that this was a happy place, I got my reality check. Not long after I entered the hospital, a friend sent me twenty-four roses in a cut-glass vase made by Lalique, the French crystal manufacturer. Wanting to share them with the other patients, I put them in the common room. Soon after, a young girl found the opportunity to smash the vase and cut her wrists before being rescued by staff.
One of the worst aspects of my jaundice was the unbearable itching. Every inch of my skin throbbed and tickled. I was put into baths of oatmeal, where I spent much of my days. At night I was given gloves to stop myself scratching in my sleep. Slowly, my liver function returned. I was put on a strict diet, with lots of water and fresh vegetables. I was fortunate: I recovered fast and suffered no lasting damage.
While these treatments continued, Dr. Brown talked to me about my mental state. She tried various medications until she was satisfied that she had found one that suited me. My bouts of mania alternating with depression were, she told me, a clear indication that I was suffering from bipolar illness. Dr. Brown assured me that these mood swings were normal in bipolar patients, and that the condition was treatable. But, she said firmly, you must co-operate. I was only too willing.
And during my stay in the hospital, Dr. Brown went to considerable lengths to make my life bearable. She put me on Wellbutrin, an antidepressant that not only suited me well but had the added advantage of not causing me to put on weight. She allowed me out to the store to buy lengths of material, and arranged for my sewing machine to be delivered to the hospital. I began, once again, to make clothes.
As always in psychiatric wards, our main caregivers were the nurses, kind and knowing men and women who had seen this illness a thousand times. As Dr. Brown put it, she could help me with drugs and she could teach me how to monitor my moods myself, but the nurses were the ones who would really chart the course of my illness and my recovery.
Finally, I had a clear and unambivalent diagnosis, one that I was able to take hold of in a way I hadn’t been able to before. I was bipolar, which explained the ups and downs, the erratic and destructive swings my life had followed. I had been told as much before, but never with the same clarity and finality. Somehow, I hadn’t fully absorbed the diagnosis—until now. In this, Dr. Brown had been excellent, leaving no further room for confusion.
But there were two key components to my recovery that no one told me about. This education I would have to acquire on my own and over a period of years. The first hard lesson was that a cure could not be simply imposed from without, by means of a mere pill. Recovery was more complicated than that. I would have to take a hand in my own recovery, to decide to get well, to explore and then put into practice all the different aspects of healing—diet, exercise, therapy, meaningful and purposeful work. The second vital piece of information that I then lacked was the crucial relationship between bipolar disorder and marijuana.
Not long after I got home, Michel had an accident while driving along the Trans-Canada Highway near Portage la Prairie in Manitoba with his dog, Makwa (named with the Ojibway word for “bear”). A young man, driving carelessly, made a left turn without looking and his pickup crashed into Michel’s car. Michel was cut and bruised but otherwise unhurt; his car, however, was a write-off and his much-loved Makwa had gone missing.
When he called to tell me, he added that he was going to stay and search the area, a vast open plain with wheat fields as far as the eye could see, and ten kilometres or more between one farmhouse and the next. He hoped that the dog might have run off and was somewhere licking his wounds not too far away, for Michel was pretty certain that in the crash or the aftermath the dog had been hit.
A local pharmacist loaned him a car and for the next five days Michel scoured the countryside, whistling and calling Makwa’s name. He put up leaflets and posters in the neighbouring villages. Michel was heartbroken that his search had yielded nothing and he was on the verge of giving up when he received a call from a campsite not far away. That evening a young woman had checked in and seen the poster about Makwa. Sitting by the campfire and seeing the first star appear in the sky, she had recited the familiar words “star light, star bright” and wished that the boy might get his dog back. A little later, a dog crawled out feebly from the undergrowth and the woman felt a wet nose and a tongue licking her hand. She recognized Makwa’s picture from the poster. The dog had been hurt but he would recover, and the reunion between Michael and Makwa was, of course, joyful.
That summer of 1998, Michel and I looked after each other up at Newboro Lake. His cuts and bruises took a long time to heal, and I was fragile too. I made us chicken soup; he took me canoeing on the lake. Fried, who is a man with a deep well of generosity, had forgiven me, but I was still feeling bad, and he was still very distant. He found it hard to understand just what had happened to me to make me treat him so horribly. What made me most wretched was the way I had been tricked into going into hospital in Vancouver, and I was haunted by the memo
ry of the ward with its shuffling, grey people. My family had intervened, and I’m grateful they did, but what I felt most acutely at the time was a sense of betrayal.
Michel kept telling me how lucky I was to have all this—the lake, the children, Fried—but I couldn’t somehow take it in. Coming back across the lake one night in a canoe, Michel said to me, “Look at all this. You’ve got the most beautiful life and the most wonderful children who love you very much. Why are you so sad? Why can’t you just love your life?” The trouble was: I couldn’t. I made meals, I swam, I went boating, but there was an emptiness inside me.
As the summer wore on, “with a little help from my friends,” I occasionally managed to obtain some marijuana. Only when high did I seem to feel better, more able to cope. And bit by bit, I did begin to feel more balanced. The children stopped watching me so anxiously, friends came to stay. The crisis seemed to be over; life was getting back to normal. I was shaken, but I was going to be all right. In any case, my mask was holding fine.
CHAPTER 11
NO, NO, NO, NO
Sweep, sweep, dear Mama, for your work is not yet done,
Sweep and weep, dear Mama,
For your lost young son
Sweep, sweep,
Weep, weep,
Mama, your day has not yet come,
Sweep and weep, Mama, for your dead son.
MY POEM “For Michel,” SPRING 1999
When September of 1998 came, we packed up and moved back to Ottawa, for Kyle and Ally had to return to school. The summer had been one of recovery and it always made me happy to see how close Michel and Fried were. From the moment I was first with Fried, they had found great pleasure in working together; neither was an intellectual in the way that Pierre was, and they loved doing things with their hands.
I used to watch them in the garden in their blue coveralls, cutting down trees with their chainsaws before going off fishing in the lake. Fried was an affectionate and generous stepfather, and Michel, knowing what it was like to be the youngest boy in a family of brothers, had always been particularly kind to Kyle.
Michel had just finished his degree in marine biology at Dalhousie University in Halifax and, while with me at the lake, spent part of the summer completing some English papers. He was particularly pleased when one of his professors wrote across the bottom of an essay on Emily Carr, “Michel, you may have picked the wrong major. You’re a born writer.” In fact, he had plans to write for the skiing magazine Powder. Skiing remained his passion and he had decided to move out west. He couldn’t wait to get free, to get on with his life. Though the three boys had inherited money from Pierre’s father, Michel liked to live like a ski bum—working in a steel mill in the summer and as a “lifty” (operating a chairlift at a ski resort) in the winter. He was the only one of our family with a union card.
Of the three older boys, Michel was the one most like me, not rational and cautious like his father but free spirited and too bold for his own good. From a very early age, he had felt no awe towards Pierre, and he was the only one who ever stood up to him. Michel’s character was completely honest and straightforward. Not surprisingly, he and Pierre had had many confrontations, particularly over Catholicism, but they loved and respected each other. Michel was perhaps the one who best understood my differences with Pierre, because he had shared them. Like me, his motto was “Passion over reason.”
I remember one time when Michel was seventeen and working as a camp counsellor in Algonquin Park for the summer. Pierre and Sacha, meanwhile, had set off from Montreal in the Volvo. They were bound for a rock concert in Texas—though Pierre insisted on calling them “jazz” concerts. Sacha had just returned from Africa, where he contracted malaria, and had already suffered three twenty-four-hour bouts of the illness. After Pierre left Sacha in Los Angeles and came home, Sacha proceeded to Salt Spring Island, where he stayed briefly with my sister Heather—and had another recurrence of malaria.
My sister took Sacha to the hospital, where it was discovered that he had no health card.
“Where’s your health card?” Heather asked her nephew. Turns out Michel had it. I called the camp, where they insisted they had no one on staff named Michel—until finally my contact said, “Oh, you mean Mike?” Michel came to the phone and the health card was duly sent off in the mail to his brother.
Later, Pierre called me.
“Why did Miche have Sacha’s health card?”
“So he’d have ID,” I replied.
“What do you mean?”
“So Miche can get served in bars. He’s underage, of course.”
“Michel drinks in bars?” Pierre was aghast.
I love that story. It’s a story about a father’s naïveté and a son doing what sons—especially sons who are free spirits—invariably do.
Late in October, on a perfect early autumn day, very blue and still, Michel said goodbye to me in front of my house on Victoria Street in Ottawa. He was taking Makwa, of course, and he asked to borrow the bicycle rack for his car. We stood talking in the bright sunshine on the sidewalk. He was elated, full of plans. After a few minutes, he got into his car and drove off down the street, but when he got to the end, he suddenly stopped, jumped out, ran back, hugged me and told me how much he loved me.
The second week in November, a girlfriend and I decided to go down to Montreal for the night to do some Christmas shopping. We stayed at the Ritz-Carlton on Sherbrooke Street. Sacha came and had dinner with us in the hotel’s Café de Paris, and we laughed because he was very casually dressed and had trouble getting past the maître d’hotel (the restaurant’s website advises that “sophisticated casual attire is recommended”). Sacha, too, was heading off on a trip, up to the Arctic. We had some caviar and soup. Life, I was beginning to think, might be all right again.
Next morning, at 7:30 on Friday the thirteenth of November, there was a knock on my hotel bedroom door. Two policemen from the RCMP stood outside.
“I’m afraid there is bad news,” one said. I thought at once of Sacha. “No,” they said, “it’s not Sacha. But Michel is missing. There has been an accident.” I didn’t even know that Michel and three of his friends were on a skiing trip in British Columbia, in Kokanee Glacier Provincial Park in the south-central interior. The police explained that Michel had been skiing on the edge of the glacier when a small avalanche was thought to have swept him over the ice and into the lake. I can remember falling to the floor, shouting out, “No, no, no, no.”
I got dressed and they drove me to Pierre’s house. Pierre and I lit a candle and sat waiting for news. Michel’s friends had been found and airlifted out by a national park service helicopter, and Sacha went up to join in the search. Andrew, Michel’s closest friend, had been lucky: he was caught in the slush and the other boys had been able to save him, and they had kept him alive all night in a raging blizzard, clinging together in the partial shelter of an outhouse. By sheer good fortune, for the boys had told no one where they were going and they had taken no cellphone with them, there had been another party of skiers not far behind who had been able to sound the alarm.
Snow kept falling and there was a danger of more avalanches, but on the seventeenth of November, RCMP divers managed to reach the lake. Part of it was already covered in ice, so their inflatable boat had to be towed by helicopter to open water. Michel’s body was never found. The water was icy and no one could have survived in it for long. With his heavy boots and backpack, Michel had had no chance. Sacha came home alone, without his brother.
And just as Michel had searched for five days for Makwa on the prairie after the car accident, Makwa and Andrew’s dog, a part Huskie called Yukon, circled the lake for five days looking for Michel. The two dogs had refused to enter the rescue helicopter, so food was left for them. The dogs made a snow cave and continued their futile search.
When it was clear that there was no further hope, my life slipped away from me. I felt that I, too, had died in that avalanche. And if not dead yet, death was a
ll I wanted. When I got home to Ottawa, Ally was waiting for me. We clung to each other and cried and cried until at last she stopped and said, “I can’t ever cry like this again. It hurts my head too much.”
She was nine years old and far too young to have to grow up so painfully. Later she said she would make me a cup of tea. I couldn’t get off the floor, so she put it down next to me and we sat there together, on the hard floor, drinking our tea.
What I regret most now is that I didn’t think enough about how much everyone else was suffering. Justin, Sacha, Kyle and Ally had lost a brother they adored, Fried a stepson, Pierre a son. Years of battling the different stages of bipolar illness had made me so self-absorbed that I was little help to anyone else. The pain came in stabs; I hadn’t known it was possible for anything to hurt so much. I begged my doctor to put me into a coma so the pain would go away.
“Margaret, I could do that” was all he said, “but then at some point you would have to wake up and you would still have to face the reality. Michel is gone.”
I don’t remember much about the funeral held in Saint-Viateur Church in Outremont, a Montreal borough on the north side of Mount Royal. It was here, in this church, that Pierre had attended mass as a young man—and prayed that children would come into his life. And they had. But now we both faced the torment of enduring the loss of a beloved son.
Justin, who had become our spokesman, read a Mohawk prayer, Sacha gave the eulogy in French, and Fried read some verses from the Book of Job. Pierre, in a short address, said, “If there is no resurrection, no heaven, then nothing that I have done in my entire life has any meaning.” I said nothing. Someone had given me a book about grieving—The Healing Journey through Grief—and it was actually very helpful. But I scribbled in the pages these words: “How can I survive without my Miche? Miche is dead … He is dead and I am alone now. Come home, Miche dear …”
Changing My Mind Page 20