Changing My Mind

by Margaret Trudeau

  I just could not face the fact that Michel was dead, and I looked for various ways to deal with my grief. Probably the most important work I did was at the Wabano Centre for Aboriginal Health in Ottawa, where a Native elder named Sister Irene helped me—by meditation, chanting, visualizing, channelling—to release my son’s spirit. For so long I could not face that he was dead, but I got to a point of clarity and ease. I could see the spirit of Michel as a bird soaring away and I didn’t have to worry anymore about his material self.

  Michel’s brothers felt the same impulse. After the memorial service, they built a sweat lodge at Morin-Heights, Pierre’s cottage in the Laurentians north of Montreal. The tribe gathered. A good sweat lodge, run properly, is very cleansing and good for the soul. We were looking for anything to ease our pain and we all had the same sense—that the ceremonies so long practised by those who were in this land before us still have meaning today.

  It was decided that Makwa would go with Andrew and his dog; there seemed sense in that, though I wondered whether Andrew would ever see Makwa without seeing Michel.

  In my extreme grief, I gave little thought to Fried, from whom I now felt more estranged than ever. I couldn’t cook, I couldn’t shop, some days I couldn’t even breathe. Nor could I handle his sadness. My old trust in him, my feeling that he was there to protect me, had gone. He had been the rock on which I had thought I would always lean, and now that rock had turned to dust—and I had done the crushing. Had someone been on hand to see what was happening to me, how Michel’s death had sparked a depression that only medicine could help, then Fried and I might have hung on. But we were unable to comfort each other. The grief I felt was normal; my handling of that grief increasingly was not. Many marriages do not survive the death of a child.

  The one person I did feel close to was Pierre. Pierre, now seventy-nine years old, was absolutely devoted to his sons. With Michel’s death, he seemed to shrink into himself. Having raised them to be fearless, having constantly urged them on to ever greater physical challenges, he was now haunted by guilt. Without his encouragement, would Michel have been so reckless? Had Pierre brought up the boys to be less trusting, more cautious, would the accident never have happened? Sacha, who lived with Pierre, reported that in the evenings his father no longer bothered to turn on the lights; Sacha would find him sitting in the dark. He seemed to grow both small and old.

  Pierre had always taken the greatest trouble with his appearance. Now he lost all interest in what he was wearing or what he looked like; he barely ate and turned away from his friends. Every time I saw him, he seemed to have withdrawn a little further into himself. I should have noticed more, taken more heed, but I was too consumed by my own misery.

  The first year after Michel’s death passed in a cloud of grief. I clung to Pierre as we both tried to accept this hideous loss. Meanwhile, Fried and I were struggling. On the first anniversary of the day Michel died, we held a memorial service for him at St. Bartholomew’s, the church across the street from my house. Pierre came.

  As a teenager, Michel had gone to summer camp at Algonquin Park, and once he grew up he had repeatedly been back as a counsellor. I had not expected so many people in the church. Dozens of friends he had made at summer camp came to the memorial service, and seeing their young, hopeful, shining faces filled me with acute feelings of sadness that Michel’s was not among them. In the pages of my diary, I wrote, “Since my son’s death, I feel horrified, shaken, helpless, forsaken, detached from reality, numb with outrageous grief.” I made myself speak at the memorial service, and later read my eulogy on the radio.

  The spot where Michel had died became the site of a pilgrimage for me each year, when I would hike up the three hours from the nearest road on foot and sit by the edge of Kokanee Lake. I think of this lake in the Selkirk Mountains as his grave, and what a lovely place it is. This alpine lake is deep and cold, one of thirty lakes in the park, and surrounded by precipitous cliffs.

  Kokanee Lake is also the place that has brought me signs that I have found immensely comforting. When Michel was a small child, we went together on a trip up country to Haida Gwaii—the Queen Charlotte Islands off the coast of British Columbia. Pierre had been made an Eagle Chief, and the boys Children of the Raven. Since an Eagle Chief cannot be married to someone outside the tribe, to my great honour I was made a Sister of the Raven.

  Kokanee Lake is a place where eagles and ravens gather. More than once, on my visits to the lake, eagles have swooped and seemed to lead me down a road. On one occasion, when I was with my nephew Rob, I said to him that I wished that I could have some sort of sign before we left the lake. He was deeply skeptical.

  “What,” he asked, “would you consider a sign?”

  “Anything,” I replied.

  As we walked up the path, I heard a loud screeching. Looking up, I saw to my delight an immense eagle swoop over the lake, its wings almost touching the waters where Michel had died. From that day, the sight of these huge birds has given me a sense that the spirits of those whom I have loved and who have died are soaring.

  Out of Michel’s death has come a powerful sense of renewal and rebirth. Every summer, when I hike to Kokanee Lake, I collect water and bring it home. When a grandchild is born, I use that water in the christening, so Michel’s spirit can touch the child. Michel is the one of my five children I don’t have to worry about now on a daily basis. It’s the same with Pierre. There’s a peace that comes when you give your loved ones their place. We keep them alive by telling lovely stories about them.

  As a family, we tried to find some comfort in working with the Canadian Avalanche Foundation, raising money to help build a chalet for back-country skiers and hikers, with all the latest equipment for providing weather bulletins, avalanche warnings and information about the current safety of conditions. We told ourselves that we would do everything we could to prevent this kind of death happening to other parents. Canadians were so generous: some $1.5 million was raised. It was magical. Every bit of lumber, every window and door, every nail had to be helicoptered up to the building site. The $7 million project was a wonder.

  On July 12, 2003, the Kokanee Glacier Cabin was formally opened. It’s a stunning three-storey post-and-beam cabin set on the shores of Kaslo Lake, just north of Nelson in the West Kootenays of the Selkirk Mountains. The cabin sleeps twenty in summer and is a stepping-off point for hikers who want to explore this jewel of a park.

  The cabin pays tribute to Michel and sixteen others who have died in avalanches in that area. The families of all those victims—and they came from all over North America—were there for the dedication ceremony, so seventeen pairs of scissors all cut at the same moment into that long red ribbon. And at that moment, ravens swept down on us. They were messengers. The generators are never off at the cabin, and a light always shines, like a beacon. I take some comfort in that.

  One day my sister Betsy found a rose seedling in her garden. The plant was a deep plum colour, a thorny Rosa rugosa, but she could not identify it in any horticultural encyclopedia. Finally, she named it the Michel Trudeau Memorial Rose, and the proceeds from its sales all go to the Canadian Avalanche Foundation. My brother-in-law Robin says that it is the most vigorous rose he knows, and that it will grow anywhere. I want it to flourish all over Canada.

  Not long after Michel’s death, two blows struck in succession. Nancy Pitfield, a close and dear friend, finally succumbed to breast cancer after fighting the illness with every ounce of her strength. I was made numb by her loss.

  Then Pierre was diagnosed with prostate cancer. At first, he didn’t tell me. Later, I learned that his first reaction on getting the news was to say, “Good, now I can die too. I can be with Michel.” Though the cancer was at a very early stage, he refused all treatment. After he left politics, Pierre had resumed his work as a lawyer and continued to walk every morning to his offices overlooking the St. Lawrence River and the mountains.

  But now he seldom ventured out. I only realized how
sick he was when I saw him, on June 21, 2000, at the annual party Sacha always gave with friends to mark the summer solstice—the longest day of the year. I hadn’t seen Pierre for a while and my first thought was that he was dying. He had lost a lot of weight and looked thin and gaunt. We sat by the campfire, and I held his hand. Even in the summer heat, Pierre got cold very quickly and wanted to sit close to the flames; when he stood up to leave, he needed help walking to the car.

  That summer, feeling very shaky myself, I accepted an invitation from Jane Faulkner to visit her in Switzerland. When I got back to Montreal, on my way home, I rang the boys to ask how Pierre was feeling. Sacha answered, and his voice was etched in worry, “Thank God you’re back, you must come quickly. Dad is dying.” Pierre had announced that he wanted to die at home and it had been decided that loved ones would be with him all the time, and that we would take shifts so that he would never be alone. I was pleased to be a part of it, and I also wanted to be there to help Justin and Sacha. We all knew that Pierre did not have long to live.

  The first night I was there, Pierre felt well enough to come up to the second-floor dining room for dinner. It was almost like old times. My role was to be mother again, to cook and make sure the boys were all right. We laughed and I told Pierre about the Van Gogh exhibition I had just seen in Europe.

  But soon he was too ill to finish a meal or even climb the stairs, and we would eat our meal round his bed at a small table. Then we converted a bedroom downstairs into a dining room, so he didn’t have to face those stairs. Every day, he grew a little weaker. During the shifts I spent with him, he sometimes wanted to talk, but mostly he liked to lie in silence. One afternoon, I lay on the bed next to him and he wanted me to hold him in my arms. When his body became so frail that it hurt if anyone touched it, I sat holding his hand.

  Pierre was not frightened of death. For a while, after Michel died, he had questioned his faith, but now he seemed to embrace his religion again and talked of joining Michel. We talked about Michel a lot. When I was with Pierre, I often wore the pearls that his mother had given me before our marriage. That seemed to please him. The only thing that the living can do for someone who is dying is to remind them of all the good things that happened in his or her life. Pierre and I shared beautiful memories of our happy times parenting our sons.

  Looking back, I can see that we took consolation in the fact that we had loved each other once, loved each other deeply. He was kind and thoughtful, and he threw away his heart to me. But my catch wasn’t very good; it’s true what George Bernard Shaw said about youth being wasted on the young.

  Several years after Pierre died, Peter C. Newman told a story about him in his book Here Be Dragons: Tales of People, Passion and Power. Stuart Hodgson, then commissioner of the Northwest Territories, was flying over the North Pole in the winter of 1974. As they passed over the pole, Pierre took control of the plane and called 24 Sussex, where a housekeeper answered. Maybe he wanted to share the excitement of the moment. He asked for me, and (this I find hard to believe) I apparently refused to come to the phone. At this, Hodgson told Newman, Pierre “sobbed.”

  “Why did you marry her?” Hodgson asked him, I gather with compassion.

  “Because I love her,” Pierre replied. “I truly love her.”

  Pierre died one afternoon in the early fall of that year, on September 28, 2000, after not having spoken for nearly a week. In many ways, Sacha was the son that Pierre was closest to. He had always lived with his father, and they were very alike: disciplined, loyal, a bit gruff, unwilling to waste time on banalities. Towards the end, Pierre was unconscious and both Sacha and Justin stayed by his side, comforting him until the very end. They let him go very peacefully with their enormous love for their fine father. I slipped deep into sorrow.

  From the moment it was known that Pierre was dying, the public concern and support throughout Canada had been overwhelming. The press were camped out all around and, to our horror, a satellite dish had suddenly sprouted on a telephone pole not far from the house, clearly visible from the bedroom where Pierre spent his days. He found the sight of it distressing and Sacha had the dish taken down.

  For many Canadians, Pierre was the politician who had shaped modern Canada, the man who had made multiculturalism work. Now that he was nearing the end, they wanted to honour him, and when the news of his death was announced, there was an outpouring of grief. For four days, Pierre’s body lay in state in Ottawa in the hall of the House of Commons, and Canadians queued to pay their respects, in a long line that wound right round the square.

  On October 2, four days after Pierre’s death, I went down to the square with my sisters. A TV reporter, a man well respected as a shrewd political pundit, caught sight of me. Thrusting his microphone in my face, he barked out, “How do you feel today, Mrs. Trudeau? Have you remembered it’s Michel’s birthday?” I was so taken aback, so shaken, that I dropped to the ground. Later I got a profuse apology from his news organization.

  What that reporter did was so extraordinarily inappropriate and insensitive. That’s the hardest I have ever been hit publicly by anyone at any time anywhere. These journalists dare to judge, they dare to pontificate. It makes me so mad.

  The casket containing Pierre’s body, draped in the Canadian flag, was taken by train from Ottawa to Montreal, where the funeral was to take place in the Notre-Dame Basilica. Sacha and Justin, who at twenty-eight was emerging as the strong figure in our family, travelled with it. All along the tracks, there were people standing and waving, and many of them were crying. I felt that Pierre, the man who never went out without a red rose in his lapel, and whom the press had always described as a man of “reason over passion,” would have been touched by the piles of red roses and by the fifty thousand Canadians who had filed past his coffin.

  I had gone down to Montreal the previous day. Early on the morning of the funeral I had a brief meeting with Fidel Castro, who was to be one of the pallbearers, in his hotel. This was the only time, apart from a visit to Russia, that he had left Cuba, and I hadn’t seen him for some years, though we had remained friends from my first visit to Cuba in 1974. I found his kindness and sympathy very comforting. Heads of state, political dignitaries and former leaders had all come to Canada for the funeral. Justin delivered the eulogy with eloquence and passion. He thanked his father “for having loved us so much” and went on:

  “My father’s fundamental belief never came from a textbook. It stemmed from his deep love for, and faith in, all Canadians, and over the past few days, with every card, every rose, every tear, every wave and every pirouette, you returned his love. It means the world to Sacha and me. Thank you …

  “We have gathered from coast to coast to coast, from one ocean to another, united in our grief, to say goodbye. But this is not the end. He left politics in ‘84. But he came back for Meech. He came back for Charlottetown. He came back to remind us of who we are and what we’re capable of. But he won’t be coming back anymore. It’s up to us, all of us, now.”

  And then he ended with the lines from the Robert Frost poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”—a poem that we had often recited to the boys when they were children. But for the eulogy, Justin changed the words slightly. Instead of the traditional ending, Justin said: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep / He has kept his promises and earned his sleep. Je t’aime, Papa.’

  I suddenly felt myself begin to slip, to do what I always do in moments of extreme emotion, a form of collapse I can’t control. Instantly, I felt a strong hand on my shoulder. The hand belonged to Jimmy Carter, who whispered words of encouragement into my ear.

  Then, seeing Justin so sad and distraught, looking almost as if he had fallen on his father’s coffin, I tried to rise to comfort him. Immediately I felt another strong hand, keeping me in my place. The hand was Fidel Castro’s.

  “He’s a man, Margaret. He’s a man,” Fidel told me. Let him be, was the message. Justin must rise on his own.

  Leonard Cohen was t
here as an honorary pallbearer, as was the Aga Khan. The support was extraordinary, so extraordinary.

  After their father’s funeral, Justin and Sacha returned to their own lives; Justin was now a teacher, Sacha a filmmaker. Winter was coming and the weather in Ottawa can be very bleak. The days got shorter and it was dark and grey for much of the time. I have always hated the long dark days, but this bleakness was of another order.

  My marriage to Fried did not survive Michel’s death. Someone once asked me why I did not fight harder to save it. The answer was that we did fight hard, but not hard enough. Fried bought roses and put them on my pillow and cooked delicious meals; I tried to listen and sympathize with his financial problems. Occasionally, we seemed to be close again and I began to think that all would yet be well; but there were too many cracks between us, too much bitterness. And in any case, everything in me was pushing me to get away, to be alone, to concentrate on my grief. I wanted no one close to me, not even the children, whom I continued to love, but dimly, as if through a haze. When I thought about them it was with a kind of terror, as if something might happen to them as well.

  Many things were said that should never have been said and, in due course, Fried left.

  In the early days of our prosperity, I had bought a condominium in Ottawa with money from the sale of a lot next to my house. As it was rented out, Fried moved in for a while with his parents, who were also grieving for Michel and perplexed and deeply unhappy about our separation. When the condo fell vacant, Fried moved in there.

  For a while, Kyle and Ally lived with me; I took them to school, shopped, went through the motions of being alive, while living in a cold grey fog that never lifted. In 2000, I sold the house on Victoria Street and moved into a smaller house, not far from Fried. I had told Fried, who found it for me, that the one thing I needed was a lot of light, and in winter, when I had first seen the house, the light had indeed flooded in. But when spring came, and then summer, the trees all around filled in and the house never seemed to get properly lit. I began to feel like a prisoner.