Soon after Michel’s death, I bumped into a young friend of ours, a man who had known Michel since childhood. I had been thinking of getting a bicycle and we fell into conversation. He invited me back to his house for a barbecue, and while I was there I smoked a bit of marijuana. I hadn’t had any for a while. But marijuana, as I well knew, was my addiction.
If I had any, I wanted not just one joint, or even two, but the whole bag. I wanted to start the day with a joint and end the day with a joint, with few pauses in between. One reason I hadn’t been smoking more was because Fried didn’t like it. Now I didn’t care.
The marijuana allowed me to forget. When I felt so bad I could hardly breathe, I had another joint. I was now able to arrange for a regular supply and just kept smoking. I told myself that I was not really a junkie, in the sense that I never vomited or got the shakes when I didn’t have any. But now, looking back, I see that the deep sense of distress and loss I experienced without it was a certain sign of psychological dependency. Many people use food or alcohol as a form of self-medication; for me it was marijuana. This was all part of the denial, thinking that I could cure myself with homemade solutions.
I’m not sure now why those around me did not see that my mental state was deteriorating fast. Knowing my history, why did no one detect the depression that had engulfed me? Perhaps because they mistook depression for grief, fully expecting me to be sad. Or perhaps the acting classes I had taken in New York in my late twenties had taught me how to put up an impenetrable mask. I simply got better at pretending all was well.
I made an effort to plant my deck with bulbs. I went to a bereaved parents’ association meeting and listened to the grief they were all suffering but only came home sadder. I did see a good psychiatrist, Dr. Selwyn Smith, but when he left Ottawa not long after, he passed me on to a young woman with a small child and pregnant with a new baby. I knew I couldn’t talk to her. I felt too protective, of her as well as of myself. How could I talk to a mother about the death of a child? So I stopped seeing her. People would say to me that they could not begin to imagine how terrible I must be feeling. They were right, and I didn’t even want them to try.
But the day came when my fragile sense of myself simply snapped. Justin had come to stay with us. One Saturday morning, I crawled out of bed to make breakfast for him, Kyle and Ally. They wanted eggs, potatoes, bacon, freshly squeezed juice. When all was ready, I called to them to come and eat, but they were playing video games and paid no attention. I called again: nothing.
And then I exploded, in the most appalling and humiliating way. I yelled and shouted about not being able to bear it any longer, about not being their servant. I told them to get out of the house. And as I ranted and raved, I could see a frightened and sad look in Kyle’s eyes. I had held on, behind my mask, for far too long; like a pressure cooker, the steam had been building up, and now, when I could contain it no longer, the release was terrifying in its intensity.
For me this moment spelled ultimate defeat. However depressed or manic I had been in the past, even in my most disturbed states, I had been able to look after and respond to my children. Now I had lost even that capacity.
After this, we decided that Kyle and Ally should move in with Fried. What mother willingly gives up her children? I had indeed failed if I was no longer someone who could give them the security they needed, so I saw surrendering them as an act of true maternal love. For a while, Ally went back and forth between us, and during the summer she was away at a horse camp and with her cousins at the cottage.
I never went back to the house on Newboro Lake where I had been so happy. Fried put my things into black plastic garbage bags and brought them to me.
I kept thinking how Ally simply didn’t deserve this. She touched my heart by making huge efforts to cheer me up. She kept telling me to get a dog, so I could take walks. She pressed me to go out, see my friends. Ally was growing up, too fast.
After this, quite slowly, I fell apart. I smoked dope and drank Scotch. I found that the combination dulled the pain and I needed it once the marijuana lost its effectiveness. I ate almost nothing.
Ally had decided that she couldn’t bear to live in two places and had opted to make Fried’s house her base—where she kept her clothes, her music, her pictures. She had also felt too lonely in my house. The children visited me from time to time and I did my best to provide a home for them, cooking their meals and driving them to school.
That was the best part of my day, driving them to and from school, learning about their lives, talking over their problems. But what a cheerless life for them. Fried put a stop to family dinners after one night in a local restaurant when something was said and I burst into tears and couldn’t stop crying. The children stared at me, miserable and bewildered. Christmas that year was bleak. I fed the children pre-stuffed frozen turkey-in-a-box, heated up.
Nothing made much sense to me anymore. I spent the days blaming myself, blaming others. I was extremely lonely. After our breakup, Fried never included me in all the family parties and celebrations that his large family so loved. His sense of hurt and misery took the form of telling me that his family did not want to see me, and telling them that I did not want to see them. His sister, who had become my dearest friend, now avoided me. I would hear from the children about all the fun they had had at the cottage or when they went off skiing together. My isolation had been my choice; but my sense of missing out was acute nonetheless.
Just occasionally, for no reason I could quite fathom, a bout of mania would overcome me. I would suddenly begin to feel stronger, more optimistic, but then too strong, too optimistic, too invincible. Fired by energy and desire, I went shopping, filling my bags with unwanted clothes, expensive sweaters, perfume, cosmetics, handbags, shopping with a kind of ecstatic frenzy.
When I got home and looked at my parcels, the mania would fizzle out and I would wonder what I was doing. Without unpacking them, I would let the parcels pile up in the hall before taking them round to a women’s shelter in order to make room for more.
And then the depression would return: I felt myself going down and down into an abyss where the light got fainter and fainter. I thought I would never laugh again. I had been dating a lawyer, and he was concerned and attentive. But he was also very busy. When I was with him and he left early for work, I spent the days pacing up and down his beautiful apartment—more like a museum than a place to live. I would stare at his magnificent pieces of art or out of his plate glass windows at the snowy landscape down below. I preferred to be on my own at home, where no one could see me.
By now I had lost thirty pounds and found it very hard to eat. I couldn’t bear for anyone who knew me to speak to me, so I stopped going out. I closed the blinds on my windows. When Justin, Sacha or my mother called, I told them that I was fine, that I couldn’t talk for long because I was baking cookies and that I had tickets for the theatre that night. Often I didn’t answer the phone and soon, in any case, friends stopped phoning.
Sometimes I felt so lonely in the house that I got into my car and drove round and round the city, stopping, if the weather was fine, to walk by the river. I never visited anyone, for there was no one with whom I wanted to share my misery. Trudging dismally along, I would look into the lighted windows of people’s houses, envying the happy faces of the people inside. Who was there who could understand what I was going through?
Everything was spiralling out of control. I was a train on the wrong track and moments from crashing. There was nothing now that could save me. In an old book, I recently discovered, I scrawled incoherent words in the margins and over the print: “How can I survive life without my Miche?” And “I have a broken heart, a damaged soul, an unshakeable sorrow.”
Recurring again and again are phrases about how guilty I felt about the other children and how I wanted to die. From the moment I woke up to the moment I went to bed, I lived in a misery-filled limbo where time had stopped and all joy had vanished. Everything that had once bee
n bright and colourful was now flat and grey. In my eyes, I had become dead, unresponsive, incapable, useless.
On December 5, 2000, I made an enormous effort and went to a rock concert in Cranbrook, British Columbia, generously put on by Bryan Adams to raise money for the Avalanche Foundation. No one had ever seen me more cheerful and more alive. I was always able, even if only briefly, to put on a very convincing act, and I did feel genuinely grateful for the $50,000 the evening raised. After that, I shut myself away, stopped eating, and stayed in bed.
But I did have one friend, Michelle Bégin, who was reluctant to take no for an answer. She kept ringing, and when I didn’t answer the phone, she rang again, and again, until I did answer. On December 14, having had no answer for several days, Michelle knocked on my door. I didn’t answer it. She kept knocking, and then began to ring again. Finally, with extreme reluctance, I opened the door. She found the place in chaos; I was confused, incoherent, my thoughts racing. Getting no sense out of me, Michelle rang the office of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien (he had served under Pierre in three different portfolios) and said that she needed to reach Sacha Trudeau, urgently. Something in her tone must have impressed them, for they found Sacha’s number and gave it to her. Sacha rang me and told me to stay put until he could get there.
He arrived next morning to find me leaving the house to attend a meeting at a local school, where a friend’s daughter was a pupil. I had promised I would help her with a project. Dimly, with no real idea what I was doing, I felt that this was something I could not duck. Sacha took one look at me, led me back inside, told me that I would only scare the children and put me to bed.
A doctor came, a Dr. Colin Cameron, and he talked to me very calmly, explaining that the depression and mania were now alternating at a frightening rate and that I needed something urgently to slow my mind down. There was nothing for it but to go to hospital. The idea filled me with terror and dread. My memories of psychiatric wards were all too fresh. My one feeling was that I was once again going to be punished and imprisoned. They insisted. I kept saying that I was fine, that there was nothing wrong with me, that they were all making a mistake.
Through the fog of my mind I knew that I had to escape. Telling Sacha and Dr. Cameron that I needed some clothes in the laundry room and remembering that I had a one-piece ski suit hanging there, I made my way down to the basement, put on the ski suit and let myself out quietly through the back door. Then I ran.
After a while, I found myself back outside my old house on Victoria Street, where I had been so happy. It was snowing and extremely cold. Despite the snowsuit, I couldn’t seem to get warm. I hung about for a bit, then rang my former neighbour’s bell and asked her young daughter if I could come in and get warm. By now I was shaking all over and making very little sense. The girl looked so alarmed, so appalled by the state I was in, that I left and went on to the house of a good friend, Pauline Bogue.
Finally, Pauline took me home and got hold of Sacha and the police—who had all been out hunting desperately for me. The police now arrived, an ambulance in tow. They trooped upstairs, put me on a stretcher and carried me down before strapping me onto a gurney. I struggled and fought. One of the officers, a tough-looking woman who plainly had little sympathy with such antics, put her hand under the sheet, took hold of my hand and pulled the thumb sharply back towards my wrist. I was in agony; she had dislocated my thumb, whether on purpose or not I never discovered. Clearly, she thought I was drunk.
When we got to the Royal Ottawa Hospital, I kept begging for someone to look at my thumb, which was throbbing. They paid no attention but began to sedate me. I called for help. What terrified me most was being locked up, and I begged them not to shut me in. Finally, a psychiatric nurse took pity on me. He fetched a pillow and helped me into the day room. I was totally exhausted and fast succumbing to the drugs; I had no more struggle in me. I took the pillow, put on my coat, crawled over to a corner of the room and fell asleep on the floor. I had hit rock bottom. There was nowhere lower for me to go.
CHAPTER 12
CHOOSING SANITY
A person with a mental illness needs an advocate—someone to chart the waters, interpret the possible side effects of drugs and provide reassurance when recovery seems so terribly slow. My oldest sister, Heather, was that person for me.
CHRISTMAS 2000
Psychiatrists have long recognized that the process of accepting an acute mental illness, in much the same way as accepting death, has five distinct phases. The first phase is denial, a refusal to accept that what is going on has really anything to do with you: it’s the life you are leading, it’s other people, it’s the circumstances, it’s extreme bad luck.
Then you start to bargain: Maybe it will all work out if I take better care of myself, if I find a hobby, join a yoga class, get more exercise, buy a pet, get up earlier in the morning.
After this comes depression and self-pity: Why me? What did I do to deserve this? Why isn’t this happening to others?
Next comes anger, with oneself and with others: What is wrong with everyone?
And then, but only then, the anger gives way to acceptance: Yes, this is me, this is my life, I am ill, I need help and I will take a hand in my own recovery. I am not an innocent victim; I am a player—the player—in this game.
Thirty years in and out of Canada’s mental illness services had done me very little lasting good. I had lived the first four stages, again and again, for most of my adult life. I had fallen ill, been treated and gotten better—but I had never really acknowledged what was wrong with me, not deep down. It was now time to embrace the fifth stage: acceptance. And I was lucky in the timing. The public perception of mental illness was finally changing, much helped by new research into brain health and the neurochemistry of moods and disorders. The moment was coming when the stigma was lifting—when the full extent, the sheer number of people affected, was at last beginning to be realized.
Situated on what was then a country road, the Royal Ottawa Hospital had been built in 1910 as a sanatorium for people with tuberculosis. Its last TB ward had been closed in the 1960s, by which time it had become a treatment centre for all kinds of disability, including emotional and psychiatric disorders. The place was grey, dark and extremely gloomy, and I was filled with terror. I arrived on an arctic, snowy day in the middle of a long, cold winter. To help patients and staff navigate the different parts of the hospital, they had built subterranean tunnels and passageways—long, dimly lit, echoing corridors lined with air ducts and pipes. I would get to know the tunnels well.
I had been admitted under a seventy-two-hour committal order, which meant that I was not a voluntary patient but incarcerated by social services as a possible danger to myself or to the public. Though there was in fact no likelihood of my harming anyone, not even myself, at that point, the rule was that I was to be observed at all times. When I moved about, I was accompanied; when in my bed, I was watched. This was all part of the horror.
On the first morning, I woke feeling somewhat calmer. The medication given to me the previous night had soothed me. But at the same time, something inside me had been broken by the sheer trauma of my escape through the snow and my treatment at the hands of a police officer. I felt defeated. I had nothing left.
When I looked in the mirror, I could see an elderly hag, my hair dirty and dishevelled, my skin grey, my flesh hanging off me from months of starvation. Normally, I weigh about 147 pounds, but at this point I tipped the scales at 117. Photos of me then are sobering to see.
Sacha’s last words to me the night before haunted me: he had said, as they tried to reason with me, that I was possessed. He was right, I was indeed possessed: by fear and sorrow, but mainly by fear. Just how unreasoning, how deranged I had become was clear from the letters I had been writing my mother; she told me later that they were so mad that she had torn them all up.
One of the first things the hospital did was to inform me of my rights. An ombudsman arrived to talk to me, an
d I told him what the policewoman had done. My thumb was by now hugely swollen and badly bruised. My initial thought was to bring charges against her, for even in my sickened state I felt that such conduct was unacceptable.
But all this was just playing for time. I was prevaricating, denying, blaming others, anything but facing up to the truth. However, I felt somewhat comforted by a visit from our family doctor, Rick Martin, a man who had again and again tried to help me at different stages of my illness. He came to tell me that I was in the best hands, that this was exactly the place for me and that he believed that I would now really get better.
At this point, something really good happened to me. The same doctor who had come to my house, Dr. Cameron, took up my case. Finally, finally, someone from the caring profession who understood what I had been through and how I had suffered, was prepared to take my recovery in hand. He knew that my spirit was broken and he knew how to go about fixing it. Dr. Cameron said that healing would take a long, long time—and he was right about that—but he also assured me that there was, indeed, light at the end of the tunnel. Quite simply, he gave me hope.
Dr. Cameron was young, almost boyish looking, with round glasses and his hair gathered in a ponytail. He had an easy manner about him, as do all who are comfortable in their own shoes.
He was a psychiatrist specializing by training in mood disorders and—this would prove crucial in my case—post-traumatic stress disorder. He also conveyed his absolute determination to make me better. Trusting him, I believed it. In any case, I had very little choice. There was no fight left in me. Something about his manner and his sympathy made me listen and, this time, take it all in. The day had finally arrived when I was able to say, “Please help me. I want to learn how to live with and manage all this.”
Changing My Mind Page 22