Changing My Mind

by Margaret Trudeau

  Sometimes these cycles had been slow, taking months or years to unfold; but sometimes the cycles had been extremely rapid, swinging from elation to despair several times in a single day. I had quite simply lost control of my mind and spent much of my time in a state of “impaired insight.” Because I was good at donning masks and acting, I had been able to fool those around me.

  Now I needed to learn the real boundaries, the real edges, how to cope with reality and not dwell in fantasy. As for the shame, Dr. Cameron told me that there was no avoiding facing up to the past. But many, many months would have to pass before I broke through to a real glimmer of the better life that lay ahead.

  Dr. Cameron had been right in his forecast. There were days when I trudged up and down the hospital’s grey, subterranean corridors with nothing but bleakness in my heart. But now I was not only allowed to be sad but encouraged to face the sadness. I was allowed to grieve for Michel and I was helped to do so.

  The doctors and psychiatric nurses were wonderful, but one orderly in particular, a gentle man with a goatee and long white hair gathered in a ponytail, was the person who most helped me to face Michel’s death and my father’s death and to start the painful process of grieving. Discovering that I loved music, he brought tapes into the hospital for me to listen to—the Beatles, George Benson, Sam Cooke, Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck and Miles Davis.

  We would talk about the songs and the playing, and I found that the music released tears that had been trapped somewhere deep inside me. I would sit listening while tears poured steadily down my cheeks. Until now, I realized, I had been too angry and too frightened to cry properly. Those tears, shed with such anguish, marked a breakthrough in my recovery.

  Until then, something inside me had been frozen, as if I had been simply too terrified to let the grief out. With the tears came huge, overwhelming relief. This wasn’t like the wailing and keening of the previous years. These were the soft tears of sorrow, the normal and appropriate response to sadness. As Dr. Cameron put it, sorrow does not have to take you into depression. I had to learn to “own my sorrow.”

  And soon I actually began to enjoy the safe routine of my days. Because I had ranted and raved and screamed the day that I was brought into hospital, the other patients had tended to steer clear of me. The world of a psychiatric ward is a very quiet one. But gradually I was beginning to make friends. One of the secrets of a good ward is to have the patients medicated enough that they remain calm but not so much that they have to be helped out of their chairs. And among the others who haunted the same grim basement corridors that I did, I found friends.

  I was still extremely skinny, and had to put socks in my bras and wear jeans suitable for a twelve-year-old. But as soon as I was able to have visitors, a friend came regularly, bringing me little meals of delicious Lebanese food that he knew I loved: hummus, tabouleh, tzatziki, falafel. Every night we had a feast.

  I had been given a room of my own, and when the cart with the clean linen came round, we were allowed to choose the colour of our sheets. Since the room itself was so stark, I used pink and yellow sheets to make a skirt for my bed and made an effort to make it all as cozy and homey as I could. Pink is a soothing colour, and yellow is the colour of the sun that brightens my spirit. There was no television in the rooms, and I found concentrating on a book too confusing, but I was happy curled up in my bed.

  After a few weeks, I was given a pass to leave the hospital for several hours. My first attempt at negotiating the outside world was not a great success. There was, quite simply, too much stimulation and I was thrown for a loop. I had been feeling guilty about not being at home to shop and bake for Christmas lunch. A friend agreed to drive me down to the local gourmet shop, where he was stocking up on food for his own family Christmas. Standing in the warmth of the shop, surrounded by so many enticing things, so much Christmas food, I became overwhelmed by memories of Christmases with Pierre and the boys, when I had always baked mincemeat tarts and taken them down to the police guards at our gate.

  I piled up a basket with mincemeat tarts and cookies and asked my friend to drive me to 24 Sussex. By now it was late and he was reluctant, but we went and the officers were pleased—and very surprised.

  I was taught a lesson. I needed to rein things in, and he needed to help me to do so. I wasn’t really sorry when he returned me to the hospital. I was beginning to feel very safe there and I knew that I was not ready for more.

  Christmas on the psychiatric ward was surprisingly good. We cut red stars out of heavy-stock paper, and hung the decorations on an artificial Christmas tree. When the full Christmas lunch was over, we held hands and sang carols. I could never have imagined being happy in such circumstances, but there was something so secure and safe about the day; I had forgotten that I really could live without constant fear and apprehension.

  The holiday was hugely lifted by the presence of my oldest sister, Heather. Unable to bear the thought of me alone on a day that we as a family had always celebrated with such excitement, she abandoned her own family Christmas and came to Ottawa to be at my side. What I vividly remember is her warmth and the tears I shed in her arms, and the feeling that I had an advocate, someone who would help me to navigate the maze around me when I could not do so myself.

  I was beginning to discover that a person with a mental illness does not have the ability to understand what is going on. That person needs someone to chart the waters, to read what needs to be read, to talk about the possible side effects of drugs and to provide reassurance when recovery seems so terribly slow. Heather was that person for me. All my life, from my youngest days, she had looked out for me.

  And slowly, very slowly, my depression became more manageable. I learned how not to allow depression to suck me down into that grey, bottomless well. Bit by bit, minute increments at a time, the depression ceased to be depression and became mere sadness, which is what it should have been all along.

  I knew perfectly well that I had to learn to live with sadness out in the real world, and that there never would, never could, come a time when I would not be sad about Michel’s death. Some years later, a woman asked me to write a foreword for a book that she had just finished about palliative care for people who have had to cope with death. She sent me the cover. It was exactly like Edvard Munch’s The Scream, with graffiti all over the jacket, my name in larger type than the author’s, and the words “Get over it.”

  What I told the author was something that I was busy learning during those first months in the Royal Ottawa Hospital: that her title could not have been more wrong. “Getting over it” was not the issue; “getting on with it” was. There is no alternative to learning how to live with sadness and sorrow. What you need are the tools to help you do that.

  There’s a postscript to this story. I never did do the foreword for her. Recently, the author sent me an e-mail: she had ditched the old publisher as well as the title and had released the book under a new title. The old one, she now agreed, was inappropriate and even distressing.

  In 2000, smoking in hospitals was still permitted: a room was set aside for patients to use. I was a heavy smoker then, and here the smokers met and talked, danced and learned about each other. That room was our safe place. No doctor or nurse ever came in. This was hardly surprising, as the air was so thick with smoke it was hard to see across the room. One of the first things I did was to take down the curtains hanging in the room and wash them; they had originally been white and were now a yellow-grey colour. In the evenings and at odd moments during the day, we sat and exchanged our experiences and stories, and I learned a lot about the many unhappy forms that mental illness can take and the tragedies that can befall people with depression and mania.

  I had been checked into the hospital under another name—Carol Wilson—but I found that almost impossible to remember myself. Soon everyone knew who I was. (A measure of my mania, thought some, was that I believed myself to be Margaret Trudeau!) We also engaged in group therapy, as well
as art classes, which I felt gave me some kind of purpose. The days on a mental ward can be very long and tedious. I had railed and ranted against my imprisonment for the first forty-eight hours, but after that I had felt increasingly content to be just where I was. I felt safe.

  I stayed in the Royal Ottawa Hospital for two and a half months. I emerged to a new world, one in which there would be no more marijuana, no more delusions, no more self-punishment. I was still in regular therapy, with my kind and imaginative psychiatrist, Dr. Cameron. He was as interested as I was in the possibility of using alternative therapies to work on the particular nature of my mental troubles. Seeing how fearful I still was of eating, and how my breathing was compromised when I was unhappy, he used hypnosis to help me find somewhere that I could feel safe.

  He used a certain memory, a beautiful and peaceful memory that captures all that I love in life. When assailed by my fears or when my thoughts begin to race, I can go to this place in my mind and calm down, then reflect and think twice. That place is private, and no one goes there but me. For others, it may be a particular walk or the smile of the grocer that morning—whatever. Find a place that is quiet and reassuring to you, as familiar as an old pair of slippers, a place where you can let your mind rest. But—and this will seem curious—don’t think when you’re there; just be there and enjoy the beauty. Then, when you’ve left that place, only then should you reconsider whatever it is that has made you react, perhaps harshly.

  Dr. Cameron wanted to disperse the great weight of my sadness. I had to learn to handle the pain of Michel’s death, a pain I would have to bear for the rest of my life. I had a wound but the cut was still raw and in need of protective scar tissue. There was nothing wrong with sorrow, but I had to be taught not to wallow in it, not to indulge in self-pity, not to feel so constantly guilty.

  With Dr. Cameron’s help, I at last fully understood that I had spent many years—probably since childhood—feeling inadequate and unacceptable. Pierre’s Catholicism, with its emphasis on guilt and sin, had only increased my load. To cope, I had adopted a mask, but that mask had slipped and was no longer appropriate. The new me had to live without a mask.

  Dr. Cameron gave me books by spiritual writers such as Deepak Chopra, who had thought deeply about how to live consciously in the everyday world, and these I found immensely helpful. During my sessions with Dr. Cameron, we talked about the ideas of innocence, experience and redemption, about how one can lose one’s soul yet find it again.

  One day, when I was going on yet again about the terrible things that I had done to Pierre, Fried and the children, he suddenly said, “You are so incredibly hard on yourself. By the way you talk you would think that you had been an axe murderer and a criminal. Nothing you did was terrible. Yes, you did do some embarrassing things, but never anything seriously harmful. You think that you are the most despicable speck on the planet. You’re not. No one is perfect. We’re all flawed, full of imperfections. You’re you—and you must learn to forgive yourself for your mistakes.” This all made sense.

  Dr. Cameron also made me realize the impact on the mind of regular and hard exercise of the body. One day, asking me about my daily walks, he wondered whether, as I walked along, I looked up or down. I told him I would check. Next day, in the park, I discovered that I always looked down, at the path in front of me, at the puddles left by the rain, at the concrete and the stones.

  “Try looking up,” he suggested when I next saw him. And so I did. As I walked, I began to notice the trees and the changing sky and the play of the clouds and then I began to make contact with other walkers, instead of shuffling round in my lonely fashion. Soon after I got out of hospital, Sacha and Justin bought me a puppy. I made good friends as I walked him each morning. Then I found a personal trainer, and over about twenty sessions I got him to teach me exactly how each muscle in the body works and how best to make it function well. Exercise, as Dr. Cameron had explained, raises serotonin in the body.

  I let no day pass without some form of exercise—even if it means doing deep-knee bends while I’m stirring the stew. Sometimes I run on Mount Royal, sprinting as if a gun has gone off. Whatever regimen you devise, just know that you’ll never get it perfect. Time, travel, circumstance will all invariably cut into your best-laid plans, but the two major components of my stability, I am convinced, are sleeping well and eating well. If I do that, everything else seems to fall into place.

  A pup. Looking up. Getting the body moving again. Sometimes very simple things can make a huge difference.

  Soon after I got home, Sacha came to talk to me about money. While I was in hospital, he had gathered all my recent bank statements. He discovered that, in my mania, I had squandered most of the money from the original sale of my house on Victoria Street. Since the reason for selling the house had been to create a nest egg, this was extremely depressing. I recalled the uncontrolled shopping sprees in which I had thought nothing of spending thousands of dollars on clothes I neither wanted nor needed—or could even fit into. In those states of manic delusion, I had had no trouble in convincing myself that the clothes and the jewellery and the perfume were investments in myself and in my life, the life of a successful woman with exciting new prospects for a rich and prosperous future. And, as Sacha discovered, I had been ridiculously, inappropriately generous, showering friends and strangers with unworn clothes and unwanted objects.

  Some of this behaviour, I knew, was rooted in my childhood, when we had been taught to be generous towards other people. But I was also responding to a deep guilt for having fine things and to the knowledge that my mother would have profoundly disapproved of such extravagance and waste. Driven by guilt, I bestowed the items as fast as I bought them. None of this stuff, perhaps surprisingly, was junk: even in my mania, I shopped carefully, but extremely expensively.

  When, many years later, President Obama accused Americans of living recklessly and excessively, his words struck a chord with me. Mania had made me precisely that: reckless and out of control.

  Now, with the sober reality of my new life, I became painfully aware that I was running out of money. Sacha pointed to the receipts from the department stores, the huge amounts taken out in cash, the dozens of still unpaid bills. Between us, we decided that he would now take charge of my finances, that he would have power of attorney for my affairs and that he would give me a monthly allowance for my expenses.

  What he didn’t tell me was that he and Justin had decided that from now on, the two of them would make sure I was financially solvent. Unbeknown to me, they had told Fried that he should stop his small allowance to me and simply continue to pay for Alicia and Kyle. The boys did this to spare Fried financial hardship and to let him focus on his children. Unfortunately, Sacha forgot to mention this detail to me, with the result that when I saw from my next bank statements that Fried’s cheques had stopped coming, I was immensely hurt. I took this to be punishment, and heartless punishment, for what I had put him through. Only many years later did I learn the truth.

  Unable even to pay my cleaning lady, aware that my sons were making financial decisions for me and providing for me (though even with their allowance, I was still short), I found my poverty humiliating. Most demeaning of all was that I had to report to a social services office that dealt with money management. “Guardianship,” it was called, with my doctor and Sacha insisting on it.

  I had to visit an office in Ottawa’s equivalent of skid row, where a young woman my daughter’s age told me exactly what I could spend money on and what not, and how much it should all cost. I had to show her my bills, which she then paid from my account, before lecturing me on what funds remained. This process was perhaps necessary; it was certainly painful. The strict monitoring of personal finances went on for some three or four months. It was humiliating, like being married to Pierre Trudeau.

  I came home as spring 2001 began. My medication had been carefully regulated, I was seeing Dr. Cameron once a week for therapy, I was embarked on an exercise p
rogram and I was full of plans. One of the first things I did was to go to the grocery store and stock up on food. I began cooking again.

  I felt clean, shorn, coached in new ways of looking at life, not avoiding pain but confronting it, not overreacting but listening, not closing myself away but examining why I found certain things so hard and hurtful. The healing process had begun.

  Laughter, which I had lost from my life, was coming back to me. And I knew from Dr. Cameron that a normal, healthy person produces serotonin from laughing as well as from exercise. I had discovered that the fifth step—that of acceptance—was possible. The question was, could I maintain it?

  CHAPTER 13

  ME, AT LAST

  I remember Barbara, frail and standing in the cold and the rain with a glass of dirty water in her hand—a prop as she talked to reporters about the dearth of good water in the world. “You should be a pot of honey to these bees,” she said in an aside to me. “But give them real nourishment.” Barbara was saying: use your name and celebrity to spread the word on water.

  VANCOUVER, 1976

  Emerging from the cocoon of the Royal Ottawa Hospital was extremely hard. Like all patients who spend several months in hospital, I had grown dependent on the care, the familiarity of my surroundings and the sameness of my days. Sometimes I felt like a small child, navigating my way through an alien world. But something very fundamental had changed in me. I had at last accepted my illness and was no longer fighting it. I knew that in the end only I could take hold of my life, and there was too much at stake for me to duck the challenge. I had made my choice: I was going to be sane, and this time I would see it through.

  I was determined, in a way I had never been before, to stay well, to remake my life, to become once more a reliable mother to my children. I would be neither victim nor casualty. The two years leading up to my breakdown and the months I had been a mental patient had been extremely tough on the children, particularly the younger ones.