When fall came, we three brothers again went our separate ways, and that was the last time I saw him, although he wasn’t too far from me, working on the ski hill in Rossland.
I had spoken to him on Monday of the week he died, a telephone call I made partly out of guilt. I had been kicking myself for not calling on his birthday in early October when a friend reminded me that, when it comes to family, it’s never too late to connect. She was right, of course, and I called him later that very day. We had a good talk about many things, the usual back-and-forth chatter between siblings. The subject that I remember most clearly was his plan to spend three days later in the week up on Kokanee Glacier.
“It’s early in the season,” he said, “so we have to be careful.”
I replied in the assertive tone of a concerned parent or older sibling: “Yes, you must be especially careful at this point in the season.” He burst out laughing. He knew that I knew little about avalanche dangers and the steps that need to be taken to avoid them. I knew only that mountain skiing in that region of B.C. always brought the risk of avalanches. I learned so much more when, after Michel’s death, I became a director of the Canadian Avalanche Foundation and pushed for increased funding to support avalanche awareness.
When word of Michel’s disappearance spread later that day, the national news media flooded Rossland, eager to get a quote from anyone who knew Michel. All the comments were the same—he was a happy-go-lucky young guy they knew only as Mike, popular with everyone who met him, a bon vivant type with a quick smile. They were all surprised to learn that this well-liked fellow who had no pretensions and intensely loved exploring the wilderness on skis was the son of a former prime minister.
Michel had built so much of his life around the snow and the air and the mountains and the people around him. He was a free spirit, enamoured of the Aboriginal culture that flourishes in Canada’s most beautiful places, a guy utterly at peace with himself in a way that had so far eluded both Sacha and me.
After booking an early flight to Montreal, I called my father to let him know I was coming and to ask if he had any news. My father had never been given to hopeful self-delusion, and he wasn’t now. “No,” he told me sadly, “and there won’t be any news because Michel is gone. The only question now is whether or not they find the body.”
Michel had ventured to Kokanee because the area held all the attractions he valued in life: a remote wilderness location, stunning scenery, challenging skiing, and the kind of stillness that is so rare in our hectic world. Skiing on the glacier above the shore of Kokanee Lake on a perfect sunny day was close to paradise for Miche. Kokanee Lake itself is an alpine jewel about a kilometre long, four hundred metres wide and very deep, surrounded by cliffs and precipitous rock slides. I understand why Michel would be drawn to it and how he probably weighed the risk of an early-season thaw, despite his laughter at my concern. The danger was not really an impediment. If he wanted badly enough to challenge his skill and satisfy his need for adventure, he would have gone under almost any circumstances. And he did.
He had probably long before come to terms with the risks faced by adventurers in the rugged parts of Canada where he most felt at home. A few years before his death, Michel had been idly watching a TV documentary about burial rites in Asia when he stated, matter-of-factly, “When it’s my turn, just leave me down at the bottom of the mountain where I lie.”
Kokanee Lake was at the bottom of the mountain, and the early-season avalanche knocked him off the path and into the depths of the lake. Had it been later in the year, the ice would have been frozen, and he and his buddies would have simply watched from the safety of the track in the centre of the lake as the small slide came down. His comment proved prescient: divers would never find his body, and he is there to this day.
Michel had carved his own route through life. While Sacha and I attended McGill, close to Dad, Michel chose to head east, to Dalhousie University in Halifax, where he studied microbiology. From there he went west for a life in which he wouldn’t have to think about the expectations others might have of him.
In my third year at McGill, I drove to Dalhousie to spend some time with Michel. We had been close as kids, but by the time he entered university, we had drifted apart somewhat. In Halifax, he seemed to get away from the influence of his brothers and his father, and he partied hard. It was on that visit that I came to understand his desire to forge his own identity.
I still miss him. I will always miss him. Michel was just twenty-three when he died, but he had already found his calm zone, a private place that eludes many of us throughout our lives. If Michel were alive today, I believe he would be the father of teenage children, and that Sophie and I and our kids would visit him and his family each Christmas. Perhaps Michel would have launched his own ski tourism operation; he loved the sport, and I believe he had a knack for business. In his spare time, he would have found a way to bring out his creativity through painting or writing. Whatever he chose to do, I know he would have been happy doing it. That was his gift.
When I stepped through the door of my dad’s house in Montreal late in the afternoon of the day we heard Michel was lost, I hugged my father tightly. Before we could speak more than a few words to each other, the telephone began to ring. My father made a move to answer it, but I stopped him and said, “No. That’s why I’m here.”
Once released, the news of Michel’s death sped across the country almost instantaneously. While my father dealt with his private grief, I spent the rest of the evening accepting condolences from family friends. The calls continued for several days. They were sincere and touching, and in a way they helped me deal with my severe emotional pain. I was fulfilling a function by helping my father through the worst days of his life, and the duties I assumed helped dilute the agony I was feeling over my brother’s death. Sacha had been filming a documentary in the Arctic when he got the news. He flew to B.C., where he acted as the family’s representative amid the rangers and divers involved in the recovery effort at Kokanee Lake, and he made a point of thanking each one of the searchers on our behalf. My mom was home in Ottawa devastated, comforting and comforted by Fried, Kyle, and Ally.
I stayed with my father in Montreal, helping to organize the memorial service for Michel at Église Saint-Viateur d’Outremont. The activity helped by keeping me busy, for a few days, but as reality set in, emotions overcame me. Sach delivered a beautiful, poignant, but heartbreaking eulogy. I could find no words and so read a First Nations prayer Miche loved.
Afterwards a reception was held at the Mount Royal Club, where some of Michel’s friends staged a video tribute to my brother. At first it seemed incongruous to have a life as vital and, in its own way, as rebellious as Michel’s being celebrated in a well-upholstered club straight out of Montreal’s gilded age. But as the rooms filled with Michel’s friends, it became clear that the Mount Royal dress code, which leaned heavily on bespoke tweed suits and Italian silk ties, was set aside that day. Michel’s friends, from Dal, from Camp Ahmek, from out west, arrived dressed as they were, and no one complained. The ambiance was sad, and beautiful, and the smell of patchouli was everywhere. It warmed my broken heart to be surrounded by people who had loved Michel so deeply, and so well.
Over the weeks that followed, Sacha became my father’s principal pillar of support after I moved back to Vancouver to resume my teaching duties and my life, trying to put the tragedy behind me. But at Christmas more bad news arrived, when my father was hospitalized with a serious case of pneumonia.
That was the medical diagnosis, at least. My own opinion was that the lights began to dim in my father’s soul when Michel died. He recovered from his pneumonia within a few weeks, and even travelled a bit after that. But from the time we buried Michel until his own passing two years later, my father was never the same man.
My mother endured horrific, debilitating grief at losing her son, compounded by and compounding her mental he
alth issues. She went through an extremely difficult period that left her entire family struggling to help during the five or six years that followed his death.
Michel’s death and its impact on my parents affected me deeply. I spent long days in contemplation and long nights dealing with the loss of Michel, my mother’s struggles, and the reality of my heretofore invincible father’s deterioration. I sought and received help from many quarters: faith, therapy, and, most of all, an incredible circle of friends. It was then that I understood that friendship is not truly about being there for the good times, the fun, the adventures, but about being there for each other during our most difficult, solitary moments. It was through that dark time that I understood that the extraordinary people I get to call my friends are what make me the luckiest person in the world.
In his last year of life, my father grew melancholy and existential. He had wrapped his mind around timeless questions of human mortality and the fate of the human soul. Sometimes he seemed angry with God, unable to understand why God had taken his son, who was so full of life, instead of him. It weakened his faith. One day Dad suggested to my mother, “If there is no afterlife, then nothing I have done in my life matters at all.” It may have been the most profoundly sad thing my father ever said.
During this period, I began to examine my own relationship with God. My father had been a devout Catholic throughout his life. When we were children, he took us to church on Sunday as often as he could, and as a young adult I performed the rites of worship just as they were taught to me. Yet as I grew, all too often the rituals struck me as more ceremony than substance. Was I too childish to appreciate their significance? Perhaps I was. Children dressed in their Sunday best at church are, after all, still children. When Sacha, Michel, and I had attended church services with our father, we dealt with the boredom by trying to make one another laugh without laughing ourselves.
When I was eighteen, I had a long conversation with my father about my attitude toward religion. I told him that I believed, as I believe now, in the existence of God and in the values and principles universal to all major religions. It was the dogmas of Catholicism that I struggled with, particularly the idea that someone who was not a sincere and practising Catholic could not gain entrance to heaven. That seemed strange and unacceptable to me. My father’s response to my questioning was to say, “You must make your own choices,” suggesting he was content that I at least had a grounding in Christianity, and that I could return to the teachings later in life if ever I so chose.
Michel’s death made my father question his faith, but it had the opposite effect on me. Amidst all the searing emotional pain I was feeling, I had a moment of revelation: despite all the torment and confusion we suffer in this valle lacrimarum, a divine sense of the universe exists, one we cannot comprehend. With this revelation came an oddly empowering sense that my life, like everyone else’s, is in God’s hands. This awareness hasn’t absolved me of the need to struggle for a better world and a better self, but it has helped me deal with things I cannot change, including death. It also helped reaffirm the core of the Christian beliefs I retain to this day.
Going through this spiritual crisis in the wake of Michel’s death, I became friends with Mariam Matossian, an Armenian Canadian who was a teacher at the time but later would become a successful folksinger. Mariam and I developed a genuine friendship, talking regularly, mostly about matters of faith. I was a lapsed Catholic and she was an evangelical Christian with doubts, and both of us were enduring a period of personal reflection.
When Mariam invited me to accompany her to an Alpha course, a program of instruction that guides attendees though discussions of the meaning of life experienced from a Christian perspective, I hesitated. I was suspicious that the course would consist of proselytizing for one sect or another. But I discovered this wasn’t the case at all. Instead, it was about developing the humility necessary to admit that we cannot get through life’s most difficult challenges on our own. Sometimes we need God’s help. I understood that I was going through just such a period, and the course helped me welcome God’s presence into my life.
The Sydney Olympics were on TV in September of 2000 when my father died, and to this day, the mere memory of seeing the Canadian flag at half-mast in the Olympic Athletes’ Village the day after still causes me to blink back tears. IOC vice-president Dick Pound said on air that his friend Pierre Trudeau “hadn’t been old long,” a phrase that perfectly summed up the end of my father’s life. Dad had remained a great outdoorsman well into his mature years, able to overcome almost any obstacle he faced. In his seventies he ripped his knee by stepping into a hole while on a vacation in the Caribbean; within a few years of the surgery, he was back skiing the black diamond trails at Whistler. One of the jokes among our family was that whenever Dad went to the movies he insisted on getting his senior citizen’s discount. It was laughable to view him as a traditional senior citizen; he was one of the most robust people I ever knew. Until, very suddenly, he wasn’t.
A few years earlier, just before I turned twenty-five, at the urging of a dear friend I had had “the talk” with my father. He was still hale and hearty, but as the eldest son I felt that I needed to have a conversation about end-of-life issues, preferably well before they arose. I asked him what sort of care he wanted, and what level of intervention he desired if his body started to fail him. He talked about joining his parents and grandparents in the family tomb in the small town of Saint-Rémi, and said that he wasn’t bothered by the likely very public, possibly state funeral he’d have, as long as it was in Montreal.
It was a difficult conversation for me to have with him, but he seemed somewhat bemused by it. I suppose it is a difficult conversation for anyone to have with an aging parent, but on the whole I felt fortunate that, unlike some adult children wrestling with their parents’ mortality, I had not come to him seeking some kind of emotional closure. It was a very practical conversation, extremely matter-of-fact, and it made a world of difference to have had that chat before he fell ill.
Of all the memories I have of my father and of our relationship, none is warmer and more poignant than what happened a year before he died, when he came to visit me while I was teaching at West Point Grey Academy in Vancouver. It was a quiet Friday lunchtime, and he enjoyed meeting my teaching colleagues and touring the school with me. It felt good to show him my home classroom and share what I was doing with my professional life.
As we were about to leave the building, we heard the scurry of running feet approaching from behind. We both turned to see one of my students, almost out of breath from chasing after us. As she approached, suddenly nervous, she said, “Mr. Trudeau . . .”
I had seen this sort of scene unfold thousands of times. Everywhere I had gone with my father, star-struck children and adults alike approached him to seek his autograph or shake his hand or ask if he would pose for a picture with them. I would always stand back smiling silently while my father politely indulged the request, and I stood back now.
But this young woman, possibly born the very year my father had taken his famous walk in the snow, didn’t even glance at him. Instead she addressed me. “Mr. Trudeau, I just wanted to let you know that I’ll be late for French class this afternoon because I have to help out in the gym.” I nodded and thanked her; she turned and trotted away without another word.
I felt a little embarrassed by the encounter. This student was the child of immigrants, part of the wave of newcomers who had come to this country and made a success of themselves thanks in part to the open-minded policies my father had introduced as prime minister. Now, he had been treated like some anonymous bystander, and I cringed a little before turning to Dad, unsure what to say.
To my delight, he was wearing a broad smile. After many years of receiving recognition and gratitude for so much that he had done, he hardly needed one more gesture of acknowledgement from a young Canadian. Instead, he had taken fatherly pride
in seeing his son maintaining our family’s legacy of service to Canada, this time as a teacher of young people. Now I, not Pierre Elliott, was “Mr. Trudeau” to a new generation of kids, and he was proud of me for that. It was a lovely warm moment for both of us to share.
And it was one of the last. In the spring of 2000, as I was finishing my school year at West Point Grey Academy, Sacha called to tell me our father was dying. He had been beset with Parkinson’s disease and had already survived a bout of pneumonia. He will get past this somehow, I assured myself. But while he was tough, my father was not indestructible. Sacha revealed that Dad had been diagnosed with prostate cancer some time ago and had decided not to pursue treatment. The disease now seemed to be entering its terminal phase.
“What the hell?” I almost shouted through the telephone. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Sacha explained that it had been Dad’s orders to keep me in the dark. My father knew I would drop everything I was doing in Vancouver and return to Montreal the moment I heard about his condition. He didn’t want to me to quit on my students before the school year was over. I know my father had been trying to be considerate, but I was angry anyway. Some irrational part of me thought that perhaps I could have fixed the unfixable if I had known about it earlier. When I settled down, I packed my bags and once again caught a long, sad flight to Montreal, where I would spend the summer with my father, reading him his favourite plays by Shakespeare, Racine, and Corneille, and just sitting quietly with him.
Common Ground Page 11