Spade’s death compels writer to share story of loss
“You’re members of a secret club that nobody wants to join.”
Toronto writer Corinne McDermott, on why after Kate Spade’s sudden death she wrote a searing Facebook post on parents who kill themselves and the children they leave behind.
When celebrity designer Kate Spade died suddenly in her New York apartment this week at 55, and police confirmed her death as an apparent suicide, it was only natural that her many fans claimed a piece of the sadness.
From Chelsea Clinton describing what it meant to get her first Kate Spade handbag, to less well-known women posting loving descriptions of Spade’s vividly coloured household goods as “cheerful” and “hopeful,” the outpouring was both a tribute to Spade’s legacy and the inevitable question mark: How could such a smart, successful woman choose to end her life, leaving behind an enviable string of achievements, including a long, supposedly loving marriage — and, much more poignantly, a 13-year-old daughter?
For one Toronto writer, Corinne McDermott, whose own mother killed herself when she was 17, Spade’s death evoked such painful memories from her own past that it compelled her to write a remarkable and anguished Facebook post that has been shared widely.
Here is how McDermott’s post — written, she told me, on her phone on the subway ride home from work after she heard the news — began: “Tucked inside my Kate Spade wallet is a photocopy of my mother’s suicide note. When we found her, the police had to keep the original as evidence, before they could officially declare it a suicide.
“I know she wrote other letters, too. But I can’t remember who they were to or if they ever received them. I was 17.
TIMSON continued on E9 “A survivor of suicide struggles with more than just grief. We are still here, but we are also left behind.” CORINNE MCDERMOTT ON FACEBOOK
“I pulled my letter out and reread it for the first time in a long time, after I learned the designer Kate Spade had taken her life and left a note for her daughter, Frances Beatrix. Bea is 13. She will never be the same.
“When your parent takes their own life, you’re still here. But you are also left behind.”
McDermott has no interest, she said, in “grief-jacking” the Spade family tragedy.
Already within a day, rumours were swirling about how and why Spade — cocreator along with her husband, Andy Spade, of a multimillion dollar fashion empire — had killed herself.
There was talk of marital discord. Andy Spade, with whom she had been together for 35 years, later released a statement confirming the couple had been living apart for the past 10 months. “We were best friends trying to work through our problems in the best way we knew how.”
But that wasn’t the whole story. Spade also said in his statement that his wife suffered from depression and anxiety “for many years” and was working closely with doctors “to treat her disease, one that takes far too many lives.”
While the contents of a note left at the scene were not officially confirmed, gossip sites reported it had been addressed to Kate Spade’s daughter, Frances Beatrix (Bea), telling her not to blame herself in any way.
McDermott, editor-in-chief of Bell Media’s the Movie Network magazine and the founder of havebabywilltravel.com, said she was still wondering a day later what gave her the courage to post her own devastatingly personal note.
“Not being able to understand how someone could leave their child … is a good thing. It means you haven’t experienced the kind of pain and suffering that would lead someone to choose suicide.” CORINNE MCDERMOTT ON FACEBOOK
Maybe it was because it was her 47th birthday, and the love was pouring in anyway on Facebook. Maybe it was the eerie coincidence of not only having a treasured Kate Spade black-and-white polka-dot wallet, but what was tucked inside it — that suicide note from her mother, which began: “I am so sorry to do this to you.”
Maybe it was because she finally figured out, as a mother herself of a 12-year-old daugh- ter and a 9-year-old son, that she had some things to say about mental illness, suicide and the necessity of seeking help.
McDermott’s mother, Anne (born Margaret-Anne), was also, she says, “a smart, successful woman.” She was 19 when she came to Canada from Glasgow, 21 when she married Corinne’s dad, 23 when she gave birth to her only child, Corinne, and at 24, says her daughter, “was a professor of math, computer science, and physics.”
Anne McDermott was diagnosed with “what was then called manic depression and now called bipolar disease,” and while she was treated with meds, she suffered debilitating side effects, and eventually took her own life, just three weeks short of her 41st birthday.
It wasn’t until 10 years after her mother’s death that Corinne McDermott read the famous book An Unquiet Mind, by Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, that chronicled the author’s epic struggle with mental illness.
“I was bawling my eyes out on the streetcar.”
It helped her understand, in part, her mother’s struggle, if not her decision to end her life. And it helped her, when she heard of Kate Spade’s suicide, to write: “Not being able to understand how someone could leave their child, their partner, their loved ones, is a good thing. It means you haven’t experienced the kind of pain and suffering that would lead someone to choose suicide.”
McDermott is reluctant to republish her powerful post because she doesn’t want anyone to think she is making the Spade story about her. But hearing personal stories like this is how we mourn, how we help and how we heal.
What stands out is the searing sense of identification with Spade’s daughter, and the blunt truths it enables McDermott to write: “In time, I have come, and Bea will come, to understand these things. But a survivor of suicide struggles with more than just grief. We are still here, but we are also left behind.
“We weren’t enough. The thought of missing us wasn’t painful enough to decide to stay.
“We weren’t enough. We weren’t smart enough to fix the problem or strong enough to help.”
And yet, there’s hope, too. As McDermott told me, she got the necessary painful help she needed to build a “lovely beautiful family” that she wishes her mother were here to share.
“If anyone out there is feeling this way now, things can change in a heartbeat, don’t give up.”
And the messages she received about her post included “people actually saying they may have had these thoughts, that their kids would be better off without them. And my words showed them otherwise.
“That’s worth it to me.”