THE DAMAGE DONE
A family laments the future that never will be, after their husband and father was killed while bicycling — one of Toronto’s growing tally of road deaths
Christine Crosbie still has a lot of questions about her husband’s death.
Not about his final moments, because she heard from the cyclists who held his hands and stayed with him after he was struck on Dundas St. E. a month ago.
And not about whether he’d been at fault. There is video showing Doug had the right of way on a green light when he was hit by the front bumper of a truck as the driver made a right turn at Jones Ave., police told her.
What Crosbie wants to know is what she’s supposed to do with the rest of her life.
“When the police told me, I said ‘No, no, no. I believe what you’re saying but this has not happened. This is not our story,’ ” Crosbie says, sitting in the east Toronto home she bought with her husband six years ago so their two kids, Davis, now 18, and Marina, 22, would be closer to their French immersion school.
The couple met when they were journalism students at Concordia in Montreal and had been married for nearly 25 years.
Doug died May 16 at the age of 54. A woman killed while riding her bike on Bloor St. on June 12 brought to 93 the number of cyclists and pedestrians killed since the city adopted Vision Zero — an initiative to reduce deaths on the streets — last year. The deaths raise the question — once again — of whether Toronto’s goal for safer streets is more rhetoric than reality. And they show the human cost of the failed policy, the lives upended and the trauma that spreads through the community like a widening ripple.
Crosbie says that her husband was her rock, always there for her and “an amazing friend to so many people.”
“He was such an ideal male role model. He had a super feminist mom so he had all of those ideals,” she says. “He was a really ethical person. He was a really good friend to anybody. If someone was moving or if someone needed some kind of support, he was always there.
“I’m glad my kids are at an age where he’s kind of already bestowed that on them. They’ll take that away. If they were very young, they might not have registered that.”
Close to noon on the day he died, she was called into a meeting in the human resources department of OCAD University, where she works as communications manager. Police came in and told her they were sorry, that there had been an accident and that her husband was killed riding his bike to work that morning. They pushed Doug’s wallet across the table to her.
“It was OK that way because no matter how you do it, no matter how gently or slowly or nicely you do it, it’s just like a total nightmare,” says Crosbie, a former Global News reporter. “You’re in total shock.”
She was thankful there was no chance for her to think something had happened to her kids.
“Do you have a checklist, because I have no idea how to deal with this,” Crosbie says she asked police.
“Can you give a checklist? Can you tell me what I’m going to tell my children? Because I don’t know what I’m going to tell my children. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing. Can you just give me some direction? You tell people this all the time,” she said to them.
Afterwards, she went to the hospital and then to her son’s workplace with her brother-in-law to tell him his father had died. She called her daughter in Montreal, where she is a Fine Arts student at Concordia.
Crosbie says word of Doug’s death spread quickly in the neighbourhood and in Riverdale where the family used to live. She posted a kind of obituary and photos publicly on Facebook about Doug, who started his career at the CBC and produced Mayday, an award-winning show on the Discovery Channel, and instantly received hundreds of responses, comfort she says in an impossible situation where you can’t really be comforted.
Crosbie says she would have tattooed the words from the obit on her forehead, “that this amazing person is gone because of this stupid thing that happened. The more people I can tell, the better.”
Her husband’s colleagues at Cineflix Productions downtown reached out on Facebook to say what a fantastic boss he was. She heard from the cyclists who stopped to help Doug as he lay on the ground.
“Four people who were at the crash site when it happened messaged me and said, ‘I want you to know that someone called 911 immediately, that there were three people holding his hand and talking to him and there was someone with him the whole time until he was taken away. I’m sorry we couldn’t do more for you.’ Could you imagine they would do that?” she says of their kindness.
Crosbie doesn’t know all the details contained in the video of her husband’s death, but she knows he was both a cautious driver and rider. Police say he was not at fault and not distracted.
“Not that I would ever fault a cyclist for making any of those mistakes,” she says. “But he didn’t.” Mayor John Tory called her a week later on the morning of the funeral, when 350 people attended the ceremony for Doug at Eastminster United Church on Danforth Ave., and invited her to have a private meeting with him to discuss ways to improve infrastructure, but as she struggled to even get into her dress, she really couldn’t think about it. Crosbie says she’s not an activist — not yet. “I’m not that educated on how things are being done, whose responsibility it is,” she says about road safety. “So I’m just learning that now in the worst possible way.”
She’d like drivers to be smarter, to understand how careful they need to be.
“And consequences that go beyond punishment, that are more about educating,” she says. “I would like to see having to do safety lessons before getting your licence back. Having to maybe meet with the family if they (the family) were up for it. Not everybody will be.”
She doesn’t know if the driver will be charged, but she says that even if he is, it won’t bring her husband back. Police say they are still investigating and there is “no determination on charges yet.” “I’m not looking for vengeance,” Crosbie says. Now, she busies herself with all the things that have to be done when a person dies, changes to the mortgage, to insurance policies, visits to the bank. Davis, a student at the University of Guelph, will live with her for the summer. Marina goes back to Montreal soon. Friends stop by every day to visit or bring food.
Doug’s colleagues made her a little booklet and each person wrote a paragraph and pasted it in the book. She says someone included the last text message that he had sent them about what a good job they’d done editing some footage. Another said what an awesome boss he’d been.
She says all the care the family has received makes her wonder how elderly people cope, when the number of friends and relatives has dwindled with age and someone they know has died.
Crosbie and her husband did most things together, including picking out the furnishings and artwork in their home, and so she looks for things around her that are just Doug. She had his wedding ring made smaller and wears it with her own on her left hand. She and Marina found a pack of ticket stubs from concerts he’d attended and they plan to do a collage.
Doug had wanted to do a family tattoo and the two of them had been looking for designs, so she and the kids went and got one that says “Heart of Gold,” a song from Neil Young’s Harvest album, Doug’s favourite. “I still don’t quite get it,” Crosbie says . “I’m fine a lot of the time. But then when I think about it — all these things that we wanted to do, travel plans — and that’s kind of like out the window. He was always there for me,” she says, her voice lowering to a whisper.
“For 25 years. We practically grew up together.”