OUT OF TRAGEDY, MOM HOPES BOOK HELPS OTHERS
Memoir recounts daughter’s struggle with Borderline Personality Disorder
She was more rebellious than most teenagers. In fact, other moms could hardly believe the stories about Debbie Sands’ mercurial middle child, Amy.
“They’d tell me, ‘You should write a book,’ ” says Sands. “I always wanted to be a writer, but life got in the way.”
Earlier this year, Sands finally fulfilled that desire with her first book entitled A Moth to the Flame (Crossfield Publishing), a memoir of parenting a child suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder.
“It was therapeutic,” she says of the book, which topped the local bestseller list earlier this year, its proceeds going to the McMan Youth Family and Community Services Association. “I also wrote it to help those dealing with this illness,” says Sands, who will be signing copies of her book at Indigo at Spectrum Shopping Centre (2555 32 Street N.E.) from noon to 4 p.m. on Saturday, July 30.
Four summers ago, it was a tragic death that brutally interrupted the life of Debbie Sands and her family.
Her 27-year-old daughter was with a group of people in the garage of a suspected drug home in Calgary’s southeast, when shots rang out in the night. One of those bullets hit Amy in the spinal cord, exiting out her throat. While the shooting was not random, it was later established that her ex-boyfriend, not Amy, was the intended target. In 2014, 28-year-old Jesse George Hill pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter and is currently serving an eight-year prison sentence.
On that horrible day, Debbie Sands heard the news reports from her Okotoks home. “My head said it couldn’t be Amy, but my heart knew it was,” says Sands.
While the young woman was described as being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Sands and her husband Ed, a councillor with the Town of Okotoks, knew better. They had long feared that Amy’s self-destructive path, one she had set out on years earlier, could one day lead her to such a fatal encounter.
Before the Calgary Police Service had confirmed her identity, Ed spoke out publicly, sharing the story of Amy’s lifelong struggle with mental illness.
Today, Debbie Sands and her family have extensive knowledge about Borderline Personality Disorder, a condition affecting about two per cent of the population that is marked by unstable moods, behaviour and relationships. Many of those affected have co-occurring issues that can include substance abuse, eating disorders and suicidal behaviours.
“Amy had all of them,” says Sands of the many disturbing symptoms of an illness thought to have both genetic and environmental causes. “But we had never even heard of Borderline Personality Disorder until her doctor told us about it the year before she died.”
With the benefit of hindsight, Sands can see that the signs were there from the very start. “She might be just tired or hungry, but she would scream her head off,” she recalls of her then-toddler’s extreme reactions, so different from her older sister and later, younger brother. “As soon as you satisfied her need, she’d go back to being happy.”
While that could be dismissed as the terrible twos, Amy’s mood swings became more pronounced as she entered the school system, exacerbated by the relentless taunting the chubby girl received from classmates.
“She was already so sensitive, so easily hurt, the bullying was traumatizing for her,” says Sands, whose daughter later blossomed into a willowy beauty. “If there is an environmental component to BPD, that would have contributed.”
Common teenage acts of rebellion, such as staying out past curfew, would evolve into substance abuse, petty crime and relationships with men involved in crime. Amy even began to take crystal meth, finding the drug helped her stay slim.
“People would say to me, ‘You need to be tougher on her, throw her out to the wolves, let her find her own way,’” says Sands. “But I knew she wouldn’t survive on her own.”
After moving out in her teens, Amy returned to the family home several times. Yet the next few years brought even greater chaos, with Amy putting her hands around her mother’s throat during one argument, along with stealing her older sister’s identity in order to commit crimes.
On the night she died, Amy had gone to a house at the request of her ex-boyfriend, who had just been released from jail. “We told her to stay away,” says Sands, her eyes tearing up from the memory of the worst day of her life.
Despite the terrible times, Sands also remembers a beautiful young woman who in her better moments could be loving and charming. “There is now a talk therapy that is doing wonders for those with BPD,” she says.
“I think Amy could have been helped, if she hadn’t been murdered. But at least by sharing our story, I might be able to spare another family such a tragedy.”
We had never even heard of Borderline Personality Disorder until her doctor told us about it the year before she died.