Life after the suicide of a child
When her dolls were injured, she would triage each of them in her bedroom. Then, after the scope of their trauma was duly prioritized, she would wander downstairs in her Niagara Falls home wearing an apron embellished with a red cross to find her mother, an intensive care nurse or her step- dad, a paramedic.
The make- believe plots imagined by the young girl whose heart was filled with compassion for anything living were limitless. She usually needed medical advice. How to spiral wrap a fracture. Or, did her mother have pins she could borrow? Her bear had fallen and shattered his hipbone. “We’ve got to put pins in it,” she would explain, sounding all official and doctor- like.
It was no surprise to anyone that Victoria Marcotte wanted to be a paramedic.
“She wanted to help people,” says her mother, Wendy Fisher, 51. “It was something in her blood.”
Victoria was grounded and enthusiastic. Her sense of humour was pure, fluent sarcasm that surpassed even the expert, cultured wit of her mom. Wendy once grounded her daughter by uttering words that both asserted her authority and maintained a requisite sense of humour: “I’m grounding you until menopause,” she told Victoria.
Without a beat missed, Victoria smoothly asked for clarification: “Yours or mine?” “I think if she hadn’t have been my daughter I would have been her friend anyways,” says Wendy.
“She sunk her teeth into life.” Victoria was 16 years old in 2012 when she died by suicide.
She hanged herself.
When police found her, Victoria was on the edge of life. She was gone, but not all the way. So she was airlifted to McMaster hospital in Hamilton where she was diagnosed as brain dead and her organs were retrieved, to be given to others. Her lungs to a woman with cystic fibrosis. Her kidneys to two teenage boys. Her eyes. Her heart. Her pancreas, liver, ligaments, tendons and bones.
“Life is funny,” says Wendy. “All she wanted to do was save lives and in the end, that’s what she achieved.”
And then, Wendy and her husband, Peter, and her teenage sons Alex and Doug, sank into an unfathomable place of pain and grief. A place both barren of emotion and overwhelmed by it. A place only other parents whose children have killed themselves have ever, ever felt. On Saturday, Wendy will be one of the speakers at a forum on children and grief to be held at Brock University. The second annual event is organized by Grief Network Niagara, a group of professionals and volunteers who provide bereavement support in the community.
The morning session is for children and families. They will watch the movie, Moana, the story of an adventurous teenager who sails on a daring mission to save her people and discovers the one thing she always sought — her own identity. There will be discussions on grief, resiliency and ways to cope.
In the afternoon, adults can attend sessions on topics that range from nightmares and grief dreams, to secondary loss and preparing for the holidays.
Wendy will share her story in the session Children and Suicide Loss.
It will be the first time she will tell her story, outside of Loving Outreach, a support group for people who are living with the loss of a loved one by suicide. It was started by Walt and Lucienne Chemerika after their 21- year- old daughter, Lisa, died by suicide in 1989.
The Chemerikas are older now. Wendy and Peter are helping with the group, which meets the second Monday of each month at Silver Spire church in St. Catharines.
“The stories are devastating,” she says. “If I have the opportunity to help one person, and make a difference in one life by sharing my story, then I’ll tell it as many times as I have to.
“I don’t want another parent to have to deal with what we’ve been through.
“I want to stop it.
“I want to change it.
“I want to make a difference.” After Victoria’s death, she felt profoundly, irrevocably sad for Alex and Doug. They had not only lost their little sister, but in many ways, their mother too.
“I was so deep into depression, everything happened around me and I just didn’t care,” she says.
“The pain ... there’s not a minute,” she begins, then pauses.
“The whole grief component involved with a suicide is you don’t know why.
“It’s the question that drives you to almost your own insanity.”
Her three children were close knit, each separated by one year in age. They were raised to give without expecting to receive. They loved winter. Loved building forts, having snowball fights and eagerly shovelled the driveways of their elderly neighbours. They didn’t like accepting money so they would scamper home before the older women could get to their front doors to pay them.
When one woman insisted and gave Victoria $ 10, she used it to buy gas for a snow blower so they could clear more driveways. The next time, she used it to buy food for the foodbank.
They were especially fond of one neighbour, a Second World War veteran named Bill. Every Remembrance Day, the trio made thank you cards and delivered them to his house. When he died, they went to the cemetery to salute his grave, except for Victoria who didn’t like graveyards. When Bill’s widow found nearly 10 decades of their cards, she returned them to Wendy, with gratitude.
By all accounts, their lives were wonderfully ordinary. They were happy and loved. And yet, there was a labyrinth of issues in Victoria’s life that for reasons Wendy and Peter will never understand, she couldn’t find her way out. There was bullying. There were all the social pressures of social media and the stresses of having to make decisions that could impact the rest of her life. There were problems that might have seemed insignificant to someone older, with more lived experience, “but that could be totally rocky in the world of a child,” says Wendy.
“You wouldn’t see any suffering looking at her. She looked very happy.
“I’m a nurse. My husband’s a paramedic. We couldn’t see the cracks that were there.
“She got to a point where she made a permanent decision to solve a problem that was temporary.”
And yes, the guilt of second guessing, of analyzing every single moment in time with a harsh, self- defeating “what if”, is penetrating. Never ending. Futile.
Yet somehow, over weeks and months they picked up the debris of their lives scattered across the world they once knew, and tried to assemble it back together again.
“It would be very easy to go upstairs and crawl under the covers and never get out,” says Wendy.
“It’s trying to learn how to forage your new normal without your child,” she says.
This could have been the end of the story.
Only, their pain did not end here. “Just when we thought that we could even put our lives back on track, then we lost Alex.
“And I felt gutted.
“I was angry. Angry at myself for not seeing the pain.
“I felt like the grief would on on forever. That we’d never live life again,” says Wendy.
In 2013, a year after his sister’s death, Alex died by suicide. He hanged himself.
Alex talked about the future. He seemed engaged. He wanted to be a soldier and serve his country, so he had joined the 10th Battery, 56th Field Artillery Regiment in St. Catharines.
It was a connection that gave him pride, says Wendy.
One day, during physical fitness training, Alex and his squad had to march with their fully loaded, 70- pound- something packs along the Niagara Parkway, from Fort George to the Brock’s monument in Queenston Heights park, an 11- kilometre hike that finishes with an uphill climb.
His superiors later told Wendy and Peter that Alex was in such good shape, he was in line to break the record for speed — completing the distance in the shortest time. However, at some point in the march, Alex learned that two of his friends had fallen so far behind that they would not have finished in the required time.
He turned back. When he found his friends, he offered words of encouragement. “Then he took each of them under the arms, him in the middle, and he dragged them all the way to the finish line,” says Peter.
He was headed to be an officer. But he just wanted to be a regular soldier, says Wendy. Alex had his sister’s brilliant wit. Long ago, Peter, 54, had been a member of the Lincoln and Welland Regiment, an infantry unit. So when Alex joined the militia, he announced to Peter that he aspired to rise through the ranks ... so that one day Peter would have to salute him.
The pair often traded friendly banter. “I still outrank you,” Peter would say. “Not for long,” promised Alex.
Grief is a journey. And Wendy has arrived at a place of acceptance. She can talk about Victoria and Alex without dissolving into puddles of inconsolable tears.
“I’ve accepted my new reality,” she says. “I’ve accepted the fact that two of my children are no longer here with me.”
Yet, even acceptance can be a place of uncertain boundaries.
Is Wendy happy? She pauses. A few seconds of silence are replaced with careful words: “I’m happy I have the opportunity to evoke change.”
“The memories I have of both children are so precious to me.
“They have to sustain me.
“I have no more of their lives to chronicle.”
Their family is closer now. There’s a sense, a heightened awareness of each other’s feelings, she says.
She tells people there is hope. A promise of a better tomorrow, even if it’s one minute at a time.
“It is possible to move forward with a meaningful life,” she says.
“It takes working through the journey and the grief.
“I want to let people know that although your life is profoundly changed, it’s still worth living.”