After son’s suicide, grieving blogger tweets loud and clear about loss
Kathleen Smith, a popular Edmonton blogger and prolific Twitter user with 14,500 followers, opines on everything from same-sex marriage (she supports it), to the waiters at Montana’s Cookhouse (they all look like Woody from Toy Story), to the messy brew that is Alberta politics (she skews part liberal-part libertarianpart pragmatist, depending on the day).
On Christmas Day, she was merrily tweeting about drinking “mimosas on the patio in beer glasses … at Grandpa’s house.”
Then came this tweet Dec. 3o: “Today I lost my youngest son, my beautiful boy. Our hearts are broken. We thank all of you for your kind messages.”
Mackenzie (Mack) Thomas Pawluk was a “styling dude,” his mother says from Edmonton in a voice that croaks with grief. She tells me he always wore a hat, not baseball caps — unless he was at work digging drains — but trilbys and newsboy caps.
He was funny, a real laugha-minute kid with a wide circle of friends and a series of epic pranks to his credit, including staging a mock pirate battle on the pirate ship at the West Edmonton Mall. (He was banned from the mall for that one).
Two days before Christmas, he talked with his mother about moving out of his father’s place — Smith and his father, Darren Pawluk, divorced when he was two, and both remarried but remain close. He even fished a box full of old dishes out of her basement for this soon-to-be-rented new pad.
A week later he killed himself, four days shy of his 19th birthday.
Ever since, his mother’s tweets have been falling like teardrops in a public display of grief that is raw and real and funny — “I’m still waiting for that truckload of egg salad sandwiches. Isn’t that what is supposed to happen? Someone dies & you earn sandwiches?” It’s also, she says, essential.
His parents, the biological ones and their respective spouses, gathered at the Glenwood Funeral Home last Thursday. They hugged, bawled their eyes out and heard a question they hadn’t considered.
“One of the first things the funeral director asked was, ‘Are you keeping the suicide part of it quiet?’” Smith said. “Mackenzie’s father and I looked at each other and said, ‘No.’
“We were going to talk about it. We were not going to be ashamed. When it is suicide, we whisper. We don’t with cancer, or accidental deaths. But when it is suicide people put a hand over their mouths and say, ‘Well, you know, you heard what happened.’
“My son deserves better than that.”
So Smith, a mother now with a gaping wound in her heart, has been talking about her son, telling the Twittersphere Mackenzie “would join in if he were here. And he’d be very pissed at me if I became a weepy pathetic quitter.”
Telling us: “You know what’s adorable? My former husband & @MrKikki (her current husband, Richard Smith) texting each other & smiling. You know what’s terrifying? Same thing.”
Telling us: “First rule of parental grief club: no self medicating. Second rule of parental grief club: no bitching that first rule sucks bald monkey ass.”
Telling us: “Mental health waiting lists 8 to 10 MONTHS in AB. Imagine telling cancer patient ‘ 8 mos to your first chemo treatment.’”
She hopes by speaking out other parents who have lost kids to suicide and chosen to stay quiet will understand it is OK to talk. Talking could erase the stigma around suicide, and maybe the conversation will be heard — or read in tweets — by some other laugh-a-minute-kid, with lots of friends and dreams and a darkness, unseen, gnawing away.
Smith has received thousands of emails since going public with her family’s grief. Most of the notes thank her for speaking out.
Mackenzie Pawluk, meanwhile, was well aware of his mother’s online persona. Among his pranks was a habit of popping onto her Facebook page to flirt shamelessly with her “older friends.”
It is a joke he never seemed tired of. It drove his mother nuts and now he is gone. Smith has not even seen his body yet. Wednesday is the family viewing at the funeral home.
“My entire life I wondered how parents who lost children survived,” @KikkiPlanet wrote Monday. “Now I understand that we do. We fight, we cry, we smile, we survive.”
We tweet.