Erin's Journals

Mon, 09/23/2019

September 23, 2019 Erin's Journals

Just a thought… A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for. [John A. Shedd]

Ah, a new season. And what a summer it was! I can’t say that, when it began, I ever envisioned spending nearly seven weeks of it trying to work through a whole lot of things I had pounded down and embedded in wet cement, but that’s how it went. And, boy, am I glad – and grateful – I did!

I was planning to tell you today about two movies I saw this past weekend: Ad Astra and Downton Abbey. I’ll save that for Thursday.

Today, I am moved to say this: Margaret Trudeau rocks. I was sent a review yesterday of her one woman show “A Certain Woman of an Age” (a play on the term “woman of a certain age” which, of course, she definitely is) which was staged as part of JFL42 in Toronto.

I saw an early version of her presentation at the Registered Practical Nurses’ Association of Ontario annual gathering in Ottawa two years ago, which I emceed, and was blown away. In fact, I refer to it in Mourning Has Broken, as she is a high-profile bereaved mother – among many other things. I wrote a journal about it and I’ve copied it below today’s entry, if you care to read it. As it happens, this year I’ll be the keynote speaker myself at that same RPNAO event to be held in London, Ontario on October 3. A nice full-circle moment, if you will.

An advocate for mental health, Ms Trudeau is frank and vulnerable and it’s the latter quality that scares me so much in this age of online vitriol. I can only hope that she never EVER reads the “comments” on any articles about her talk, which is delivered as a speech from a podium.

I was struck by the honesty and deep humanity that Ms Trudeau shared in her struggles and triumphs (“bad choices make for good stories” was one line I recalled and loved). I hope that in this age of hating – literally hating – someone who does not share your political beliefs, she is spared the pain of reading the barbs of people who choose to post with cowardice and anonymity, and who only aim to cause pain.

I understand from a Toronto Star write-up that her presentation does not include mention of her most prominent son’s vastly embarrassing revelations of late, since it wasn’t part of what was deemed a “script.” I would have been tempted to lean into that a little if I was her, although I can understand fully her fear that any words she said, even in jest, might end up on late night TV or in the mouths of her son’s political opponents.

You can think what you want of a woman we’ve known – or thought we knew – almost our entire lives here in Canada. But all I see is an awful lot of courage. Courage to take on the haters and the cowards simply by standing up and telling her story. Courage to share her own struggles with mental illness and experiences being an inmate of what she calls “the crown jewel in the federal penitentiary system” (24 Sussex Drive).

At 71, she could stay at home in Montreal and revel in the quiet pleasures of being a mother and grandmother, as well as best-selling author. Instead, she is, to paraphrase Brené Brown’s take on a Teddy Roosevelt quote, daring greatly: she puts herself in the arena, covered in mud and blood, and makes her mistakes with more bravery than any who sling barbs and criticize her from the safety of the viewing stands. And that, to me, is real courage.

Have a gentle day and I’ll be back with you Thursday – from Brad Pitt’s future in space to Downton Abbey’s royal grace – two movies that couldn’t have been more different.

In the meantime, here’s that journal from two years ago:

A number of things strike you when you are in a room listening to Margaret Trudeau speaking.

First, it’s that she’s been a figure in your life for as long as you can remember. From the young Flower Power bride of a charismatic politician to the wild child partying with the Rolling Stones and dancing with abandon at Studio 54, to a woman who seemed to publicly battle demons of mental illness, lose herself to grief following the death of one of her sons and then emerge as a spokesperson for mental health.

In the course of an hour, she spoke of all of those things.

But the other thing that strikes you is how she speaks: like someone who has just run into the house to tell you of the most marvelous rainbow or a tornado on the horizon. She almost bounces in her red pumps, her curls tossing as she gesticulates and laughs, her voice modulating from excitement to sadness with a force that takes her listeners on the roller coaster with her.

I felt exhausted when the hour was done, as though we’d been running hand in hand on a train platform, passing each car that represented another element in an extraordinarily public and equally sad life.

Her time in our lives began when she was a teen on a family trip at a Club Med; whilst awaiting a chance to flirt with the young, handsome French Canadian staffer on the beach, she met up with an older gentleman who, she says, began grilling her about Plato of all things!

When she returned to her parents’ side, her mother told her that the man she’d been killing time with was the leader of the Liberal party of Canada. Ho-hum, thought Margaret, and as her politician parents socialized with this lawyer from Montreal, she continued to prance around in her bikini, somewhat oblivious to his attentions.

Some time later, back in Canada, her mother told Margaret that Mr. Trudeau had asked for a date; it turns out that Pierre Trudeau told a confidant that “…if ever I marry, it will be that woman.” And so began an unconventional marriage: at one time the unhappy bride told her husband that he could see other people but, she exclaimed, “I didn’t mean Barbra Streisand!”

We all laughed when she continued as an aside, “I told her that she actually won,” referring to the fact that it was Barbra, not Margaret, who “got away.” In another humorous moment, Margaret refers to 24 Sussex Drive as the “crown jewel in the federal penitentiary system.”

Mrs. Trudeau’s story is honest and open: she speaks of deep depression, of being bipolar, being misdiagnosed and being deprived of proper conventional mental health treatment because of her last name.

Her own mother eschewed psychiatric analysis for her daughter, saying she just needed sleep and the company of friends. A time spent locked away in a hospital was disastrous when the levels of lithium in her body, which were not being properly monitored, threatened to seriously damage her liver. Her life was imperiled more than once.

In all, Margaret Trudeau lived a difficult life in secret – and not-so-secret (although she says of her time with the Rolling Stones, that she was a goody-goody and people like to imagine things as far worse than they were) – and seemed to have found happiness, balance and a healthy stability in her life with a second husband and more children.

And then she lost her and Pierre’s 23-year-old son Michel in an avalanche in BC in 1998. This horrific tragedy took her to her knees – literally and figuratively – and for six months she was unable to get up off the floor even, her doctors believe, trying to die by not eating or drinking water (just as Pierre had done in the last days of his battle with prostate cancer, going out on his own terms).

She found a will to live, was saved and now plays her most important public role yet: proof that one can, with proper treatment and medication, triumph over the stigma and shame that has for so long been associated with mental illness.

She spoke not of politics nor of her son, the Prime Minister (except to point out that Pierre had won a majority when she campaigned with him – but not as big as Justin’s), and that was all right. We weren’t there to hear anything more than her own story, which you can read about in her four books, the most recent of which is Time of Your Life: Choosing a Vibrant, Joyful Future published by HarperCollins.

The lineup to speak to Mrs. Trudeau after her speech was a long one and she agreed to meet with every single person, regardless of whether they purchased one of her books.

I came away from her speech, given at the Registered Practical Nurses’ Association of Ontario’s 2017 gala in Ottawa, exhausted, humbled and awakened; I know that I have got to find someone to talk to about the stress and the grief that are so much of our waking lives, Rob’s and mine. She reminded me of the power of taking action, even when you think there’s no more help to be had, that you’re just going to have to “live with it” and that, as always, there is tremendous strength in vulnerability.

Thank you, Margaret, for sharing yourself and for speaking in such a manner that held us all completely in the palm of your hand. You may never know how many people have been touched and changed by your message and it’s one that should be spread as widely and loudly as can be. #sicknotweak

@erindavis on Twitter

Thu, 09/19/2019

September 19, 2019 Erin's Journals

Just a thought… Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. [Dr. Viktor Frankl]

So, how’s your week been? Mine’s been…busy. I truly had no idea how much work was involved in recovery until I began it – and this applies to everyone, whether from illness or disease, or from traumas and change (large and small).

I have also finally come to admit that one of my biggest enemies is judgment. And it’s not from outside – as it used to be – but from within. I’ll explain.

When you live and work in an environment that is literally a popularity contest (in my case, with radio ratings monthly, and in a former life, counting how many clicks there were to posts or blogs – something that quite literally no longer counts), each day can be a challenge. I faced judgment as to whether what we were doing – topics discussed or written about, songs that were played and so on – were to people’s liking. Many felt free to share their opinions (especially at Christmas time). But that was the job and I loved so much of it that the rest was worth it.

Now, of course, that has changed. I’ve set more boundaries in my personal life and have removed several of the demands for more-more-more when it comes to numbers. Would I love to see our Switzerland-to-The Netherlands riverboat cruise in 2020 filled with just guests who want to be with Mike Cooper and me? Oh, heck yeah! (Anyone wanting information on that can click here to email our friend Gerry Koolhof.)

Do I hope that my friend Allan Bell will sell out tickets for the Old Mill-style dance Mike and I are hosting in Markham November 1 to aid Markham Stouffville Hospital? Absolutely.

But the pressures are off now. It feels strange but wonderful.

I don’t worry that what I write or post on social media will not please people. I stay away from political discussions, especially as one scandal after another – real or manufactured – arises each day; it’s just not worth the garbage responses and personal attacks that can accompany having a different point of view. I’m done with that idiocy and I’m embracing the Serenity Prayer‘s reminder to have the courage to change the things I can (and the wisdom to know the difference).

I block bots and bigots, have stopped following acidic accounts on Twitter and deleted my subscriptions to emailed newsletters that used to put a knot in my stomach when I saw their subject lines first thing in the morning. How much of my tension was self-inflicted! Now I use that morning time on meditation instead. Ahhhh.

The judgment that I’m working on now is something that I think a lot of us deal with: the voices that peck away at us from within. The ones that ask me why I’m doing this or not doing that; the ones that ask if I’m doing enough or doing too much. But this week, I found an astoundingly clear answer in a book that I’ve waited far too long to read: Viktor E. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning.

If you’re not familiar, I’ll boil it down: Dr. Frankl was a young Austrian doctor when he was shipped to a series of concentration camps during World War II. Much of his family, including his pregnant 24-year-old wife, were among the millions who perished. The first part of the book is a series of moments and experiences from that horrific stain on history as seen through his eyes, both as a man and as one who studies the mind and its workings. It’s filled with heartbreak and abominations, but its pictures of human nature in that most stripped-down moment in time reveal glimpses of humour and even hope. It’s a brilliant and timeless piece of work.

(I am going to make it clear here that in no way am I comparing the loss of our daughter to the unimaginable hardships endured by those who have suffered physical and mental torture, the loss of their entire families and communities and so much more in wartime – and even peacetime – atrocities. While I think that something like that might go unsaid, I feel I should point it out, lest anyone imagine I believe otherwise. Full Stop.)

Back to what jumped out at me from this book. It was a line that made me reach for my highlighter, mark it and then read again and again. I’ve cited it to counsellors, to Rob and to anyone who will listen to me in recovery. An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behaviour. The line refers to the behaviour patterns and psychological makeup of his fellow concentration camp prisoners. Laughter? Hope? Prayer? Bargaining? All normal for them as they strived to find a reason to live another day, another hour or even another minute.

What does that mean to me? Well, those simple words help me to understand why it is that I’ve been able to do what I’ve done since Lauren left us: dig deep into our grief to write a book and then talk about it without breaking down into tears every time I’m interviewed, sent a letter or email, or asked a question in a book club.

You see, it may not strike anyone as normal to have a reaction or aftermath like the one I’m experiencing, but that’s okay – it’s my normal. It’s how my mind and body have chosen to cope and to move forward and put into practice what Dr. Frankl calls “will to meaning.” Rob and I are willing ourselves into a future that has purpose and goals, like helping others through our own experience. That is exactly what Mourning Has Broken and the events that have come in its wake are meant to do. Even my recovery.

After judging myself and wondering how it was that the woman on stage or on camera (me) was getting through all of this intact when it should have left us to die, too, I finally have an answer. This is normal! And, as we all know, like beauty, “normal” is in the eye of the beholder.

When we stop judging ourselves, it frees us from the weight we carry in our minds, on our shoulders and elsewhere in our bodies. We become lighter of spirit and outlook and the rocks in our pockets transform into feathers. After all, are we that different from each other? Most of us are just doing the best we can with the hands we’ve been dealt (or the cards we’ve drawn) on any given day.

To lighten up on oneself, truly, is to feel altogether lighter. And it’s glorious.

By the way, if you’re interested in more information on the river cruise, the Oldies Dance or perhaps one of the appearances I’m making over the next few months, have a look at the ‘What’s UP’ section of my homepage.

Have a beautiful weekend and I’ll return on Monday.

Mon, 09/16/2019

September 16, 2019 Erin's Journals

Erin’s Journal

Just a thought… Food is the most primitive form of comfort. [Sheila Graham]

Welcome in! I hope you had a good weekend and thank you if you shared the reasons for your gratitude on my Facebook page. The post I put up early Saturday, asking people for their contributions, followed a quote: “Grace and gratitude make the hard stuff bearable and the good stuff even sweeter.” There were a lot of lovely posts, but the main threads were appreciation for good health and for family. Today’s journal ties both of those themes together.

The weekend here on the Saanich Peninsula on gorgeous Vancouver Island was one that was a mixture of rain, cloud, blue skies and then more rain again. So it seemed fitting that with a long day of writing and choreographing (with photos and video) some speeches in the months ahead, a nice slow-cooker meal of beef stew would be perfect.

I don’t use recipes when it comes to dinners of this kind, with one small exception I’ll share with you shortly. The house filled with the most delicious smells: onions, beef, garlic, vegetables and rich, thick broth, and it was all coming along beautifully. With less than an hour to go until it was ready to be served, I thought dumplings would make a nice finishing touch to the savoury, fragrant mixture that bubbled gently in the kitchen. A comforting, hearty and healthy dinner would be our reward for a day’s work of talking, thinking and typing.

Usually when I’m looking to make something, I just put a list of food items or a general idea of the dish into Google. Pages upon pages of suggestions, pictures, recipes and links to videos suddenly appear and, without fail, I can find something that fits my ingredients and the amount of time and work I am willing to put into making it.

But when it comes to dumplings, there’s only one choice.

This is one of three versions I’ve had of this book. One is from the 1960s, the other a decade or two later, and the most recent – I’m going to guess from the 90s – was passed on to Lauren.

I’m careful when I turn the pages of this oldest version we have of the book; long ago, many of the punched holes gave way and, in addition to the loose pages of recipes I found and printed out some 20 or 30 years ago, there are plenty of the book’s original pages floating freely inside the cookbook’s faded and food-stained covers.

This was my late mom’s cookbook. I couldn’t count how many dishes or meals originated from its pages and, as you read this, you may well be nodding in agreement, so ubiquitous was this housewife’s little helper. The key paragraph I sought was a dumpling recipe I’ve used countless times.

Better Homes and Gardens new Cook Book dumplings

I turned the pages with the care of someone handling the Magna Carta (minus the white gloves). You’ll recognize why when when you look at this page and the tiny recipe that I’ve circled. I wonder when it was that it tore. The Scotch tape used to hold the tired page together tells a tale of forty – or even fifty or sixty – years. When the word “housewife” was used, as I did in the paragraph above, and one didn’t raise an eyebrow. (Now we can thank Botox for that.)

Glad to have located the sifter that gets dug out probably twice a year at most, I proceeded to make the dumplings. All the while I thought of my mom, but also of our Lauren, who so loved the “fluffy clouds” as we would call them.

She’d come to my mind earlier in the day when I found a can of beef bouillon in the cupboard; with an expiration date of 11 years ago, she had bought the broth to make Rob and me French Onion Soup upon our return from a trip to Paris in 2006. (She got intimidated by a recipe that included liquor and didn’t end up making the soup, so we had a few cans of the bouillon left over.) I smiled at the memory, while Rob was certain she’d actually made the special dish for us. Funny how the mind works, isn’t it? But I knew I was right: I’d tracked those soup cans with the intensity of a Warhol fan.

Once I’d sifted and mixed, I proceeded to plop the thick dough on top of the stew’s surface, covering it as Rob and I finished our work. Minutes later, they were ready and I served us up some hearty stew, leaving enough for leftovers tonight.

The stew, Rob said, was delicious and I didn’t disagree. The “clouds” were not so fluffy, which I recognize is likely at least in part due to the fact that my baking powder predates our move west (which is coming up on three years ago). In my kitchen, it could well have predated the new millennium, as you saw by the soup can. But our hearts were light, even if the dumplings were not.

I felt as if family was there in the kitchen with me, thanks to a history book filled, not with stories, but with recipes. And memories.

Thu, 09/12/2019

September 12, 2019 Erin's Journals

Erin’s Journal

Just a thought… The secret to a rich life is to have more beginnings than endings. [Dave Weinbaum]

I’ve so much to fill you in on: now that you know where I’ve been, I feel like I should catch you up on where I’m going.

Before you worry that I’m getting too busy (and there are a lot of caring people I know might express these concerns, not considering the support network I have had and continue to build), know that I’m doing the work on myself as well as on all of these other projects.

I realize that workaholism was always a thing in my life – since I was 17 – and breaking that pattern is as much a project for me as taking care of the other “ism” in my life. But I also have a deep love for every project that I’m taking on, so I don’t consider it to be a hindrance or a risk to my wellness. That makes sense to me and I hope that it does to you, too. And, as always, I have Rob at my side.

Soon you’ll be seeing public appearances mentioned here on my website in the ‘What’s UP’ section. (The site is still getting that facelift I mentioned back in July; we’re tweaking to make it as good as possible.)

There’s a literary event in Vancouver in late September, I’ll be in London, Ontario for a book signing October 3 and we’re working to put one together in Ottawa the following week. Then, another trip in late October brings me back to the GTA for what promises to be a GREAT oldies dance Mike Cooper and I are hosting at Le Parc (Hwy 7 and 404 area) Friday, November 1 in support of Markham Stouffville Hospital, plus a few other events I’ll tell you about soon.

Of course, the Basel-to-Amsterdam river cruise is just a little over a year away now and the terrific news is that we now have a few extra weeks in which to sell out the boat so it’s just our group on it. But again, more in days to come. I don’t want to overwhelm you!

The biggest news we’ve gotten in the past few weeks is from the Globe and Mail. Mourning Has Broken: Love, Loss and Reclaiming Joy is sitting at a solid #7 in sales of non-fiction books (#3 among Canadian authors) in Canada for 2019 and we’re overjoyed! And I’m hearing from readers here who are getting their October Reader’s Digest in the mail and have come across an excerpted version of the book. Here’s a sneak peek:

You know what this means, right? I get to live on forever in doctors’ offices across the land! Seriously, though, I’m honoured that word of MHB will find its way into the hands of people who need it. And that’s really great news.

Thanks for coming by this week and, if you haven’t noticed, at my Facebook page I post a daily inspirational message or photo that might help your day get off to a good start. Have a look and click LIKE if you wish to be a part of this each weekday.

Take care of yourself, as I will Rob and me (I promise) and we’ll be back with you here on Monday. Enjoy tomorrow’s Harvest Moon and make a little wish. You just never know.

Thu, 09/05/2019

September 5, 2019 Erin's Journals

Erin’s Journal

Just a thought… Daring to set boundaries is about having the courage to love ourselves even when we risk disappointing others. [Brené Brown]

Now, where were we on Tuesday? (Yes, I’m writing journals now twice a week – ordinarily Mondays and Thursdays, but this week, Labour Day meant an adjustment. See Tuesday’s journal for why I’ve made the change…and today’s quote for my strength to do so.)

Rob was about to drop me off at a treatment centre about an hour from our BC home, so I could start to try to make sense of what it was that was wrong with me and hindering my efforts to live the fullest and most joyful life I possibly could.

Of course, you don’t have to have a medical degree to know the main cause of my troubles: having lost Lauren just 4 years ago (during a 10-year period of self-administered sobriety) and dealing with the reeling changes that came in the aftermath of that tragedy.

I left the job and city I loved, sold a house that was built with dreams in mind of family happiness for years to come, and moved to a place where I really knew only four people, all of them relatives.

But what went wrong between that time at the end of 2016 and summer of 2019?

It’s hard to pinpoint any one thing, but I can look back and know that I should have continued the counselling and therapy that I so cherished in our Toronto life. Instead, I isolated, hunkered down, wrote a book, did some freelance radio work and tried to build a new life without the solid foundation of a support network.

Yes, we would make two new friends, join Rotary to help serve the community – as we did last weekend calling Bingo at the fair all three days – and continue our efforts to maintain as much of a public profile as would ease the ache that I found accompanied leaving radio and Toronto.

And in many ways I was able to do that: the journal continues here – albeit with changes to its frequency – I had an exciting book launch and continued to be regularly interviewed about Mourning Has Broken, as well as being contracted to do keynote speeches and book signings.

It all looked so good on the outside.

But on the inside, I sought comfort. Comfort, I realized as I delved back, that disappeared early: when I was but three years old, a woman I loved second only to my mom decided that since I was about to start senior kindergarten (yep, at age three) I was too old to keep my beloved blanket. So she burned it in the trash can outside.

Wounded but undeterred, I found a replacement. That blankie was burned by my grandmother, too. I know that my trauma doesn’t begin to compare with that suffered by so many who’ve turned to addiction and whose stories had me in tears while we were in treatment together.

There’s no comparing trauma, just as there’s no comparing grief. I wanted you to know that I recognize that.

The blanket incident (times two), I have learned, was when I first discovered that things – and later people – you love, can disappear without notice at any time. “Don’t make connections or close friends; they’ll either be gone without a trace or you’ll have to leave them. Nothing that gives you comfort will stay.” Those were the warnings I decided to live by to protect my heart from being hurt.

My marriage has proven that wrong, but losing Lauren just branded it into my heart more deeply than ever.

The fear of it happening again to Rob (and thus to me) kept at me, nagging, scraping open wounds again and again until the only comfort I could find came, not in the form of a blanket, but of a tall, misty-coloured bottle. It never judged me, nor disappointed or left me. But it was promising to do me a world of harm.

I came to the decision that I needed to stop before it did harm me. Losing boundaries (like alarm clocks and people to answer to) meant losing perspective, losing caution and losing sight of what I was risking.

And so that scared woman walked with her husband, suitcase rumbling behind us, and committed to sobriety and recovery (and seeking reasons for what I had fallen into) like it was my job. And it was. It is.

My work continues with weekly meetings and counselling, both group and one-on-one, taking care to set new boundaries, saying “no” when I have to and being brutally honest with those who love me. Losing fear that people would judge me (which, of course, some have and will) and dropping the illusion that I have anything to prove to anyone anymore.

These are tall orders to fill and I’ll just do it – one day at a time. On Monday: life on the inside. What an experience!

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