Then, her world shattered. Back in Ottawa in November of the same year, she received the most horrifically shocking news that a mother can hear: her child was dead. Her third son, Michel, had been killed in an avalanche. Margaret tumbled into a crippling depression. “The death of my son was the end of my battling it on my own,” she says. “I was so devastated; there was no bucking up and pretending. I went into such….” She has to pause, and her eyes brim with tears. “There’s nothing worse than losing a child.”
Because of her overwhelming sorrow, Margaret suffered a second loss: her marriage to Fried Kemper. “I adore Fried, but my untreated illness caused too many problems for us. He couldn’t deal with all the sorrow and grief that I was experiencing, and I ended up in serious trouble.” They separated, and their two children lived mostly with Fried. (He lives, conveniently, across the street.) She felt guilty, too, that she was too ill to offer support to Justin and Sacha in the loss of their brother. “I felt very badly that I wasn’t able to be there for them. Nor was Pierre. Pierre was so devastated too.”
While still very ill, Margaret found herself dealing with yet another loss. Pierre died in 2000 with Margaret at his bedside. Such a succession of losses can cause people with a mental illness to contemplate suicide. It’s estimated 15 per cent of people with bipolar disorder are suicidal. “I was, passively,” Margaret says. “I was living alone. I stopped being able to take care of myself. I stopped being able to leave the house and get food. So I was slowly starving. And nobody seemed to notice.” Justin was living in Vancouver, Sacha in Montreal, and her two younger children were living with their father. Margaret realizes now that her maternal instinct to hide her distress from her children, while well-intentioned, actually delayed her getting help.
Finally, a friend of Margaret’s called Sacha and said, “You’ve got to come. Margaret really isn’t in good shape, and I’m worried about her.” Margaret says, “Sacha got me help. His biggest gift to me was recognizing that I was in trouble and getting the best help he could find for me. That’s what family members can do. You may as a family member feel helpless, but the biggest gift you can give is to help them get help.” The first step, she says, should be the family doctor.
Margaret’s recovery has been a slow, arduous process. It took a great deal of trial and error to find the combination of drugs that worked. Many didn’t; one drug caused her to gain 30 pounds in a month. “I have, for the past few years, been working very hard getting the right medication to help me live a balanced life,” she says. “They’ve had such breakthroughs in the drugs. Now they’ve got such clean ones, with no side effects, no giving up of your sparkle, your desire, your curiosity and your sense of wonder.” Drugs are not a miracle cure, she cautions. And close monitoring is essential, as an antidepressant may initially give a severely depressed person enough energy to carry out a suicide plan. She adds that her recovery was aided by talk therapy.
