Margaret also learned the importance of making healthy choices in her quest for a sound mind, body and spirit. She cycles for two hours a day on a bike that was a Mother’s Day gift from Justin and Sacha. She has a personal trainer and works out with weights two or three times a week. She eats three balanced meals a day – today’s bundt cake is a rare indulgence.
“I put on weight quite easily now,” she admits. “Since I turned 50, everything seems to have slowed down a bit, and I have this bulge.” She pats her midriff. “I don’t like the fact that I’ve lost my waist, but I am 58.”
Once Margaret began to feel better, she got a job with a relocation company, helping newcomers to Ottawa find housing and get their children settled in schools and activities. “It was just a quiet, little, nice job, but it got me out of the house and contributing once again to society,” she says. She was also able to devote more energy to WaterCan, a charity that provides clean drinking water to the world’s poorest villages. She has been a volunteer with the organization for 11 years, honorary president for four and, in that capacity, visited Ethiopia in October.
“I have so much delight in life now,” she says. “It’s so precious to me. I think it was because of the period when I had such total absence of delight and such painful sorrow. I still have sadness – I live with sadness, missing my boy – but it’s in proportion. I have joy again. I got it back. A lot of people don’t, and that’s a great worry to me.”
By speaking out, she hopes to lessen the stigma of mental illness and encourage people and families to seek help. She is now working to raise funds for the new state-of-the-art mental health facility at the Royal Ottawa Hospital, which opened in November. “I’m not good at asking people for money, but I’m good at getting attention for the charity,” she says. When it’s suggested that she’s always been good at getting attention, she laughs and says, “Yeah, but now this is the right kind of attention.”
Copyright April 2007 CARP magazine
