A search beyond family bonds

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This article was published 30/11/2019 (2152 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When his brother died by suicide, Don Gillmor was left with a question that was impossible to answer: why?

“We were separated by 4,000 kilometres, so I rarely saw him,” says the award-winning author, a former Winnipegger whose book To the River: Losing My Brother explores the death of his brother David Gillmor. “We got a phone call that he had disappeared and that his truck had been found by the side of the river outside of Whitehorse.”

“But there was no way to find out what had happened as the river was icing up.”

David was 48 years old when he disappeared in December 2005. With the river frozen and covered with ice, for six months, nobody knew what had happened. It wasn’t until six months later that his body was found in the Yukon River, about 30 kilometres from his home in Whitehorse.

“I went up in June when the ice came off the river,” Don says. “In an odd and eerie coincidence, he actually surfaced the day I arrived.”

What followed for Don was a 14-year search for a semblance of understanding. “I wrote about my brother’s death in Walrus magazine about two years after his death,” Don says. “In the weeks leading up to his death, I was with our father. He was an architect and I took him to see Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house in Pennsylvania. He was a huge fan of Frank Lloyd Wright.

“My dad and I were down there while David must have been contemplating his own death. Part of the Walrus piece was my father and I down there and the other part was my brother working out the idea of his own death.

“In a way, it gave me a sense of relief… but I never did get it out of my system.”

To the River: Losing My Brother was published in December 2018. It begins as an in-depth investigation into the death of his brother and expands to explore the current social and scientific understanding of suicide. It won the 2019 Governor General’s Literary Award for non-fiction in October.

Don, a graduate of the University of Calgary, is the recipient of numerous awards for his work as a journalist, novelist, non-fiction writer and children’s author. Though he has received prior Governor General’s Award nominations, To the River: Losing My Brother marks his first win.

The book begins in the second person, putting us in the shoes of David as Don imagines the last moments of his brother’s life. David’s first moments began in Winnipeg, where he lived until he was 13 years old before moving to Calgary with his family. As a child, he displayed remarkable musical talent.

“He was one of those people who just had a natural gift,” Don says. “We used to take piano lessons when I lived here in Winnipeg. I found it so difficult and I could hear him sailing through his lessons like Mozart. He kind of lived for music in many ways.”

David spent the next years of his life in Calgary until, at age 27, he met a woman, fell in love and moved to Whitehorse.

“The odd thing was,” Don says, “he never liked the cold. Here he was, a native Winnipegger, and he didn’t like the cold. For him to go to Whitehorse, I thought it must be love.”

David quit formal music study relatively early, but continued to play music on a part-time basis. In the weeks leading up to his death, he had accepted a job as the manager of the first Chapters bookstore in Whitehorse.

“We all thought it was great,” Don says. “He would be doing something that was interesting for him.”

But David never showed up for his first day of work. He vanished the weekend before he was to start.

The finality of David’s story exists in stark contrast to the incompleteness Don explores in his memoir, which goes on to encompass a greater search beyond family bonds.

The titles of each chapter offer an overview of the expansiveness of the memoir. They feature titles such as Dead Poet Society — similar to the 1989 film Dead Poets Society in which a young man, played by Robert Sean Leonard, dies by suicide — and Long Day’s Journey into Night, based on Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning tragedy about addiction, mental illness and the power of family.

The titles expand the subject matter from a personal story to a larger one.

“A lot of this book is about my brother’s death, but a part of it is about this larger phenomenon of middle-aged people,” Don says. “It used to be that that was the safe zone for suicide.

“It used to be you had a lot of adolescents and you had a lot of old people that were suicides, but in the middle, the statistics went way down… but now, middle-aged is the highest incidence group.

“There are a lot of lonely people,” Don says. “There’s so little definitive information in terms of suicide. It is — like the book itself — an exploration as opposed to a pronouncement.

As all survivors of suicide know, the question of why is never truly laid to rest, but Don has achieved an uneasy truce with the unknown.

“I think by writing this book and working through it on the page, I came as close as I can to making peace with it,” Don says. “I got closer to it. I have a better understanding of him.”

frances.koncan@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @franceskoncan