Picking up the pieces

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This article was published 22/09/2017 (2948 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

After Betsy Mayham moved to Winnipeg in 1990, the care packages began arriving on the regular. Her brother Dean sent them from their reserve, Tataskweyak Cree Nation, a token to remind her of home.

Inside the packages? Fresh pickerel. Dean caught them himself, on the sprawling lake that surrounds the First Nation. He packed them carefully, with ice packs, and sent them down to Winnipeg for his sister.

“My family loves pickerel,” Betsy says. “He caught those fish and fixed them up for my family. I never said no (when he offered to send them), I’d always say, ‘Sure, sure.’”

This, Betsy knows, is part of how he showed that he loved her and her two daughters.

He cherished his nieces and nephews; later, much later, Betsy learned he kept their photos framed on his bedroom wall.

The siblings were close. Dean was a year younger than Betsy; they were the middle of seven children. When they were little, she teased him by singing the Turtles chocolates jingle.

“Turtles, Turtles, rah-rah-rah,” she’d sing, and he’d turn and chase her, laughing.

In 1990, Betsy moved to the city. But many nights, when she needed someone to talk to, she’d pick up the phone and call Dean and they’d talk about anything and everything. Sharing life, sharing dreams.

It all fell apart on Sept. 23, 2006. Dean committed suicide. He was 35 years old.

For two years, Betsy couldn’t even bear to speak his name. His old ice packs stayed in her freezer, but it would be a long time before she could eat pickerel again.

A lot of healing needed to happen before then.

• • •

People around someone who decides to end their own life often never see it coming.

Some will struggle in the hours, days and months that follow when they think back and find — or believe they have — a sign, a subtle clue they missed.

Mostly though, it is a sudden, crippling shock.

So, after the funeral is over and “normal” life resumes, what can those who have lost someone do?

For years, local filmmaker Leona Krahn had been mulling over that question: how do survivors — people who’ve lost a loved one to suicide — learn to cope with their grief, heal and move forward?

When Krahn was 16, her best friend’s older brother took his own life. Nobody saw it coming.

“I just saw the anguish that it brought,” she says.

“Ever since then, it’s been on my mind. I just have wondered, how do people cope when something like that happens? It’s often so totally unexpected.”

“The way I see (other survivors), they’re like angels. They happened to pass my path when I really needed it.” – Betsy Mayham

Three years ago, she began exploring the question in earnest.

She’d come to believe that there wasn’t enough said publicly, for and about survivors’ grief. Some find supports, but others wrestle with it alone.

As a journalist, she thought she could help break open the discussion and offer some hope.

Now, the end result of her work is a new documentary, After A Suicide: Moving Past Why, which will be aired across Manitoba next Saturday on CBC. (It will also be featured on the Documentary Channel.)

The film features members of six families living in the painful aftermath of suicide.

Some have chosen to speak out about difficulty in accessing mental-health care, including Bonnie Bricker and Judy Dunn, who both had adult sons who ended their lives. Others are opening up publicly for the first time.

“It’s really just a matter of how inspiring they are to find a way through their pain,” Krahn says.

“Each one has a different approach, but they all have their own strategies for getting past this.”

When the film premièred at the Metropolitan Entertainment Centre on Sept. 12, it drew a crowd that included politicians and front-line health-care workers. The Mood Disorders Association of Manitoba provided on-site counsellors.

In the audience were many who’ve staggered down the same anguished path. Betsy was there with her 20-year-old niece, whose best friend recently ended her life.

Betsy, who works as a family conference mentor at Ma Mawi Wi Chi Itata Centre, thought her niece might find something in the film helpful. And she was curious, too, to find out how others had managed to find a way through the darkness and confusion that remains when the terrible shock fades.

“I could relate a lot,” she says.

“I reflected back when they were talking and said, ‘Oh, yeah, there are things I remember that I did in the past.’ I felt blessed, because it made me reflect on how I coped.”

This part is instructive.

Betsy is 11 years along that difficult path. There are still days when the grief washes over her. But she has also been able to find her own core of strength.

Her partner of 21 years has been the rock that kept her anchored through all of the pain.

“Without him,” she says, “I don’t know where I would have been.”

She read books.

There were Cree ceremonies, which in 2008 enabled her to utter her brother’s name again.

And the day she decided to cook pickerel. It was Dean’s birthday.

“While I was cutting (the fish), all the memories just flashed through me and I had a meltdown,” Betsy recalls.

“But it was actually good, it was healing for me.”

And what has helped above all, she says, is talking to people who have been in the same wretched places.

The first Christmas after Dean’s death, a co-worker who had lost a brother to suicide stopped at her desk. They cried together.

“By sharing her story, it helped me move on, for that Christmas at least,” she says.

“The way I see (other survivors), they’re like angels. They happened to pass my path when I really needed it.”

• • •

This is, perhaps, the central purpose of Krahn’s documentary: that by lifting up the some families’ stories, others will see the myriad ways people have navigated the same shock, the same grief, the same questions.

“Overall, the feedback was that people felt that they really needed to see something like this,” Krahn says.

“The real emphasis now is on lived experience: people who have lived through it can help better.”

Because there is — eventually — a way through.

So Saturday, as she’s done for many years, Betsy will prepare a special meal on the anniversary of her brother’s death.

It’s a pretty safe bet pickerel will be on the plate.

And, she does every year, she’ll open a box of Turtles and once again taste the beautiful memory; she’ll think back to how she and Dean used to play, and she’ll sing — “Turtles, Turtles, rah-rah-rah,” and laugh, just a little.

“It brings a smile to my face,” she says.

Someday soon, Betsy plans to find a way to help her community through her story.

She took a suicide prevention course and is thinking about ways to share what she’s learned over the years. Dean’s legacy will be hope.

“I’m going to do something when I’m ready,” she says.

“I’m able to talk about it now, without crying.”

After a Suicide airs on CBC Manitoba on Sept. 30 at 7 p.m.

The public is also invited to a special showing at St. Jean Brebeuf Church next Friday at 7 p.m. Mary-Anne Derrick, who is featured in the film, is hosting the event.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca