Choosing Hope Read online

  Choosing

  Hope

  A MOTHER’S STORY

  OF LOVE,

  LOSS, AND SURVIVAL

  GINNY DENNEHY

  with SHELLEY FRALIC

  Copyright © 2013 by Ginny Dennehy and Shelley Fralic

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Greystone Books

  www.greystonebooks.com

  Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada

  ISBN 978-1-77100-034-5 (pbk.)

  ISBN 978-1-77100-035-2 (ebook)

  Editing by Barbara Pulling

  Copyediting by Shirarose Wilensky

  Cover design by Jessica Sullivan

  We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

  To my beautiful boy,

  Kelty Patrick,

  and my dear sweet babes,

  Riley Rae

  Contents

  Prologue

  (1) Family Ties

  (2) Growing Up Dennehy

  (3) Kelty

  (4) The Kelty Patrick Dennehy Foundation

  (5) Riley

  (6) Life Ever After

  (7) Choosing Hope

  The Kelty Patrick Dennehy Foundation

  Teenage Depression and Suicide: Warning Signs and How to Help

  Acknowledgements

  Photo Section

  Prologue

  I DIDN’T WANT to go on the business trip to Florida, but Kelty insisted. “Mom, don’t worry, go,” he told me. “I will be all right.”

  But it didn’t feel right. It hadn’t felt right for months, not since our beautiful seventeen-year-old son had been gripped by a depression so incapacitating that he would curl up in my arms, crying, “Mom, I just want to be normal like everyone else.” The disease had made him so hopeless that he would tell his father, “Dad, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. This thing grabbed me.”

  And it wouldn’t let go.

  We all knew he was in trouble: his fifteen-year-old sister, Riley; his father, Kerry; and me. We tackled it head on, taking Kelty to doctors and clergy and counsellors, making sure he took his medication, and ensuring we were always there for him. When Kelty asked his dad to hide his hunting guns, Kerry hid the hunting guns. When Kelty said he didn’t think he could go back to school, we knew we’d find another way for him to finish his senior year. The details didn’t matter. Only Kelty did.

  So when my son insisted he didn’t want me to miss that conference in February 2001, I went. I wanted him to know that I believed in him, that I wasn’t afraid to leave him for a day or two, even though my heart was heavy as I drove away from the house and headed to the airport.

  I wanted to believe that Kelty would be fine.

  But he wasn’t.

  The phone message light was flashing in my hotel room in Orlando when I went back there just before dinner. The message was from Kerry, telling me I needed to call him right away. When I reached him, I learned he was at the Whistler medical clinic with Kelty. It’s hard to remember exactly what he said. At first he didn’t want to tell me the details, worried because I was alone. But I made him. He had found our son, a garden hose wrapped around his neck, hanging from the cedar beam in my loft office, the airy room in our house that overlooks the mountain peaks where Kelty loved to snowboard.

  Some friends at the conference helped me through the fog of the next few hours, booking my flight home and making sure I got on the plane. Two days later, on March 2, we took our beautiful boy off life support, and he died with his mom and dad, his sister, and his devoted nanny by his side.

  To live without Kelty seemed impossible. The loss was so deep and the pain was so overwhelming that we felt our family would never recover. We didn’t know it then, but the searing sorrow that comes when a parent loses a child would be compounded eight years later when we lost our daughter.

  This is their story, the story of Kelty and Riley, a chronicle of family love and loss. But also a story about moving forward and making sense of the incomprehensible.

  It is a story about choosing hope.

  (1)

  Family Ties

  MY CHILDHOOD MEMORIES are half a century old, dusty snippets of play and parties and flashes of time and place distilled through the filter of youth, which recalls only what really matters: the feeling of being safe and loved within the protective cocoon of family.

  But I will never forget the day my dad died.

  I was six, my sister Cath was not yet nine, and our little brother and sister, Robbie and Nancy, the twins, were almost three. In the midst of our happy, chaotic life, it was confusing to walk in the back door of our Montreal house on the afternoon of June 13, 1959, and find sombre strangers milling around.

  Who were these people? Why was that woman with the pinched face saying over and over to Cath and me: “Oh, you poor little girls, you poor little girls.” Why was our mom sitting on the couch crying and holding the twins so tightly? Why was someone telling us that our dad had been killed in a car accident?

  It couldn’t be real.

  Our father, Edward Pointz Wood, whom everyone called E.P., was to us simply our big strong dad. Even though he was away a lot working, when he was home, he was really there, and he loved us and played with us.

  So how could our dad be dead? He was our dad. He was invincible.

  E.P. wasn’t just our hero; he was everyone’s hero. Born in Ontario, an only child, he devoted his life to the service of his country, and that didn’t change when he married my mom, Barbara Spear. They first laid eyes on each other at the air force base in Winnipeg. Dad was a squadron leader in the Canadian Forces and something of a ladies’ man who never missed the base dances in the 17 Wing mess. Mom was twenty-six then, working as a model and doing volunteer work at the local hospital. When she and her girlfriends wanted to go out and have some fun, they’d head to the base to meet handsome servicemen. My parents met there and fell in love.

  Mom and Dad were married on December 29, 1949. Mom settled into life as a military wife knowing that although her husband’s work was prestigious and would provide security for the family soon to come along, theirs would be a life on the move. They were living in Winnipeg when my big sister Catherine was born in August 1950. I came along two years later—Virginia Joan, born on September 10, 1952. Over the next few years, our little family would pack and unpack in air force bases all over Europe before Mom took us back home to Winnipeg while Dad was taking courses in Toronto. It was there the twins were born in July 1956.

  Two years later, we were on the move again, joining Dad in Montreal. The six of us settled into a lovely house in the enclave of Saint-Bruno, right across the street from the home of the daughter of Governor General Georges Vanier. It was an era when kids spent their days roaming their neighbourhoods until the streetlights lit up the dark. We got into all manner of mischief, most of it harmless, like testing our luck and pluck by sticking our tongues to the metal stair railings of the Vanier residence on the coldest days of winter, which invariably sent our friends screaming for Mom. We had to endure her frantic scolding as she flew out of the house with a pot of warm water to unpeel our bleeding, shredded tongues from the freezing metal.

  And then, suddenly, Daddy was dead, and everything changed. Even as I grew older and came
to understand the vagaries of life, I would always wonder how it made any sense that a brave man who led his pilots through D-Day, who was wounded during the Dieppe raid, who survived ditching his plane in the North Sea and was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross in 1944 could make it home safely, only to be killed fifteen years later when someone broadsided his vehicle at a traffic intersection.

  We didn’t go to the funeral. Young children usually weren’t included in the ceremonial rites of the day. Despite our bewilderment and grief and confusion about what it all meant now that Dad was gone, we were expected to pull up our socks and get on with things.

  It didn’t take long before we were once again on the move. Grams Spear, Mabel, came out that summer, packed us up and shepherded us onto the big ship that took us east across the Great Lakes and to the waiting train that would deliver us to our new life in Winnipeg. Mom’s support system, all her family and her friends, were there, not just her mother and stepfather but her younger brother, my Uncle Bob, and his wife, Rae.

  Rae first met our family when she was a nurse at Winnipeg General Hospital. Mom, Uncle Bob, and Grams were there regularly to visit my grandfather Elmer Spear, who was very sick with liver cancer. Rae and Mom serendipitously met up again in Germany when their husbands were stationed at the same base. They became good friends, and when Rae’s husband was killed in Germany in a training accident, she returned to Winnipeg and ended up marrying my Uncle Bob.

  As children do, we soon adapted to life without our dad. The five of us settled into a comfortable home at 218 Waterloo in the prosperous River Heights area of Winnipeg, surrounded by other gracious houses lining the boulevards. We were just blocks from the Assiniboine River. I entered Grade 2 at Robert H. Smith Elementary, Cath was in Grade 4, and the twins were still at home. When Mom decided to get a job at Polo Park shopping centre, she hired a nanny and started working at Rene’s for Gifts, which wrapped everything in little pink boxes tied with black ribbons. Locals called the store the “widow’s den” because all the women who worked there had lost their husbands.

  We were lucky; ours was a family of some means, and we did not go without. Grams’s dad, our great-grandfather, was William L. Parrish, a Brandon-born entrepreneur who had co-founded a successful grain company in 1909 with a young Ontario businessman named Norman Heimbecker. The firm, Parrish and Heimbecker, became well known for its agri-food products, including the Butterball turkey that has graced many a Thanksgiving dinner table. Over the next century, it would grow into a nationwide company with interests in grain shipping (one hundred grain elevators across Canada) and become the second biggest manufacturer of flour in the country. The company exported peas to Cuba and flour to China. Today, it operates numerous inland grain terminals and employs 1,400 people.

  When Grams and our grandfather married in 1920, he was not a wealthy man. He had studied architecture and was a captain in the Royal Naval Air Service in the First World War, but after the war he had returned home and bought a gas station with a partner. He moved on to work for a company that sold auto parts, and eventually he bought that business, which he renamed R.E. Spear Limited. It became the largest manufacturers’ agent for automotive parts in western Canada. When my grandfather died in 1953, Uncle Bob took over. Two years later, Grams married our new granddad, Cecil Philip, who was a reserved, very proper judge.

  Those first years back in Winnipeg seemed to suit us. Cath and I made friends at school and in the neighbourhood, and Mom seemed to be adjusting to life without our father. For a time, things were good.

  But it wouldn’t last.

  In the summer of 1960, the year after our dad died, Mom packed the four of us kids into the car for a road trip to Montreal. She wanted to show us the place where we’d lived and spent time with our father. While we were there, she began feeling an intense pain in her chest, and once we were back home, the news was grim. She was diagnosed with breast cancer and by September had undergone a mastectomy, though no chemotherapy or radiation. While the details of that time are dim, I remember the day Cath and I were sat down and gently told that our mother was sick and that we were being sent away to school and would have to sleep there. Balmoral Hall was a private, girls-only boarding school in Winnipeg, and everyone felt us going there was for the best. As it turned out, I was the youngest boarder the school had ever accepted.

  I was an adventurous child, and boarding school sounded like an adventure. Cath, who was more responsible, wasn’t so sure. The twins were too young to really know what was going on, and they were to stay home with a nanny looking after them while Mom battled her illness.

  At Balmoral Hall, Cath and I were put up in bunk beds in the residence called the White House. We were able to stay together, which made it easier. We weren’t just sisters, we were best friends, and to be near each other meant everything. Cath missed her friends from public school, but I felt like I belonged in this new place. The staff were always around ensuring we were doing our work and behaving, and that seemed to give me comfort.

  Balmoral Hall, though a non-religious institution, was as strict as any Catholic girls’ school might be, regimented and purposeful about protocol. The headmistress wore a black cloak, and we had to line up regularly for tunic inspection. But the education was a good one: we took Latin and French and music lessons, and the expectation was that we would excel. Cath was a very good student. I fell short on the academic front, a reality somewhat softened when I began to share my Grade 5 locker with Clare Powell, a day student at Balmoral. Clare was dark-haired and pretty, and we shared a sense of mischief that bonded us immediately. She was smart, too, and liked sports and horseback riding. We would become lifelong friends.

  Cath and I usually went home on weekends, but it was a sad time. If our mother wasn’t in the hospital, she was in her wheelchair, which meant our Saturdays and Sundays were spent quietly. We didn’t really understand what was going on; we just wanted her to get better. She was such a beautiful, stoic woman, and if she was in pain or had her dark moments, she never let on.

  But as the months went by, her health deteriorated to the point that she was forced into the hospital. She seemed to know she was going to die. One day she sent for Cath and me, and we were each given a few minutes alone with her. Not realizing that we were there to say goodbye, I sat on the edge of her bed and asked her when she was coming home. She gave me a big hug and said, “Snookums, I worry about you more than anyone.” Mom knew intuitively that this spirited nine-year-old child of hers, this girl with the tough-on-the-outside bravado—I would try anything and had even learned to ski on a local river bank at the age of three—was already putting up walls to fend off the pain life would throw her way.

  A few days after that visit, on a Friday afternoon, Cath and I were at Balmoral Hall waiting for the taxis that would take us, along with our schoolmates, to our regular outing at the Winnipeg Winter Club. It was a break we looked forward to every week, an early evening of swimming lessons, badminton games, and as many French fries as we could eat. But on this afternoon, one of the teachers took Cath and me aside. We wouldn’t be able to join our school friends; Uncle Bob and Auntie Rae were coming to pick us up instead. When they arrived, Cath and I noisily piled into their station wagon. Auntie Rae turned to us, sitting in the back of the car, and said, “I have to tell you girls that your mother has died.”

  Cath burst into tears, a complete waterworks. I sat still and said to myself, over and over, as if that would somehow make it so: “No, she hasn’t. No, she hasn’t.” I didn’t make the connection, didn’t want to believe it. It couldn’t be happening again.

  It was February 9, 1962.

  We were orphans.

  Except, of course, we weren’t. My mom had taken much care to ensure that we would be looked after. In the weeks before her death, she had made arrangements with Uncle Bob and Auntie Rae to adopt us, and they had readily agreed.

  Mom had been worried, though, that her brother’s house wasn’t roomy enough. My aunt and uncl
e had married in 1956—Cath and I were flower girls at their wedding—and when they realized they couldn’t have children of their own, they had adopted Robbie, who was born in 1959, and Cheryl, born in 1960. With us in the mix, they were about to become the parents of six children, so a few days before she died, my mom had pulled out a newspaper advertisement and showed her brother a house for sale that she thought would be perfect, one block down from our house on Waterloo. She had no idea that her brother, mindful that the Spear brood would soon include the Wood children, had bought the same house earlier that day.

  When my aunt and uncle picked us up from Balmoral that day, they took us for a little drive around the neighbourhood, stopping out front of what would be our new home. It had a long curving driveway and a grand façade, and there was something stately about it that seemed to put me at ease. I already knew this rambling house at 66 Waterloo because I had ridden my bike around its driveway many times.

  We moved in a month later, and I loved it. Inside the front door was a huge double staircase, and the main floor had a fancy drawing room and a massive living room with an attached sun porch. The big dining room with its wainscoting and glorious woodwork was toward the back of the house, along with the kitchen. The floors were polished wood, and there were stained-glass windows everywhere. Up the first flight of stairs, on the landing, was a billiards room. Farther along the upper hall were four spacious bedrooms, each with its own sink, and a main bathroom. The two boys shared a bedroom, Nancy and Cheryl each had their own rooms, and my aunt and uncle took the fourth bedroom.

  The third floor was magic because that’s where Cath and I had our bedrooms and our own bathroom with rose-petal taps. There was another room on our floor, which we called the maid’s room. Over the years we sometimes shared our space with a live-in student or a domestic worker who had been hired to help around the house.