Intelligence Among Us

After Cindy’s death, Tanja printed and framed a really nice picture of Cindy and the girl’s from the first day of school last year.  We put them on their night tables and I know its brought them comfort.  Last night Melody came out of her room crying and said that the picture of Mommy was making her upset.  I went up and we talked and she said that she just felt so sad when she looked at the picture because mommy is dead and she’ll never get to see her again.   Despite the fact that this kind of sadness has been mercifully rare so far, the tears seem to come at night.

We decided that maybe it would be a good idea to take the picture down for a little while and put it somewhere safe.  Knowing that she could take it out whenever she wanted to seemed to make her feel better.  I think she felt a small sense of control over the situation.

I told her how upset I felt the other day at the cemetary and that I cried afterwards and reiterated to her that there is no right or wrong time to feel sad and that we just need to make sure to always talk about things.    She seemed to feel better.  A lot of these little steps will make up this journey.   They are such good kids.

We were in Chatham this weekend visiting friends and on the way home we stopped to visit Cindy’s grave for the first time since the funeral.   It was a holiday Monday and very hot.  I felt a lot of trepidation walking up to her final resting place.  The girls were fine and in good spirits.

Looking at the headstone I noticed that Chloe’s name was spelled incorrectly which I found quite upsetting.  It seemed like some kind of symbolic final metaphorical insult on a troubled life.  I need to find out how to get it fixed.   I think the heat of the day and the emptiness of the cemetary contributed to my reaction as well.

Melody left a picture and a piece of wood she had from the weekened.  Chloe actually found it funny that her name was spelled wrong.  We stayed for 10 minutes.  As we pulled away Mel yelled, “Good-bye Mommy!  I love you!”   I started to cry as we left and needed to get out of the car for a few minutes.  Tanja was wonderful as she always is.

The finality of  it all was somewhat overwhelming and it causes me to retrace the convoluted and complicated events that led here over and over.  Life moves on and we’ll be fine but I imagine these visits will always be hard.  I think that’s OK.

Over the year and a between the time of our separation and Cindy’s death I didn’t have much of an opportunity to get a sense for how she was doing at work although I assumed based on how she typically acted things were not going that well.  Sometime at the beginning of the year she was involved in a car accident.  She told me afterwards that she had had a panic attack while driving her cruiser and crashed her car.

At her funeral I had the opportunity to speak with some of her co-workers and got some insight into just how much difficulty she was having and it was very concerning both as someone that cared about Cindy and a citizen.  I heard about how she was having breakdowns at work,  behaving erractically and one co-worker believed that the car accident I mentioned was actually as a result of her attempting to commit suicide.  

I thought about this a lot afterwards and felt like based on my experience I might be able to provide some insight to the OPP in order to help them help their people.  As a citizen I feel like I need to do what I can to mitigate the risk of a mentally ill person from managing to slip through the cracks as a front-line police officer.  So I wrote a letter to Julian Fantino, the Commissioner of the OPP to express my thoughts.  A few weeks later I received a letter from the Deputy Commissioner of the OPP telling me that the officer in charge of their EAP and critical care program would like to meet with me.

She came to my home earlier this week and we had a great talk about Cindy and what can be done going forward.  She was really open and communicative and obviously is passionately committed to what she is doing.  We talked a lot about the stigma of mental illness, the culture of policing, privacy concerns etc.  I feel that a major contributing factor to the lack of understanding about mental illness is that’s a very abstract concept for people that have never experienced it.  How could you possibly understand suicidal depression or mania that lasts months and the repercussions unless you have lived it first hand?  

I told her that I would be more than happy to speak to groups of police officers about Cindy and my experiences with mental illness because I ‘m sure I could be effective at telling the story in a context that is relevant to police and help them better understand what it all means.  She seemed very interested in the idea and I will do my best to make sure it happens.  I feel a strong need to help others as a result of this experience and in a way I feel like it’s honouring Cindy’s legacy.

Here is the letter:

Commissioner Fantino,

My name is Jason MacKenzie and I am the ex-husband of Cindy MacKenzie, an OPP Constable of nearly 12 years, who recently took her own life after a long, painful and ultimately unsuccessful battle with Bipolar Disorder. 
 
I have great concerns with the manner in which the OPP dealt with her over the years and continued to allow her to serve as a front-line police officer despite her mental illness.  My intention is in no way to apportion blame but is rather to hopefully provide some insight to help you serve both your own officers and the public more effectively in the future.
 
She was on short-term disability for approxiately half of the last 5 years and struggled mightily while at work.  There were times she worked as a desk officer and times she was on the road.  During her return after her first stint on disability in 2006 she was only kept in the office for 2-3 days before returning to the road.  She recently, I believe in December of 2009, was involved in a traffic accident while  on the road in her cruiser.  She told me afterwards that she experienced a panic attack which led to the crash.  I’m not certain whether she was forthright with her supervisor as to the exact cause of the incident.  I’m certain the Traffic Report would detail that clearly.
 
Each time she returned to work she had a supporting letter from her doctor.  I can understand that this could be seen as sufficient but it clearly was not.  There was a period in 2006 where she was seriously considering driving her cruiser into an oncoming transport truck because she was suffering so profoundly.  When she told me this I took her to her psychiatrist and she was institutionalized for a period of time.
 
I know that some of her fellow officers were aware of the difficulty she was experiencing at work and in fact at her funeral this was mentioned to me a few times.  It would be  difficult for someone to report a colleague and to be honest I’m not sure that I possess the strength of character to have done it had I been in the situation either.  Regardless, her safety, that of her fellow officers and the public makes it imperative that there is more proactivity when dealing with people in this situation.  This might include regular and ongoing interviews with her co-workers and more importantly implementing the organizational and cultural changes that would allow these officers to feel more comfortable coming forward.
 
I also understand the need for privacy both from a legislative and human perspective but talking to her friends over the past week as yielded a lot of information indicating the level to which she was struggling.
 
The pieces of the puzzle were all there, albeit scattered and difficult to assemble.  But families, supervisors, colleagues and the OPP as an organization need to work together more closely to achieve better outcomes going forward.
 
On a more positive note, many officers attended her funeral last week and it brought much comfort to Cindy’s family and friends.  The return salute my 5 year old daughter received made her happy.
 
Thank you and best regards,

I’ve decided to change the focus of my blog from IT related topics to something much more personal.   My ex-wife recently committed suicide after a long struggle with bipolar disorder.   I want this blog to reflect my (and her) story and that of my girls.  I’m not sure what exactly I hope to accomplish.  I suppose it’s to put words to mental illness from the perspective of a man and father of two girls.   I don’t want to dwell on the negative but I want to articulate how to try to find the positives in situations that feel completely out of control.  My intention is for this to be both a recap of past events as well as the challenges that come with dealing with the present and looking forward.  My life is great and will continue to be.  For that I am thankful.

March 26, 2010 “Jason.  Jason!!!  Are you home?”  I woke up from a deep sleep to the sounds of someone calling my name clearly coming from inside my home.  I stumbled downstairs to see a uniformed police officer that I knew and asked him what the hell he was doing in my landing.  He asked me where my kids, who were sleeping soundly upstairs, were.  Disoriented, I told him they were with my ex-wife.  His look of true concern shook the cobwebs off and I corrected myself and told him they were upstairs.  He told me to sit down and that he had bad news.  “Brother, I have some bad news.  Cindy’s dead.”  And with that everything changed forever.

I think my experience can help others that are going through what I went through.  That’s it.  That’s the reason I have decided to put my experiences to paper (or in binary ).  Then again, I suppose it’s also a cathartic exercise to help me make sense of the last 5 or 6 years and get some perspective on the future.  It’s also important to me to give a voice to the suffering I have witnessed so that others can understand what the implications of mental illness can be.

How can a relationship that for the first 13 years was so joyous and unbelievable so totally destruct at the hands of bipolar disorder in a matter of months? How does a vibrant, strong and kind woman claw herself up from a horrific upbringing, build a wonderful life and then have it end in suicide?  How do raise our children and move on while honoring her memory?

I’ve thought about tailoring this story and perspective to dads.  I’ve also thought about focusing on mental illness, my own frailties, kids and everythinlg else under the sun.  In the end I decided to just tell my story as honestly as I can and let the reader decide if it’s of benefit to them.

I want to share honestly the things I have done during this time that I am incredibly proud of as well as the things I’m not.  Your character and mettle are not tested during the good times.  The rigidity of your spine is tested during the hard times.   When my simplistic view of how life and people should be was shattered I realized that as long I could look myself in the mirror and feel like I had a lot more to be proud of then what I was ashamed then I would be ok.  That doesn’t make dealing with the shame or regrets much easier.

I have raised good kids during times of chaos, protecting them and loving them the best way I can.  And you know what?  It’s not that hard.  Sitting them down and telling them their mother is dead…that’s hard.  There are some simple, fundamental principles I adhere to always with my kids that have nothing to do with dealing with a mentally ill mom.  They are universal and you certainly don’t need a self-help book to explain them.  They’re common sense if you have the wherewithal to compartmentalize your own drama and put them first.

I want to tell the good parts of this story because it helps provide some context into the later stages but also shows why, for some time, I couldn’t see the forest through the trees.  When my family was crumbling around me and my perfect financial future was disintegrating I was so busy trying to get through each day I almost couldn’t see how bad things really were.  I’m an extremely rational person and logically I must have known how bad things were getting but there were so many other day to day issues to deal with I just couldn’t put it together.

I also want to share the frustrations of dealing with government agencies, psychiatrists, the police – both as an employer and a law enforcement agency, support lines and on and on and on.  I found myself screaming at people on the phone that my wife was slowly killing herself and no one would do a goddamned thing to intervene.  How about a psychiatrist having your wife on some many medications that she was living like a fucking zombie?  All those years of medical school for what? To be a pill pusher?  Can you imagine a child protection agency telling you that there was no imminent danger to your children 48 hours before their mother committed suicide?  Can you imagine being at the funeral having co-workers tell you how unstable she really was?  I’m not going to go on a rant and blame everyone because everyone did the best they could.

This is as much a love story as it is a story of mental illness and I think the dichotomy will be familiar to those who have experienced it and enlightening to those that haven’t.   It’s almost impossible to imagine the devastation  mental illness can cause unless you have experienced it or witnessed it firsthand.   Our perspectives are shaped by our experiences.  That’s human nature.  I know my world view has irrevocably changed, for the better, due to what I have seen and lived.  That’s my choice.

I want to also focus on the present and future. Meeting someone wonderful, incorporating them into you and your childrens’ lives, planning for the future etc.

If this helps anyone then it’s more than worth it.  In fact, if it helps me it’s more than worth it.