The heartbreaking truth about Anne’s creator
Kate Macdonald Butler reveals a long-held secret about her grandmother, one of Canada’s most beloved authors, Lucy Maud Montgomery

Globe and Mail [Toronto Ontario] September 19, 2008 at 11:42 PM EDT

For many years, my family has kept a troubling secret. What has made things even more difficult is the fact that the person it involves was not only my grandmother, but one of Canada’s most beloved authors, Lucy Maud Montgomery.

Her most famous novel, Anne of Green Gables, is still a bestseller after 100 years. In addition to Anne, my grandmother wrote 19 other novels, personal journals and hundreds of short stories and poems. As well, she has been the subject of several biographical studies.

Despite her great success, it is known that she suffered from depression, that she was isolated, sad and filled with worry and dread for much of her life. But our family has never spoken publicly about the extent of her illness.

What has never been revealed is that L.M. Montgomery took her own life at the age of 67 through a drug overdose. I wasn’t told the details of what happened, and I never saw the note she left, but I do know that it asked for forgiveness.

After having read the poignant Breakdown series on mental health in The Globe and Mail during the summer, I was inspired to reflect upon my own family’s history with depression.

Additionally, the recent focus on my grandmother’s creativity – this is the 100th anniversary of the publication of Anne of Green Gables, with events around the world celebrating Anne and her creator – has encouraged me to end our silence.

I have come to feel very strongly that the stigma surrounding mental illness will be forever upon us as a society until we sweep away the misconception that depression happens to other people, not us – and most certainly not to our heroes and icons.

Obviously it can happen to anyone. The public faces of such prominent Canadians as Roméo Dallaire, James Bartleman, Valerie Pringle and others who supported mental-health awareness during the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health’s recent publicity campaign have also had a powerful effect on me.

But, most important, the legacy of L.M. Montgomery, and my grandfather, Rev. Ewan Macdonald, and its related responsibilities and joys, are taken very seriously by my family. I spoke with them before writing this essay and we agreed that it was important for us to share our family’s story.

I never knew my grandmother. She died in 1942, before I was born. My grandfather, who also suffered from serious mental illness, died the following year. I got to know them through my father.

After my two older brothers married and left home, I had my parents all to myself for a few short years before my father, a physician at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, died in 1982. I became closer to him while I studied at the dining-room table – a time when we had a lot of conversations together. We developed a deeper connection during his last years and I am grateful for those memories of our time together.

When the last volume of The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery was published in 2004, I sobbed through it and, in fact, I couldn’t even finish it – there was such a profound sadness for me in imagining how my father must have coped with two such depressed parents.

For a young man in the prime of his life, it must have been an overwhelming responsibility. I remembered our late-night conversations and how he shared many memories, yet rarely talked about the burdens he must have felt during his young adult life.

My heart aches for my father, who was left behind to deal with the grief of losing his beloved mother. He carried the secret of the circumstances of her death and maintained the façade of a proper and well-adjusted family because of his desire to protect them and their reputation in the community.

Reading between the lines

L.M. Montgomery’s most famous character, Anne Shirley, declared, “My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes,” and readers find it one of Anne’s more endearing sayings. That particular lament has always been especially significant to me as I imagine my grandmother must have felt the same sadness at times in her life. The fictional Anne went on to happiness and a life full of love and fulfilment. My grandmother’s reality was not so positive, although she continues to inspire generations of readers with her books, which reveal her understanding of nature – both in matters of the heart and the world. Although she was a very successful author, her life was overshadowed by her depression, coping with her husband’s mental illness and the restrictions of her life as a clergyman’s wife and mother in an era when women’s roles were highly defined.

Even though I never met them, I’ve always regarded my paternal grandparents with great affection because of their influence on my father and, therefore, on me. I grew up admiring their achievements, both professional and personal, through my father’s stories and reminiscences.

My heart aches for them, as well, because I know they were part of a generation that simply did not acknowledge personal dysfunction, let alone seek help.

I have great admiration for my grandmother, for her contribution to Canadian literature and culture, her strength of character, and the love, pride and sense of responsibility she gave to my family.

I am proud of her courage, given how isolated and lonely she must have felt during certain periods of her life. I wish that her family or community had had some of the tools that are available today. I expect that most families continue to be bewildered about how to help loved ones who suffer from debilitating depression.

I hope that by writing about my grandmother now there might be less secrecy and more awareness that will ease the unnecessary suffering so many people experience as a result of such depressions.

An encouraging light

The recent Globe and Mail series certainly sheds an encouraging light on the notion of the “perfect” family, acknowledging that it may include the reality of depression and other mental illness, and suggests that the shame surrounding these subjects may be lifting.

I’ll never know if my grandmother might have been inclined to seek help if she had lived in a less judgmental era or if she had had access to supportive therapy or the medications available today. I would like to think so.

I long to tell her how I wish her family could have known how to help her and how proud we all are of her accomplishments. I also wish that, while my father was still alive, my family could have helped one another more by talking more openly about our feelings around her death. We realize now that secrecy is not the way to deal with the reality of depression and other mental-health issues.

Kate Macdonald Butler is the daughter of Stuart Macdonald, who was the youngest son of L.M. Montgomery.

“Is this Lucy Maud’s suicide note?”

This copy is unfinished and never will be. It is in a terrible state because I made it when I had begun to suffer my terrible breakdown of 1940. It must end here. If any publishers wish to publish extracts from it under the terms of my will they must stop here. The tenth volume can never be copied and must not be made public during my lifetime. Parts of it are too terrible and would hurt people. I have lost my mind by spells and I do not dare think what I may do in those spells. May God forgive me and I hope everyone else will forgive me even if they cannot understand. My position is too awful to endure and nobody realizes it. What an end to a life in which I tried always to do my best.

The Globe and Mail (Canada)

September 24, 2008 Wednesday

Lucy Maud suffered ‘unbearable psychological pain’;
But there’s ‘a much wider context for understanding’ final note found on bedside table of Anne’s creator, biographer says

BYLINE: JAMES ADAMS

SECTION: NATIONAL NEWS; BREAKDOWN: CANADA’S MENTAL HEALTH CRISIS; Pg. A7

LENGTH: 1212 words

One of the foremost experts on the life and literature of Lucy Maud Montgomery says she has “a totally different interpretation” of the death of the creator of Anne of Green Gables, one that does not necessarily point to Montgomery having committed suicide in her Toronto home in late April, 1942.

Mary Henley Rubio, professor emeritus of English at Ontario’s University of Guelph, said in an e-mail interview that a note found on Montgomery’s bedside table the afternoon she was found dead doesn’t conclusively demonstrate that Montgomery willfully killed herself at 67 with a drug overdose.

Dr. Rubio, 68, said that there’s “a much wider context for understanding that final ‘note,’” which she believes she provides in her much anticipated biography of Montgomery, more than 30 years in preparation, to be released by Doubleday Canada next month, the 100th anniversary of the publication of Anne of Green Gables.

The scholar, famous for co-editing Montgomery’s multi-volume journals posthumously published between 1985 and 2004, stressed that her views shouldn’t be seen as contradicting those of Kate Macdonald Butler, one of Montgomery’s grandchildren. In an article in last Saturday’s Globe Focus section, Ms. Butler wrote: “What has never been revealed is that L.M. Montgomery took her own life . . . through a drug overdose.”

Until last weekend, Montgomery’s end was generally believed to be what her physician, Richard Lane, described in the death certificate: “coronary thrombosis” as a result of “arteriosclerosis and a very high degree of neurasthenia” (the last is a general, quasi-psychoanalytic term to describe a neurotic disorder characterized by chronic weakness and fatigue).

Ms. Butler, a principal of Heirs of L.M. Montgomery Inc., which controls much of the author’s legacy, said in her article that she “wasn’t told the details of what happened” the day her grandmother was found dead in her bedroom in west Toronto. Ms. Butler was born several years after her grandmother’s death, and said she never saw the note that her father, StuartMacdonald, the youngest of Montgomery’s two sons, a medical doctor, pocketed from the author’s bedside the afternoon of April 24, 1942.

Dr. Rubio, however, has seen the note, which runs to 10 sentences and 148 words. Before his death in 1982, Dr. Macdonald suggested Dr. Rubio undertake his mother’s biography and provided her with many important contacts and documents. The full text of the note is in the coming biography, Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings, and is reprinted in today’s Globe and Mail.

Dr. Rubio, whose biography of almost 700 pages has not received the “authorized” stamp of Montgomery’s surviving relatives, said in an e-mail interview earlier this week that “Kate [Macdonald Butler] is totally right that her dad believed his mother had committed suicide. She is right that it was a dark secret to carry all his life. She is right to show how the stigma associated with mental illness damages lives as much as mental illness itself. I am glad that the family has chosen to speak out through Kate.”

At the same time, she said she did not know that Ms. Butler was preparing an article about her grandmother’s death before her book’s publication, nor had Ms. Butler seen Dr. Rubio’s finished biography when she drafted her Globe and Mail article.

There’s no question that Montgomery was “suffering unbearable psychological pain” at the time of her death, Dr. Rubio writes in her biography. One month before her death she’d even declared: “I shall be driven to end my life.”

The wellsprings of her despair were largely twofold. Her husband of 31 years, Ewan Macdonald, a Presbyterian minister, was himself in a state of complete mental and physical collapse at this time and had been a burden on Montgomery for almost the duration of their dismal marriage. Moreover, her unemployed oldest son, Chester, 29, was living in the basement of their large house at 210A Riverside Dr. Described variously as messy, abusive, disrespectful and lazy, Chester was a deep source of disappointment to his mother, not least because he had separated from his wife Luella (whom he’d impregnated out of wedlock in 1932) and because he’d lost his partnership with a law firm in Aurora, Ont.

Add to this Montgomery’s chronic dependency on a cocktail of bromides and barbiturates, including Nembutal, Barbital, Medinal and Luminal, and it’s plausible that the author, fuzzy-headed and weak from weight loss, could have died even if she believed she was taking only “a small amount” of medication.

Whatever Montgomery’s motivation, Dr. Rubio argues in her book that the note Dr. Lane and Montgomery’s son found on her bedside table “was not . . . specifically a suicide note.” It had, in fact, been written two days before her death, on the back of a 1939 royalty statement, clearly dated as such and with the number “176″ at the top.

Dr. Rubio contends that the note very likely was the final page of a 176-page account of the years 1939-1942 that Montgomery expected one day to transcribe in more writerly fashion into her official journals. This had long been Montgomery’s methodology - write something on scraps of available paper, then at some point - sometimes years later - copy it into her journals.

In folding the note into his pocket on April 24, 1942, Montgomery’s son “would not have known” that 175 other pages were somewhere in the house, which Montgomery prophetically called “Journey’s End” when she bought it in 1935. Rather, he “interpreted this page as a single stand-alone note written solely to explain her final despondency, and it is easy to see why he did.”

Dr. Rubio notes that the other 175 pages have never been found and, among several scenarios, suggests that Chester Macdonald “very likely” discovered them after the removal of her mother’s body, and destroyed or hid them. Mr. Macdonald, who died at 51 in 1964, had unimpeded access to all parts of the house. He knew his mother’s writing habits and “he had good reason to think” whatever she had written “would contain much about him,” very likely highly negative.

Dr. Rubio does not entirely dismiss the suicide theory, but yesterday she declined to say whether she believes it rests more solidly on other evidence besides the note. In the biography, she observes that a week before Montgomery’s death, the author had been visited by a friend from Leaksdale, Ont., where Ewan Macdonald had been a minister for many years. “At the end of the visit, [the friend] told Maud that she would drop back in a week. Maud responded that she had doubts that she would still be there in a week. [The friend] did not understand what she meant, and left puzzled over the comment.”

Writes Dr. Rubio: “Maud’s comment to [the friend] . . . tips the evidence in the direction of a premeditated death by someone who was in the grip of a major depressive episode, and may or may not have understood that she was dependent on drugs that were killing her.”

“Whatever the case,” Dr. Rubio concludes, “death would have been welcome.”

Dr. Mary Rubio delivers the Sybille Pantazzi Memorial Lecture on writing the life of Lucy Maud Montgomery Thursday at 8 p.m. at the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books, 239 College St., Toronto.

The Globe and Mail (Canada)

September 30, 2008 Tuesday

The death of Lucy Maud

BYLINE: Paul Tiessen, professor, Department of English and Film Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University

SECTION: LETTER TO THE EDITOR; Pg. A20

LENGTH: 186 words

DATELINE: Waterloo, Ont.

Kate Macdonald Butler’s and Mary Rubio’s sensitive insights into Lucy Maud Montgomery’s depression and death, in recent issues of The Globe and Mail, are sustained by some of Montgomery’s own observations in her correspondence with her epistolary friend, Ephraim Weber, a Mennonite born in Ontario’s Waterloo County with whom Montgomery began a correspondence in 1902. In her final brief notes to him, from December of 1940 until December of 1941, she gave thanks for their “long and true friendship” and expressed her fear that she might never write to him again.

It’s worth remarking, in the context of the current debate about Montgomery’s death, that in the welter of the many exchanges she and Weber had - about war and peace, literature, politics and religion - she made clear in a 1922 letter (in a direct echo of her journal entry) that she “never felt the horror in suicide that some feel.” If suicide did not leave “any burden on others,” she wrote, and caused no others to suffer, then it should not necessarily be judged a “cowardly … [or] wicked, or immoral thing.” She added, “Is this sophistry?”