Emotional Wellness

Myrtle, Carol, and Severe Emotional Wellness

I have come to the realization that my life has taken place in two separate phases.

The first phase commenced when I was born in 1948 and lasted until July 1990.

The second phase commenced in July 1990 and is ongoing to this day.

During the first phase I experienced many wonderful things, but I also lost the two women I loved the most, my mother Myrtle and my wife Carol.

Both these ladies left us way too soon and way to young, Myrtle at age forty-six, and Carol at age forty. Both succumbed to their demons brought on by severe emotional distress.

Severe emotional distress is not a term that you will read about very often, but it is a disease that has effected the vast majority of humans sometime during their lifetime.

This is a different, yet in it’s severest form, similar disease to what is called ‘mental illness.’

We live with our emotions every day, and there is a full spectrum of emotions that we deal with. We can be happy or sad, angry or content, exhausted or energetic, you can name any feeling a person experiences and it is controlled by our emotions.

People can get emotional about so many different things. They can be trivial, such as a loss suffered by your favourite sports team or losing an article of clothing. They can grow in magnitude to a point where your emotions become frayed.

A heated argument with you spouse or boss, a bad report card brought home by your child, and especially financial stress, you name it, we have all experienced it.

Most of the time we keep our emotions in check and hidden inside of us. We try to live day to day more or less on an even keel and unless you tell someone what you are feeling, no one would ever know. But when things go wrong people around you can often tell that you are out of sorts. Tone of voice, facial expressions, body language, physical appearance, all these things can blow your cover when you are feeling emotionally stressed.

Emotional wellness has a lot to do with finding a balance in your life physically and emotionally.

Physical wellness can often be obtained by keeping active, watching your weight, eating properly, getting the right amount of sleep and avoiding excesses in alcohol and drugs.

With emotional wellness a willingness to think about and deal with every day challenges can help. Things like making choices or decisions, adopting and coping with difficult situations, talking about one’s needs and desires, maintaining meaningful relationships and realizing that everyone has good days and bad days.

Now all these things sound well and good when you read them in an article like this, but what if you just can’t cope?

The human mind is the most complex, amazing organ in the human body, but it is also the most fragile. While it is certainly susceptible to physical trauma, it is equally susceptible to emotional trauma, and it is this trauma that effects one’s emotional wellness.

We live in such a demanding, fast paced world where instant access and gratification have become the norm.  With the internet invading our space at almost every turn it is difficult to disconnect and get off the grid to recharge one’s batteries.

This is when emotional wellness suffers. The pressures of everyday life can become overwhelming.

That is what happened to Myrtle and Carol.

I have never tried to write about Myrtle and Carol before, and it was only recently that I realized that even though their demons were vastly different, the cause of their decent into their own personal Hell was the same, severe emotional distress.

My mother was a wonderful lady, a gentle soul with a large, loving heart. All she wanted to do in her adult years was to be a wife and mother and watch her family grow.

But fate would decided otherwise.

Although she was born into financial privilege, her life was by no means easy.

The only child of Vincenzo ‘James’ Franceschini, an Italian immigrant to Canada who made a fortune in road building and construction and Lydia Anne Pinkham of Toronto, Myrtle was a much loved and pampered only child.

James Franceschini was a flamboyant entrepreneur who, because of his ethnic background, was not readily accepted into the Anglo-Waspish establishment in the city he chose to make his home. Nevertheless, he was a tenacious businessman who forged partnerships where it mattered most, the incumbent governments of the time. His company, Dufferin Construction, still exists today over one hundred years after he founded it.

Myrtle was raised in an Italiente villa, named after her on the shores of Lake Ontario.  James’ brother Leonard and his family lived in the compound as well. Myrtle Villa was a special place for family and friends to congregate and enjoy themselves. Portions of the estate are still used as residences and sections of the extensive gardens remain to egis day.

Outside the gates of his home as James’ notoriety grew, so did his problems.

While he was respected in the industry as shrewd but fair competitor, he was still considered an outsider and resented by many people. Even his own countrymen tried to cause trouble.

There was a kidnapping threat against Myrtle in 1934, when she was thirteen, which was taken very seriously.  A man of Italian decent was finally arrested and jailed. This incident forced Myrtle to have armed protection wherever she went for several years.

You can imagine the emotional distress that this life-threating incident must have caused her at such a young age.

My Mum blossomed high school, attending a prestigious girls private school in the north end of Toronto. She had also blossomed into a strikingly beautiful young woman. Her social circle was full of friends that would stay close her entire life.

Near the end of high school her best friend introduced Myrtle to a young man by the name of Ralph who was an excellent athlete and quite a hit with the ladies. They started dating and life had never been better.

In 1939 the dark reach of Hitler’s tyranny we spreading across Europe and by September the British Empire including Canada was at war with Germany.

Many young men joined the armed forces right away. Myrtle’s beau Ralph had just won the Canadian national figure skating championship and was scheduled to compete in the 1940 winter Olympics in Japan, so he held off enlisting until he was able to see how the winds of war would blow.

They did not blow well for the Allied forces in Europe and several independent countries in Asia. Japan was waging it’s own militarization of the immediate region and the 1940 winter Olympics were shifted to Norway. Weeks after that announcement, they were cancelled altogether as the Nazi juggernaut rolled through the continent.

There would be no Olympics for Ralph, but just before he shipped out to Europe he won the men’s North American figures skating championship in Boston in January 1941. Shortly afterward he joined the 48th Highlanders of Canada and would spend the next five years in the army, rising to the rank of major and serving in England, North Africa and France.

For Myrtle, seeing the love of her life leave for such a dangerous, uncertain future would have been extremely traumatic, just like it was for thousands of other families across the country. But my Mum was in for an even more upsetting event.

On June 10th, 1940 Italy signed a pact with Germany joining the Axis powers at war against the Allies. Italy was at war with Canada.

For many years there had been growing fear about fascist subversives in Canada, especially ones of Italian decent. With the declaration of war Canada’s Minister of Justice ordered that all suspicious members of the Italian community be arrested be the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

James Franceschini was one of those people, accused of being a subversive fascist.

Over the years James had diversified his business interests into many new areas, one of them being ship building.

On September 1st. 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland and as a result England and Canada were drawn into what was to become World War II, Franceschini transferred his ship building company to the Canadian government for one dollar. His paving company also was working with the Ministry of Defense paving runways for the Canadian airforce.

None of this mattered, and in the end he was interned in a work camp in Northern Ontario with hundreds of other Italians.  All of his companies were seized and disbanded by the Canadian government.

It is not hard to imagine the shock and dismay James’ arrest caused his family. Their lives were turned upside down in the course of one day.

At her school, Myrtle became an outcast, not by her friends, but by the school administrators and I would imagine some angry parents as well.  She was no allowed to graduate with her class and received her diploma in the mail.

Theses events could very well have sewn the seeds of the severe emotional distress Myrtle would suffer from in the years to come.

But my Mum had inherited some of my grandfather’s toughness and rather than wallow in grief she left home the following fall to attend MacDonald College just outside of Montreal where she would live and study for the next few years.

James Franceschini was found innocent of all charges against him at a court hearing in June 1941, but by that time he was near death from the cancer he had contract from the stress and severe conditions  during his internment. James was sent to the Laurentian Mountains in Quebec to recuperate and found the fresh air and natural beauty so rejuvenating that he built a home there and expanded his business interests in Quebec.

Ralph returned home safely from Europe in early 1946, and he and Myrtle were married in August of that year. I was born two years later, and my brother Martin would follow in December 1950.

I have fond memories of the times our little family experienced until Martin became severely ill with asthma and other complications in 1954. It was thought that a sewage treatment plant near our home carried air-borne bacteria that caused Martin’s condition.  The doctors recommended a  change of location to  a safer environment, and in the end, Martin was sent to live at our grandfather’s home in Mt. Tremblant Quebec, leaving the rest of the family behind.

This was very sad news for all of us, but it devastated Myrtle. Sending her baby away, even though it would save his life, was heartbreaking. The emotional distress of Martin being hundreds of miles away took it’s toll over the next five years that my  brother would live away from us.

A bright light in her life was the birth of another son, Paul, in 1955. Our family was reunited in a new home located in a safer environment in 1959 and Myrtle became pregnant in the spring of 1960. All of us were hopeful that the new baby would be a girl, which it turned out to be when Michelle was born in October.

But by then Myrtle’s world had been turned upside down with the sudden death of beloved father James in September 1960, a month before Michelle arrived.

The emotional distress of James’ passing had caused Michelle to be born three months premature, and our sister had a very tough fight to stay alive. Mum was slammed on two fronts, losing her dad and watching her new baby struggle in the hospital for several months.

Michelle won her battle, and for the next eight years we enjoyed the best of times together, at least on the surface.

While Myrtle was beside herself with joy to finally have a daughter and lavished all the love and affection she could on all her children, her life had changed forever with James’s passing.

James and our grandmother Anne had lived apart since his internment, which was a choice made by both of them. There relationship was always one of love and respect, but Myrtle was named as the sole heir to the majority of James’s assets in his will.

This meant that rather than being a wife and mother, she also had to deal with the future of complex business conglomerate.

What ensued over the remaining years of our mother’s life would make a good novel.

From the start she inherited our grandfather’s pinstriped cronies of board members and advisors. These men were bankers, lawyers, politicians, high powered cigar smoking captains of industry that would meet once a month in our home.

I am certain this was not the life my Mum had envisioned as her future only a few months before when she got pregnant with Michelle.

Dufferin Construction was sold almost immediately and a new private company that was formed, owned exclusively by Myrtle.

It became evident immediately that one high powered lawyer wanted to run the business his way, and inclusiveness and transparency were not part of his agenda.

As time went by trying to juggle family and business had an disastrous effect on the lady that just wanted to be a wife and mother.

She sought solace in late night drink, which most often included lengthy phone conversations with one of her many girlfriends.

While her emotional state was deteriorating, I know personally that she had big plans for the family’s future. Late in 1967 she was able to rid herself of the domineering executive who had made her life so difficult, and you could see the difference in her manner. 1968 dawned with real hope for the future.

But alas, the poison had done it’s evil worst, and she left us forever very suddenly in May of that year.

Over the years this beautiful lady had suffered severe emotional distress so many times that the cumulative effect was overwhelming, and her solution to numb the pain ultimately made her body shut down.

Forty-six years was far too few for our Mum to live, and we as a family unit were together less than eight years. Her death changed our lives forever.

Severe emotional distress is a killer!

My wife Carol’s story is completely different, but with a similar tragic ending.

Carol Skilling was born in the northern Ontario mining town of Sudbury. He parents were well- to-do middle class people who raised Carol and her three brothers and sister in the traditional spare the rod, spoil the child way.

I met Carol on a blind date after she moved to Toronto to attend college in 1968. We were married in 1976 and subsequently had two daughters.

Carol was a wonderful, energetic lady who lived life to the fullest. She embraced her northern heritage and loved camping, fishing, snow and water skiing and everything the outdoors had to offer. Her three older brothers and father taught me how to hunt and fish, and to this day I have a strong affinity for the northern way of life and feel very much at home deep in the bush, totally off the grid.

All this isn’t to give the impression that Carol was some coarse, back woods ruffian. She had natural blonde beauty, so much so that her career as a fashion model lasted for years.

She loved to laugh and party, and was very much into sports, playing tennis and taking high level aerobics. We had a wide circle of friends, enjoyed our faith, travelled extensively, and through the first ten years of our marriage life couldn’t have been better.

One morning in the spring of 1987 Carol woke up and said to me, ” I had a black day yesterday.”

Those six words commenced an journey neither of us could have imagine or had expected.

Our daughter were ages nine and seven, and their young lives were about to thrown upside down.

Carol had tried to hurt herself for the first time that black day. It would not be the last attempt.

We went immediately to see her lady general practitioner, who was an excellent, hands on, pro active physician, She and her husband were also  social friends.

She recommended a local psychiatrist, and we were soon about to take the first step along the psychiatric medicine trail.

Surmontil and Doxepine were her first companions, followed by Tryptophan, Amoxapine and Loxapine. Asendin, Rivotril, Imipramine, Dalamane, Prozac, Tegretol, and Desyrel joined the list as well over a three years span.

It is easy to conclude from the medications above that Carol suffered from a major depressive disorder.

But how did this happen? Why did it happen?

The answer is simple. No one knows. Not me, not our children, not the best medical minds that we were able to find.

Twenty-five years later there are still no answers.

For some reason Carol became emotionally distressed. She could never verbalize why.

She suffered from anxiety and loss of self confidence, but the worst symptom was a lack of sleep. The side effects of all those meds didn’t help either.

Our minds are so fragile. They are susceptible to forces from within and without.

Carol’s problems magnified her emotional distress until it became so severe in her mind that her only course of action to gain relief was to leave this world. She had lost all hope and felt only despair.

My mother, my wife, both gone because of severe emotional distress.

What can we do to prevent this from happening to us and how can we cope if it  does?

That is the question that needs to be discussed at length. I intend to start the ball rolling in an open form very shortly on this site.

In the meantime, please remember what you have learned from Myrtle and Carol.

Thank you,

James.