Pod Insights Personally Sorry About The Kid, Episode 3: Ghost About this episode “Were you waiting for me to just say goodbye?” Alex and his grief counsellor, Yvonne, dive into one memory of Paul that Alex never forgot and try to trigger others. Plus, Alex’s parents discover that some of their own memories are not what they seem.
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0:31 Speaker 01 This is a CBC Podcast.
0:37 Speaker 02 What's that?
0:38 Speaker 03 I liked his Ten Commandments.
0:41 Speaker 02 What were they?
0:43 Speaker 03 Uh, thou shall love all animals. Thou shalt not go to school. Thou shalt eat all the candy thou wants. Thou shalt not kick dogs. Thou shalt never get sick. Thou shall never die.
1:03 Speaker 02 Wow.
1:05 Speaker 03 Yep.
1:11 Speaker 04 I'm Alex McKinnon, and this is Story About the Kid. Chapter Three, Ghost.
1:30 Speaker 05 Testing, one, two, testing, testing.
1:33 Speaker 03 Hello, hello, hello.
1:38 Speaker 04 My parents and I are sitting in my old bedroom, surrounded by photos and letters and newspaper clippings.
1:44 Speaker 03 Did you see this picture? This is the practice the day before he died.
1:49 Speaker 02 He's taller than everybody.
1:51 Speaker 03 Yeah, he grew.
1:53 Speaker 06 He must have cut this out.
1:55 Speaker 04 Going through boxes of Paul's old things to see if they might trigger some of my memories.
2:00 Speaker 05 What is it? It's a card from you. A card from me? What does it say? Brother, when I found this birthday card saying what a great guy you are, and how lucky I am to have you as a brother, my throat clogged, my heart skipped a beat, and I got tears in my eyes. I guess I hated to part with the dollar seventy-five more than I thought.
2:26 Speaker 04 We find jokes he wrote and Mother's Day cards. And the stuff from after his death, too.
2:32 Speaker 06 So these are poems I wrote for Paul.
2:36 Speaker 05 Can you read them?
2:38 Speaker 06 When near frantic, I rushed to the scene of your accident and found hushed silence, reverence, and tenderness. Infinite love and compassion imprinted on the faces who looked with awe and wonder at my wounded boy.
2:55 Speaker 06 So still, your breathing regular, soft and steady. Hypnotic, beautiful, the breath of God. I knew again what a miracle you had always been. So I turned my eyes from all the evidence of blood, broken body, death, and said, "I'm here, sweet boy. You're safe and strong. You'll be fine." Were you waiting for me to just say goodbye?
3:27 Speaker 04 It's too hard for my mom to read me everything she wrote. In another letter after his death, she asked Paul, "Did you see us that night, Dad and I, rolling in pain? Your death's so much more painful than your birth. No relief from the contractions. Just endless waves of pain flooding every part of our bodies."
3:52 Speaker 04 My mom's name, by the way, is Dolores, which means pain and sorrow.
4:03 Speaker 04 I sometimes wonder what my family's grief would have felt like if the accident had been more of a fluke. Some incomprehensible moment of chance and chaos. Not something so stupidly, easily preventable.
4:19 Speaker 01 Ten more witnesses testified today, all ten agreeing that the police car that struck and killed Paul McKinnon was speeding excessively. All six witnesses who noticed the traffic lights testified the cruiser sped through a red. Today, the rookie policeman who was at the wheel testified he hadn't noticed the light. And he said he'll drive the same way in the future. It was emotional stuff for the victim's mother, Dolores.
4:43 Speaker 06 The emotions are always there, not only listening today. We're always aware of what happened to him and we just want to make sure that it never happens again to anybody else.
4:52 Speaker 01 They're determined to keep fighting. They say they must give their child's death some meaning.
5:05 Speaker 04 A few months after the inquest into Paul's death, the coroner released his report.
5:13 Speaker 04 Based on the thirty witness testimonies he heard, he concluded that Paul had, in fact, been crossing on a green light and that the police siren had only sounded a second or two before he was hit.
5:25 Speaker 04 The driver, Officer Serge Markovic, had testified that he'd been trained not to sound the siren for too long, so as not to distress the public.
5:35 Speaker 04 The coroner recommended that the Montreal Police change this policy and that they make sure new recruits are always paired with an experienced officer. But he also stated that bad policy wasn't the only thing responsible for Paul's death.
5:49 Speaker 04 He wrote that "the burden of alerting the public to the danger of their presence rests entirely on the police officers in the car." And that in this case, Paul died because the officers in the car chose not to adequately announce their presence.
6:07 Speaker 04 My parents thought that this would mean that Mark Vic would be charged with negligent driving and brought to trial.
6:14 Speaker 04 But Montreal's lead prosecutor wasn't convinced there was enough evidence.
6:19 Speaker 04 Mark Vic was allowed to keep his job. And for a time, it seemed the only punishment he would receive was the three-day suspension he got from an internal police discipline board for endangering the lives of pedestrians. We couldn't wrap our heads around it.
6:35 Speaker 03 I think we did kind of believe that eventually he would just say, yes, this was a huge, huge mistake. And there would be a kind of shared blame for his, uh, his lack of training. So in that sense, we were naive. We didn't kind of realize the extent to which they would defend their position.
7:05 Speaker 04 After the inquest, my parents felt this need to fill the silence of the house.
7:12 Speaker 03 It felt very strange to not have five people living in the house. So we applied for foster care, and I think that took about a year. But it was like a gift. They brought us this beautiful, healthy, four-day-old baby.
7:33 Speaker 04 I remember little by little, I started to feel okay to laugh again. And then I remember when I graduated from, from grade six and Sarah was holding him at my graduation, he, he threw up all down her dress.
7:47 Speaker 03 Yeah, all down the back of her dress. And the people in the back went, "Oh!" And she was just so cool about it. Yeah, his presence just, you couldn't help but kind of believe that, you know, life could be good.
8:08 Speaker 04 My mom felt like Paul would have loved the baby too. But of course, nothing was going to make us miss him any less.
8:17 Speaker 06 I think the movie Ghost had come out. We had a video of it. So that movie I watched over and over and over again and fantasized that Paul was around the way Patrick Swayze is in that movie.
8:32 Speaker 04 This is my sister Sarah, who was 16 when Paul died.
8:36 Speaker 06 Because like in that story, there's a person who dies suddenly. And then he's around, you know, in a sense, it's kind of creepy. Because he kind of stalks to me more.
8:50 Speaker 06 In all of her grief and, you know, how tempting and like, I went wishful thinking to have that be real.
9:02 Speaker 04 Sarah stepped into a kind of caregiving role that year for all of us around her. At Paul's wake, my brother's friend Greg had been nervous about seeing Paul's corpse.
9:14 Speaker 04 Sarah snuck him in to see another dead body in the room next door. So that seeing Paul's wouldn't be such a shock.
9:21 Speaker 06 I think I focused a lot on doing and I focused a lot on presenting and performing. I will be brave. I will be strong. And that felt good on a certain level, but then of course, it's also a deep, deep defensiveness. Like, nobody's going to see how bad this hurts. Nobody's going to see how affected I am.
9:49 Speaker 04 Since Montreal's courts were refusing to criminally charge Markovic, my parents started petitioning the provincial courts to do so. They were worried that if Markovic wasn't punished, the city's cops would just keep driving recklessly and soon kill someone else.
10:06 Speaker 04 For over a year, they wrote letters and even held a press conference saying that, if the courts do nothing, then the next death will be due to their negligence.
10:18 Speaker 04 Finally, Quebec's lead prosecutor agreed there was enough evidence for a trial and a date was set.
10:28 Speaker 04 By the time it got underway, I was thirteen.
10:33 Speaker 04 The hearings dragged on in fits and starts for almost a year. My family and I would sit in the courtroom, listening once again to testimony about the last moments of Paul's existence, over and over and over, reliving his death from every angle. All the while, Markavec maintained he'd done nothing wrong.
10:56 Speaker 04 My mom remembers the defense lawyer tossing around the autopsy pictures of Paul's body as if it was nothing. And that one time, he asked the judge to have me kicked out of court because I kept muttering things under my breath.
11:10 Speaker 03 He basically wanted us to be thrown out of court as completely crazy hysterical people who were looking for vengeance.
11:21 Speaker 04 Right.
11:21 Speaker 03 And so we were just very, very careful to not show any anger.
11:30 Speaker 03 When you get involved in the courts, it doesn't allow you to really just grieve the way you should grieve because the process is soul-sucking, really. It's non-compassionate. It's clinical at a time when you're anything but clinical. It all was just horrible. It was horrible that you had to be there.
11:59 Speaker 04 And yet I did insist on being there.
12:03 Speaker 04 Somehow, what I remember most about the trial is the slew of reporters that waited outside the courtroom, and how whenever anyone opened the doors and stepped out into the hall, all these camera flashes would go off.
12:18 Speaker 04 I used to pretend I had to go to the bathroom sometimes, just to get my photo taken again.
12:25 Speaker 04 I hate that I remember that. It's so vivid in my mind. I could hear the roar of rapid-fire clicks as the camera shutters opened and closed.
12:36 Speaker 04 Why is that detail still so clear to me when my memories of my brother have completely disappeared?
12:46 Speaker 04 You know, I've, I've always thought that my memory of that time was very good. Growing up when my sister was studying Greek, I was, I'm continuing my grief counseling sessions with Yvonne. She had to memorize the, the Greek alphabet and I was bored and was able to do it in like, you know, 10 minutes. And I still can recite the Greek alphabet and, or Hamlet soliloquy or whatever. I mean, I just have this very good memory and I just can't remember anything about Paul. I've, I have two memories of him and neither of them are that important. They're, you know.
13:17 Speaker 06 Yeah, well, what are they? Can you talk about them? Cause they are important. You remembered them.
13:23 Speaker 04 Sure. Um, I'm gonna cry.
13:27 Speaker 06 That's good. You should allow yourself to.
13:33 Speaker 04 One of them is, for the last 30 years, I've only had two memories of Paul. Real memories, not just things I know about because I've seen a photo or something.
13:46 Speaker 04 The first one is just this flash of Paul telling me he wasn't afraid of the dark anymore. So that's, that's one of them. The second one is of this time he took me to the barber. And I wanted the same haircut as him.
14:01 Speaker 06 Hmm hmm. Yeah.
14:06 Speaker 04 And when he, when he got out, I don't know why I'm crying right now.
14:10 Speaker 06 It's very important to you, Alex. It's an important story.
14:16 Speaker 04 I remember him saying that he's gonna be waiting outside, but don't get the same one as me, same haircut. And the barber said, what, what are you gonna do for you today? And I whispered the same, same one as him. And I saw Paul kinda look at me and just be like, ah, roll his eyes and, okay, fine.
14:37 Speaker 06 Why do you think you remember that?
14:41 Speaker 04 I don't know. I don't know. I really don't.
14:46 Speaker 06 I think that's a tremendous memory. It tells me, I mean, he really was your mentor. Like, you wanted to have hair like him, and you wanted to be like him. And probably it was too painful at the age you were to imagine not having him in your life because he was your mentor. He would have helped you through.
15:12 Speaker 06 And you had to grow up without him.
15:17 Speaker 04 Yeah.
15:19 Speaker 06 You know, there's some reason why you've been thinking a lot about that one memory of yours. There's a reason for it. There's a reason why you're thinking about it a lot. But you have to ask yourself and have the patience to listen.
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16:23 Speaker 04 As I've been starting to confront my own relationship with memory, I've also noticed some inconsistencies within my family's narrative.
16:33 Speaker 04 One of the things my mom has always mentioned when she talks about the day Paul was killed was the weather. It's part of her story. That October of that year was an especially rainy and cold month, but that the 25th was suddenly warm and sunny.
16:50 Speaker 03 I think it was a nice day. I think it had been raining and raining and raining all September and all October, like just pouring rain every night. That day it was nice.
17:03 Speaker 04 I never really thought much about it until I started doing research for this podcast and found out that there hadn't been much rain that month. And that that day, the sky was overcast.
17:15 Speaker 04 Then when I asked my dad about identifying Paul's body at the morgue, he said this.
17:20 Speaker 05 Yeah, I was the one who had to identify him. And we waited and waited and it was a long time afterwards. The morgue, it wasn't right after the accident. It was months later. From what I remember.
17:33 Speaker 04 How could it be months later? He was buried four days later.
17:39 Speaker 05 That's true.
17:42 Speaker 05 Why do I think it's the...
17:45 Speaker 05 It seems to me it was quite a bit later, but you're right. It couldn't have been.
17:52 Speaker 04 It makes sense that my parents' memories have shifted over the past 30 years.
17:57 Speaker 04 But it also worries me.
18:00 Speaker 04 If I do recover memories of Paul,
18:03 Speaker 04 how will I be able to trust that they're real?
18:09 Speaker 04 There's another thing I've been noticing while talking to people about Paul these past few months.
18:14 Speaker 04 When someone brings up a story about him, it seems like it might be triggering one of my own memories.
18:20 Speaker 04 I find myself shutting down the conversation. Save this for later. When I have the mic on, I tell them. But the later never comes.
18:30 Speaker 04 I recently brought this up with my wife Katie over dinner, while our five-year-old Stella was watching cartoons in the other room.
18:38 Speaker 04 It's a weird thing because this whole thing is trying to get to know Paul better. But I find myself almost trying to shut it down, in a way.
18:48 Speaker 04 It's something I push away.
18:51 Speaker 04 I think I need to work through
18:54 Speaker 04 why exactly I'm so reluctant to let these memories be jogged.
19:04 Speaker 06 I mean, the obvious answer is because they're extremely painful. And it brings up a very painful time for you and your family where you don't want to revisit that.
19:15 Speaker 04 No, but I think I'd agree with you if, if what I didn't remember was the trauma of it. Seeing my parents cry and seeing them, but I remember that stuff. I remember the court case, I remember the funeral, I remember that. It's the good stuff I don't remember.
19:31 Speaker 06 But that's almost worse to remember the good stuff because then you remember what you lost.
19:40 Speaker 04 Yeah.
19:41 Speaker 06 What are you doing? What can I do now?
19:43 Speaker 04 What can you do now?
19:45 Speaker 06 Why don't you put yourself to bed? That'd be nice.
19:47 Speaker 04 Give yourself a bath.
19:49 Speaker 06 Okay, so you're expecting me to just drown?
19:54 Speaker 06 No. Don't drown, please.
19:56 Speaker 04 Try to keep your head above water. Uh, but it is bath time.
20:12 Speaker 04 I think the first time I really came face to face with what I lost was when I started high school. Loyola, the same one as Paul.
20:22 Speaker 04 There were traces of him everywhere.
20:26 Speaker 04 My first day there also happened to be the school's first day in a new building. That morning, all the students gathered in the field next to the old campus and we began a ceremonial walk to the new location, just across the street.
20:41 Speaker 04 I remember stepping off the curb at the crosswalk. The same step Paul had taken in one of his last moments.
20:53 Speaker 04 Paul's class was in their graduating year by then. They all knew who I was and went out of their way to make me feel special.
21:01 Speaker 04 Paul's picture hung in the halls and an award presented each year in his honor was displayed right next to the main office. I remember one afternoon, sitting in class, when a voice blared through the intercom. "Would you please send Paul McKinnon down to the office?"
21:19 Speaker 04 The other kids all turned to me in shock. "Uh, I mean Alex," the voice said. "Alex McKinnon."
21:31 Speaker 04 In a lot of ways, I felt like I was trying to live up to the ghost of Paul. Like I had to be doing something for two.
21:40 Speaker 04 In one of the boxes at my parents' house, I found some notes that Paul's classmates had written to us after he died. There are pages and pages of them, and they all say the same thing. "Paul was one of the nicest guys I've ever met." "Paul was always happy. He could even fail a test and smile." "He was the kind of person who, just by stepping into the room, cheered everybody up. Everybody loved him." "We're all gonna miss him forever." "He's not someone I'll easily forget."
22:12 Speaker 04 Everyone loved Paul. Of course they did. So did I.
22:18 Speaker 04 But it was starting to feel like he was being deified. Like people were remembering this perfect, idolized version of him. I remember one time just letting loose and telling my mom a bunch of Paul's secrets, about his bad-boy side. Like that he would sometimes smoke cigarettes, and that he'd almost had sex once.
22:40 Speaker 04 I felt terrible as soon as I said it.
22:44 Speaker 04 But I think she was actually kinda happy to hear that stuff. That he had experienced more than she knew in his short life.
22:53 Speaker 04 Sometimes I wonder if the version of Paul that was being publicly remembered may have pushed out the real Paul. My Paul. Who I was starting to forget.
23:06 Speaker 06 In your family, your parents were very involved in all the court proceedings. So who was there, really, for you to talk about your experience with Paul? There wasn't anybody really talking to you about it, about the past and what he meant to you and what you're feeling about the loss of your brother?
23:30 Speaker 04 Yeah.
23:31 Speaker 06 And what is very helpful for children, when there's been a traumatic experience, that every year, actually, it's very important to bring it all up. Because children have to revisit their feelings. A child sees the trauma in different ways as he grows. I'll just give you a little example from my own life. I lost my father when I was two. Every time I must have called him or brought up his name or something, my mother must have cried. Because I learned very early on that that made her sad.
24:11 Speaker 06 So nobody told me not to talk about it, but I stopped talking about it. By the time I got to about eight or nine, when she started to say, "Well, maybe you want to know something about your father", I said, "No, no, no, it's okay. No, I'm fine."
24:25 Speaker 04 Because you'd been conditioned to kind of...
24:27 Speaker 06 I'd been conditioned and I knew that it upset her. And so I grew up never talking about it. And it was only when I was at university, doing psychology 101 or something, somebody said something about suppressed memories. I went back to my room that night and I was just beside myself. And it brought out all these memories of him, you know, when I was two years old, being on his shoulders and him walking around with me. And I thought, "Where did those all come from?" And slowly, I started to realise that I had never unpacked any of this stuff.
25:09 Speaker 06 So if you feel you can, the way to really go through memories, I'll guide you through it, but we have to go through it in lots of detail. That's the way memories start to hatch, you know?
25:28 Speaker 04 I'm in.
25:29 Speaker 06 All right, so let's talk about the memory and Alex, I want you to close your eyes for a moment. Take a deep breath. Try to remember the day, remember what you can about the day. What kind of day was it that you went to have your haircut?
25:47 Speaker 04 I remember it must have been spring or summer because I it was nice. And I really see him in the chair, like looking at him there and just being like, wow, he's big. Like tall, I mean, and he just looks almost like the, this could sound terrible, but like the Lincoln Memorial. Like he just in that it just seemed so big in that chair. And I was sitting there reading a magazine and like looking up at him. He and I remember him being so so friendly with the barber.
26:26 Speaker 06 Oh.
26:29 Speaker 06 What is that? What does that bring up for you?
26:34 Speaker 04 I don't know.
26:37 Speaker 04 I think it just because I think at the time.
26:43 Speaker 04 Um, there was just probably, you know, he's.
26:49 Speaker 06 You take a moment, just take a moment, Alex, and think about it, you know?
26:57 Speaker 04 I think it was it was probably a bit of jealousy, like a little bit of like, why isn't he nice to me?
27:01 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah.
27:05 Speaker 04 But he was though he was it was just like, just, you know, I was annoying little brother and he and I was always copying him.
27:17 Speaker 06 But you see, you've got a feeling there because there there's something you you you know about Paul. He could be very charming, could be very nice.
27:30 Speaker 04 Yeah.
27:30 Speaker 06 He was nice to the barber, but he could be tough on you sometimes, you know, so.
27:36 Speaker 04 Yeah.
27:37 Speaker 06 But at the same time, it's touched you that he was a kind person.
27:42 Speaker 04 This is a different thing, but there was another another memory that just kind of popped into my head of this man. Uh, older guy in his, I don't know, eighties or so. And he had just recently gone blind and he couldn't cross the street. And I remember me and my brother going to school, like wa- walking to school and him at like, you know, in grade five or something like that, uh, walking this guy across the street.
28:09 Speaker 06 Oh. That's very special too, isn't it? Yeah.
28:14 Speaker 04 Yeah.
28:15 Speaker 06 Yeah.
28:17 Speaker 04 I can remember it so well. I can remember him helping the guy sit down on stairs after we had crossed and, um, yeah, I remember, I remember it so well.
28:29 Speaker 06 What does it make you feel inside?
28:33 Speaker 04 I don't know. I mean, a little bit lighter, to be honest. Um.
28:38 Speaker 04 It's nice to kind of remember, to kind of see different parts of a memory that I didn't really allow myself to, to think of.
28:47 Speaker 06 You see, that's what I want you to start building. One memory that you unpack will trigger others.
28:56 Speaker 06 Do you think you've had enough for today, Alex?
28:59 Speaker 04 I think so.
29:00 Speaker 06 Um, okay. So I'm going to stop the recording.
29:13 Speaker 04 On the next episode of Sorry About the Kid. It's, it was, it's hard for, it was hard and it still is hard for him to be static. Because we keep changing and he doesn't as well. And I think that becomes a constant readjustment against his stillness.
29:32 Speaker 04 So I am on my way to the hypnotherapist. Can I be put under, I guess? I don't know. I have no idea what to expect from this, but I'm, um, I'm open to it.
29:51 Speaker 04 Sorry About the Kid is written and produced by me, Alex McKinnon, and Mira Burtwyn-Tonack. Editing and sound design by Mira Burtwyn-Tonack. Jeff Turner is our senior producer. Our theme music is by David Drury. S.K. Robert is our coordinating producer. Our associate producer is Caitlin Taylor. Our logo is by Mathilde Corbeille. R.F. Nurani is our executive producer. Follow Sorry About the Kid on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you liked the show, it would mean a lot to us if you tell your friends about it, or leave us a review. Thanks for listening.
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