Book Review of Breathe Cry Breathe: By Robin L Harvey
Breathe Cry Breathe – From Sorrow to Strength in the Aftermath of Sudden, Tragic Loss, A Memoir by Catherine Gourdier By Robin L Harvey
Catherine Gourdier feared she’d drown in a torrent of grief and despair after the sudden deaths of her mother, her youngest sister and her father. Instead, she’s written a gripping and raw memoir that shares how the screenwriter and film producer conquered depression and emerges stronger for it.
The book starts on the horrific night in November, 2009, when a car slammed into her 79-year-old mother and youngest sister. Her mother, Neta, died on the road near the family home’s driveway holding a neighbour’s hand. Gourdier’s sister, Julie, so brutally thrown from the car’s she was unrecognizable, slipped away cradled in the arms of a pregnant passerby who sang Somewhere Over the Rainbow to comfort her.
Watching this unfold before the first-responders arrived, Gourdier’s 76-year-old father, traumatized yet physically unharmed, staggered helpless from his wife to his daughter. Seven weeks later, he died from what doctors’ call “Broken Heart Syndrome.”
In a twist of wicked irony, before trauma unfolded on the road outside their home, members of Gourdier’s large, close clan excitedly worked inside, preparing Julie’s 40th horror-movie-themed surprise birthday party to be held later that night. As celebration turned to devastation, Gourdier found herself at the hospital wearing zombie makeup and half a costume as the family gathered.
“Wanita is dead,” the emergency room doctor blurted out, with little empathy, adding, “Julie has severe head trauma. She may last a couple of hours or a couple of days, but she’s gong to die.”
Gourdier and her angry family members bid their rushed and awkward goodbyes to their mother. As she kissed her mother goodbye, Gourdier turned toward her brain-dead sister and saw a nurse insert a morphine drip. When Gourdier asked why her sister needed pain medication if she could no longer feel pain, the nurse replied, “in case she can.” That statement made the family’s decision to take Julie off life support and donate her organs to save other lives more heart-wrenching and complicated.
From this “dead zone” Gourdier writes with authenticity and honesty, recounting her own resentments, as the family bickered over funeral arrangements and staging the memorial reception. All the while, Gourdier’s stricken father faded into a ghost of who he once was. His death weeks later fractured the family and left Gourdier, the eldest child and estate executor, to wrap up painful details cut off from the love and support she craved.
Months later, Gourdier was still unable to work. Bleak depression overwhelmed her. She thought her husband had withdrawn into work to avoid her endless pain. “He knew that I was sad all of the time. Why couldn’t he hug me?” she writes. Soon she popped tranquillizers with alcohol to sooth escalating panic attacks.
One night, weeks after the deaths and alone at her lake house, Gourdier fantasized she’d end her grief with a mix of pills with booze. It was the first of many times she imagined suicide. The night those fantasies edged perilously close to reality, the memory of her stylish mother snapped Gourdier to her senses. She realized neither her mother nor her father, or her joy-filled sister, would want her to join them that way.
So, she vowed to fight, rebuild her life and forge meaning from the tragedy. She learned the driver of the car that caused the fatal accident was 85 years old and had promised her children to stop driving by her next birthday. After hearing this, Gourdier lobbied for elderly Ontarians to undergo strict tests when they renew their licences. She also campaigned for the city bureaucracy to install a pedestrian crosswalk near where her mother and sister died.
Most of all, she wanted to keep her sister’s memory alive. Julie had been born with Down Syndrome. She worked at a coffee shop lived a life full of friendship and accomplishments. Julie took great pride in competing in the Special Olympics so within a few years, Gourdier created a scholarship and financed several awards in her sister’s honour. She also staged many fundraisers to help people with disabilities.
Gourdier had intended to write a self-help book about how faith, spirituality and alternative therapies can help the grief-stricken. But her publishers said a personal story would have more impact ,so Gourdier changed her focus. Still, like many grieving people, she’d hired psychics and mediums to connect with her lost family members, and in at least one case, was certain she had. She tried a host of alternative therapies from psychic massage to head-tapping and thought they helped.
These efforts, along with counseling and her deepening religious faith,finally freed Gourdier from her personal hell.
Though Gourdier is an excellent descriptive writer, he memoir lacks structure. Her mix of flashbacks, descriptive memories and current-day events can read as jumbled and confusing. An optimist who prefers to keep it together on the outside, while dying on the inside Gourdier’s need to present the shiny side of life at times glossed over the hard emotional truths readers need to be drawn in.
When Gourdier skirted this honest self-reflection, she deprived her readers of a chance to look inside her heart. Two years after the accident, when a friend pressed her on how she was coping, Gourdier realized she’d played “the great pretender” from a sense of duty. Perhaps if Gourdier had given up on duty to reveal more of the fragile, broken woman inside, the book would have rung searing and true.
As is, it’s still a more-than- accomplished contribution to a growing popular genre. More than a decade after the accident, Gourdier has finally emerged from her grief, a stronger, wiser, yet still caring and compassionate, woman. Those traits led her to postpone publishing the book until the elderly driver, whose actions inflicted wounds on many, died.
That compassion is the book’s backbone. It gives Gourdier’s intimate and compelling words the power to show other victims of catastrophic grief they, too, can find a better future.
Breathe Cry Breathe – From Sorrow to Strength in the Aftermath of Sudden, Tragic Loss, A Memoir by Catherine Gourdier - Harper Collins - 331 pages -
$23.99