Murder in the Family

by Jeff Blackstock

  Ambassador Bower’s letter stated the rationale for taking Carol back to Canada.

  George’s problem is a difficult one but his decision to go to Canada with his wife is exactly what I would have done had I been in his position. I think you would have done the same. His wife is obviously very ill. The consensus here is that unless there is a change for the better soon she may not recover.

  I think anyone would interpret Bower’s avowal that “she may not recover” as meaning she might die. He went on to argue why George needed to take Carol to Montreal specifically.

  George must do everything within his power to ensure his wife’s recovery and he would never be satisfied that he left no stone unturned if he did not give her the benefit of the experience that is available in Montreal at the Neurological Institute and with Dr. Selye in these matters.

  The reference to Dr. Selye is especially puzzling. Dr. Hans Selye was a rising Montreal-based research scientist, an endocrinologist and author of pioneering studies of the effects of stress on the body and mind. Selye had published The Stress of Life in 1956, the first of his bestselling books that established him as a world-renowned expert on stress. Although trained as a medical doctor, he didn’t treat patients; he was a researcher, and associated more closely with the Institute of Experimental Medicine and Surgery at the Université de Montréal than with the Montreal Neurological Institute. Carol Blackstock was a woman close to death, suffering from incessant vomiting and neurological collapse, yet it was proposed to send her 5,600 miles away to see a stress researcher. Who came up with that idea?

  If not because of Dr. Selye, why was Montreal chosen as the place to take her? There were many excellent hospitals in Toronto and a family support network there. Not only that, Carol and George would have to stop in Toronto on the way to Montreal. That added a one-hour layover, as well as a change of aircraft and another hour and forty minutes of flying time, to an already long journey—brutally long for anyone in Carol’s fragile condition. The unavoidable conclusion from the way things subsequently turned out is that Montreal was chosen primarily because it was not Toronto.

  In his letter to Brown, Ambassador Bower addressed the question of financial assistance.

  George does not have enough money for return passage to Canada and back for himself and his wife and I have no hesitation in providing him with the $2,000 for this purpose. I expect sooner or later I will get my money back but this is not my consideration. If the government should finally agree to reimburse him for the trip, I will probably be repaid quicker than would otherwise be the case. If not, I have complete confidence in George’s ultimate settlement.

  This too was very strange—George borrowing money from his boss to pay for the airfares. His mother, who could afford a cruise, a two-month holiday in South America, and an expensive fur coat for her daughter, certainly had the means to give him the money. What’s more, she had come to adore Carol and would have gladly paid for her emergency travel to obtain treatment. Two thousand dollars was a significant amount of money, worth around seventeen thousand dollars today. You can almost hear Bower, kindly and well-intentioned as he was, gulping as he told Brown about lending George such a large sum, while hoping the government would approve the expense so that he might recover it more quickly—even though he professed “complete confidence” that George would pay it back.

  Bower may not have known that Granny could have advanced the money, but George certainly did. He could have phoned his mother in less time than it took Bower and Brown to exchange cables. Throughout his life, George never had difficulty asking Granny for money. Another unavoidable conclusion is that he didn’t want to contact her, fearing she would alert Carol’s parents, who would naturally want to be involved in their daughter’s care. Maybe it was really Ambassador Bower who was anxious to leave “no stone unturned,” and George who, by insisting on Montreal, was merely creating unnecessary hurdles by saying he didn’t have the money for the airfare.

  Apparently, little or none of this behind-the-scenes activity involved Carol herself. I can find no record of her expressing, or being asked about, her own wishes concerning these big decisions affecting her very survival. It must have been difficult for her to watch her life being taken over by other people.

  According to the cable traffic between Buenos Aires and Ottawa, a nurse was needed “on doctor’s orders” to accompany Carol and George on the trip to Canada. Ambulances needed to be booked. Admission to the hospital in Canada, the Montreal Neurological Institute, needed to be arranged. Canadian Pacific Airlines (CPA) needed a certificate from Carol’s doctor stating that her affliction was not contagious.

  As the departure approached, the cables became more specific about details. Ambassador Bower cabled Brown (the documentation shows George as the “originator,” with approval from Bower) on July 20, the day before departure.

  BLACKSTOCKS DUE TO ARRIVE MONTREAL CPA FLIGHT 501 JULY 22 MONTREAL TIME 23.30 HOURS STOP LOCAL DOCTOR ADVISES ADMISSION TO MONTREAL NEUROLOGICAL INSTITUTE FOR QUOTE AN ACTIVE ASCENDING POLYNEURITIS ALL EXTREMITIES WITH DIFFUSE PARALYSIS UNQUOTE PLEASE ARRANGE FOR APPROPRIATE MEDICAL ATTENTION HOSPITAL RESERVATION AND FOR AMBULANCE TO MEET PLANE STOP PLEASE CONFIRM THIS EMBASSY STOP

  When I first read this, I found it highly peculiar that the embassy—that is, George—was asking the department in Ottawa to reserve Carol’s hospital bed just one day before departure for Montreal. It was already four days since Ambassador Bower’s cable indicating the possibility of her “permanent impairment” and three days since his letter to Brown saying that “she may not recover.”

  In fact, George obtained the required quote for the airfares—first class for himself and the nurse, a lower berth for Mom, who would be on a stretcher—only on Monday, July 20, the day before departure. It was Julie who observed that, on the same page as his notes about the flight times, doctor’s certificates, medications, and other urgent last-minute details for the imminent airlift of his seriously ill wife, George left this jotting: “Spring and mattress delivered…. Mon. Stn. wgn—late eve…Bradley will call.”

  In the midst of this emergency, George was thinking about a delivery, late on the night before their departure, of a “spring and mattress” in a station wagon. If it came with a box spring, it was certainly not a travel mattress. Why would a man desperately trying to save his wife concern himself with delivery of a mattress—especially when he was about to depart the country so urgently—unless he was worried what a later forensic investigation might find in the mattress it was replacing?

  Bower’s cable ended with an odd request.

  BLACKSTOCKS FAMILY IN CANADA UNAWARE THESE PLANS AND SHOULD NOT BE INFORMED AT THIS TIME.

  BOWER DOMCAN

  Surely George’s superiors must have found this directive questionable, even troubling. Carol was deathly ill, and senior government officials were supposed to keep her parents in the dark about it? By insisting on this, George was putting Ambassador Bower and Brown in a very awkward and vulnerable position. Failing to notify Carol’s parents about the decision to return her to Canada, not long after the Grays themselves had sent urgent inquiries to the department, would look terrible. George would have known this, and he’d have known how difficult it would be for his bosses to deal with the Grays if their daughter were to die. Evidently, he didn’t care. And yet he had the presence of mind to ask the department to cover his expenses.

  In addition to the cable to Ottawa, George, as originator in Bower’s name (his hand-printed draft was among his papers), sent cables to the Canadian embassies in cities where the CPA aircraft would be stopping on short layovers: Santiago de Chile, Lima, and Mexico City. These cables stated that Carol was “seriously ill” and requested that embassy personnel meet her plane on arrival and provide any assistance required. It wasn’t clear what sort of assistance they could have given, short of sending an ambulance or a hearse.
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  ON JULY 21, after a tearful goodbye with María, Carol was taken by ambulance to Ezeiza Airport in Buenos Aires. Canadian Pacific Airlines flight 501 departed at 1:30 P.M. The journey to Montreal would take thirty-five hours—nearly a day and a half. It was going to be an extremely arduous trip.

  The Argentine Red Cross nurse accompanying my parents aboard the flight was, as far as I know, a complete stranger to Carol. There hadn’t been time for the nurse to obtain a passport, so headquarters in Ottawa was forced to pull strings and improvise arrangements for her admission to Canada, and to ask the Argentine consulate in Montreal to provide her with special papers for her return trip.

  In July, the middle of Argentine winter, the afternoon sun illuminates the full majesty of the snow-capped Andes. But to Carol in her misery, lying on a stretcher in the cramped fuselage of the droning DC-6, the sight—if she’d been able to see it at all—would have seemed cold and barren. She must have felt very frightened—not only in her state of physical pain and suffering, but also in her anxiety, knowing her condition was considered so grave that the only hope was to send her back to Canada. Was she going to make it in time? Would she ever see her kids again? Would she ever see her parents again?

  It was only sixteen months since we’d all left New York for Buenos Aires with excitement and hope in our hearts. A mere three months ago, before she got sick, life had been good. Now it was sheer terror.

  Carol was still vomiting and in extreme discomfort during the journey. With the semi-paralysis of her limbs, hands, and feet, she would have needed the nurse’s assistance to go to the bathroom. The nurse’s job would have been to keep her as comfortable as possible, yet she couldn’t have provided the emotional comfort María had given her.

  After the three-hour flight from Buenos Aires to Santiago, the layover was only thirty minutes. No time to get off the plane, even if she’d been able to. A couple of hours after takeoff from Santiago, night fell over the Pacific. If Carol managed to get any sleep, it would have been interrupted three hours later when they landed in Lima.

  On the eight-hour overnight flight from Lima to Mexico City, perhaps Carol slept fitfully through the clatter and smells of the dinner service, the glare of reading lamps, the muttering of passengers’ conversations, the constant vibration of the aircraft high over the black Pacific. I can imagine her worrying about us kids left behind without her, about friends to whom she hadn’t said goodbye. Perhaps the nurse slipped an air-sickness bag under her chin when she needed it as the plane pitched and rolled over the equator.

  They landed in Mexico City at 7 A.M. Even in the Mexican midsummer, the early morning air would have been chilly when the flight crew swung open the cabin door. Perhaps the nurse draped an extra blanket over Carol’s emaciated body.

  After two and a half hours, they took off on the homeward leg. Carol would have to endure ten more hours in the aluminum tube droning over the Gulf of Mexico, the Southern and Midwestern United States and the eastern Great Lakes. Finally, they set down in Toronto at 8:50 P.M.

  By that point, Carol would have been totally exhausted. She was in Toronto, for which she’d felt homesick on first arriving in Argentina and in the depths of her despair in hospital. It was where she’d grown up, gone to school, married, had two of her children; where her parents and childhood friends lived. But she wasn’t going to see any of them that night.

  All she saw during the one-hour stop was the inside of Malton Airport (now Pearson International), Canadian customs and immigration officials, and airline attendants briskly pushing her gurney outside to the Montreal plane. She couldn’t even call her parents to tell them how and where she was, or where she was going. They were probably at home, perhaps making final arrangements for Grandma’s trip to Argentina, and still desperately worried about what was happening to their daughter. They were completely unaware that she was just a short drive from their apartment on Avenue Road.

  I’ve often wondered why my mother didn’t take that opportunity to contact her parents, to speak with them by phone for even a few minutes. I can’t believe she didn’t try. The answer may lie somewhere between her deeply debilitated condition and my father’s powers of persuasion. We’ll never know for sure.

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  ON ARRIVAL AT Montreal’s Dorval Airport (now Trudeau International), shortly before midnight on July 22, Carol was moved in her stretcher from the airplane to an ambulance, then driven through the dark streets to the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI).

  Her MNI case history gives us a bare-bones report of what happened next. The wording is clinical and distressingly incomplete. But sixty years later, it’s the closest thing we have to an eye-witness account.

  CASE HISTORY OF CAROL BLACKSTOCK

  THE ABOVE PATIENT WAS ADMITTED TO THE MONTREAL NEUROLOGICAL INSTITUTE ON JULY 23RD, 1959 AT 12.30 A.M. SHE WAS ABLE TO GIVE HER OWN HISTORY AND TOLD US THE FOLLOWING STORY.

  SHE HAD BEEN WELL UNTIL MAY 1959 WHEN SHE HAD A SUDDEN ONSET OF DYSPNEA [DIFFICULT OR LABOURED RESPIRATION] AND COUGHING AND CHOKING, WITH SOME VOMITING AND SLIGHT FEVER. SHE WAS TOLD SHE HAD ASTHMA THOUGH THERE WAS NO PREVIOUS HISTORY OF ALLERGY. VOMITING CONTINUED AND SHE WAS ADMITTED TO HOSPITAL IN BUENOS AIRES WHERE SHE STOPPED VOMITING AFTER 2-3 DAYS AND SEEMED TO RECOVER.

  The doctors who treated her in Montreal had been given Dr. Mercer’s clinical record of Carol’s treatment in Buenos Aires, including the interviews conducted with her at La Pequeña Compañía de María and Dr. Mercer’s interpretation of the psychosomatic “neurotic element” in his diagnosis.

  EXAMINATION IN THE NEUROLOGICAL INSTITUTE REVEALED A THIN, TENSE YOUNG FEMALE WHO ANSWERED QUESTIONS IN A FLAT UNINTERESTED MANNER. SHE WAS DEMANDING ATTENTION ALL THE TIME. THE SKIN WAS DRY BUT THERE WAS NO EXCESSIVE PIGMENTATION. SHE VOMITED TWICE DURING THE FIRST EXAMINATION….

  …TOUCH AND PAIN SENSIBILITIES WERE DIMINISHED OVER THE LOWER THIRD OF BOTH LEGS AND THERE WAS A QUESTIONABLE LOSS OF POSITION AND VIBRATION SENSE OVER THE LOWER EXTREMITIES…. IN VIEW OF THE SEVERE ELECTROLYTE IMBALANCE, THERAPY WAS DIRECTED PRIMARILY TO REMEDY THIS.

  ON JULY 23 THE VOMITING HAD BEEN CONTROLLED BUT THE PATIENT WAS CONFUSED AND RESTLESS. THE NEXT DAY, “SPASMS” WERE SEEN INVOLVING THE FACE AND ARMS AND, IN ADDITION, SHE DID NOT RESPOND TO QUESTIONS READILY.

  The MNI case history provides no indication that Carol Blackstock was dying. It contains no sense of urgency, no suggestion that the doctors struggled to save her life, except at the very end. Perhaps the physicians’ apparent lack of urgency reflected their interpretation of Carol’s behaviour: the loss of sensation in her lower extremities was “questionable”; she answered questions in a “flat uninterested manner”; she was “demanding attention all the time”; she had “spasms” (the quotation marks suggest they may have been real or imagined); she was “confused and restless” and did not respond to questions readily. If only she’d been more helpful.

  If she was demanding attention all the time, it was simply because she was fighting for her life.

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  CAROL’S VOMITING WAS brought under control on July 23, the same day she arrived at the MNI. While this no doubt moderated her suffering somewhat, it’s not clear what else it achieved. Vomiting is, of course, the body’s way of expelling toxic substances.

  But what was making Carol Blackstock vomit in the first place? She’d been vomiting, with the occasional brief respite, for nearly three months, since the onset of her sickness at the beginning of May. And what was causing the polyneuropathy, which had afflicted her for almost as long? Why weren’t these the primary questions in the big diagnostic picture?

  Knowing the urgency and gravity of her case, the doctors at the MNI would presumably have wanted to brainstorm and conduct a complete battery of tests, including screening for the presence of toxins. Carol was in the instit
ution’s care for more than fifty-five hours, nearly two and a half days. But sadly, the MNI case history contains no diagnostic picture of what was making her so critically ill. Instead, the focus was on the treatment of her electrolyte imbalance—an important symptom, no doubt, but viewed in isolation from the vomiting and the polyneuropathy, it appears to have been a distraction from diagnosing the real problem.

  The case history is silent about the presence of our father during Carol’s last moments, although he is mentioned elsewhere. It does provide graphic details of the indignities of her condition, some of which will not be repeated here. The hospital record notes her saying that there were “people attacking her.” Whether this was a function of the hallucinations also recorded, we don’t know, though it seems likely.

  With a dull, sickening thud of finality, like the door of a mausoleum sliding shut, the case history describes what happened next in two stark sentences.

  THE LEVEL OF CONSCIOUSNESS DETERIORATED, AND THERE WAS A PROGRESSIVE RISE IN THE PULSE RATE, WITH A FALL IN BLOOD PRESSURE AND CARDIAC ARRHYTHMIA. SHE DIED ON 25 JULY.

  That is the only account I have ever seen or heard of how our mother died. Our father never told Doug, Julie, or me anything about it. He didn’t say whether she died without pain. He didn’t tell us if he was by her side, as people are when a loved one dies, as husbands and fathers are. Did she ask after us before losing consciousness? Did she see a clergyman? All unknown.

  I can only imagine that if Dad had been with her, he’d have mentioned it. It would have been a comfort to us to know that she wasn’t alone, that he cared about her to the last.