Lavinia Thompson's Blog: Seeking reviewers!

In a world that feels like it is always ablaze with rage, toxic ideologies, war, and hatred, it’s easy to look around as a childfree woman and sigh a breath of relief that I chose not to bring kids into this society soon to be in shambles. I can simply write, publish my stories, garden, make crafts, and await the seeming end of the world if I don’t die of another cause before it happens.

But what if the world doesn’t end? What if society somehow makes a turnaround in the years I still remain here and there’s something to look forward to following this generation after all?

Because sometimes, I stop in the midst of my gardening and crafting and writing. I look at the flowers that feed pollinators and the vegetable plants that feed us, and see hope for the hungry, the environment, and for humans. I paint my garden ornaments or cross stitch and sew and stop to admire beauty in its smallness in a world so cold. I write, and find stories to share with others, that heal and help escape. I read and find that escape for myself. And I see voices that cannot be silenced.

I find hope.

That “what if?” feeds into a thought that lives rent-free at the cusp of my mind, one that maybe other childfree people might ponder too: If the current generations can fix the world they inherit, then what might those of us without children leave behind, and where do we leave it? And with who? With whom will I leave the hope that my life may have inspired?

On one hand, I normally dwell in a state of existential dread. Nothing matters. Society, money, time, credit scores, jobs, etc, it’s all an illusion, a system meant to distracted us from the brazen atrocities committed around the globe by those in power. Political issues divide us while the real issues remain concealed. Fascism and communism seem to be an ominous and shadowy plague slowly infecting the world in a bizarre foreshadowing that feels like the lead up to World War II and Hitler’s sickening reign.

It seems we can’t win. That we may be doomed to exist at the narcissistic whims of leaders who are in it only for ego, power, money, and a blatant disregard, even disdain, for the rest of us beneath them.

In a writing server I am a member of on Discord, someone offered some advice that, on the surface, didn’t seem to be something that could possibly alleviate this ongoing dread and weight of fear hanging over everything. In summary:

Make something. Create. Make something you can hold in your hands and be proud of. Let the process distract you from the world and let your mind focus on the act of creating instead of the darkness around us.

It made me ponder on the crafty little things I already do. Lately, it’s felt as though everything is too small to matter. That I am too small to matter and with that, nothing else matters, either. So why try? Despair accompanies this thought and drags me down a rabbit hole of obsessing over everything I cannot change and have no control over.

The hole is dark. Long. Endless. Dampened with depression, sorrow, and hardened by indignation and cynicism.

Writing has always been my escape from such a tunnel, but this year, I’ve felt this shadow lingering behind me and over me that has been whispering that even my writing, my haven and my love, doesn’t matter, either. I haven’t worked on what to put in my author newsletter on Substack like I was going to because it seems pointless. I slowed down on my Medium blog. Why bother? And who is going to read my silly books, anyway? What’s the point?

I’ve let it dwell as it has, but with seasonal depression coming on, I’ve become ever more aware of it’s presence. The truth is, art, the act of creating something, matters because it heals. Even if no one sees it, even if it isn’t any good, it is a hand that caresses the open wounds on our hearts and souls until it is a mere scar. And we need to be healing ourselves continually in order to keep doing good in the world that will make a difference.

I saw a meme a long time ago that said the little issues each of us take up and become passionate about are all part of the same tapestry, and by tugging at that one thread, though it may be minuscule, helps to fray and unravel the entire system which crushes and harms us. If each of us takes a thread, we can make the collective difference.

So, I have been doing things to keep me looking to the future. Preparing for spring’s garden. Setting deadlines to get “Beyond Dark 2” out next year. Keeping a list of true crime topics I want to write about on Medium. Continuing my cross stitch projects to give as gifts to others and because the mundane routine of it occupies my mind when I put on “Critical Role” or a documentary on in the background. I continue to look into family history research because it helps me understand myself and the world around me and the past. It provides hope for the future that there will be a better world and something to leave behind.

Enter part two of my existential dread: legacy. Though after I die, I won’t be around to see what impact, whatever little, my life has had, I live with this constant reminder that I have no one, really, to leave my legacy to. Where will my stories go? And the family history book I have spent years putting together, telling the stories of the mysteries that for so long baffled my family? The recipe book I keep of all my favourite foods I love to make? The writing guide I hand wrote into a pretty notebook to keep as a reference guide? Who will cherish my beloved book collection the way I cherish my mother’s Ann Rule collection while she’s still alive? Who will care about all of the cross stitch projects I’ve done and amassed over the years?

I am much too young to be worry about this yet. It seems bizarre to already be considering this. But I believe is stems from having been a suicidal kid and well into my twenties. That intimate brush with my own mortality for so long has made me so aware of what little time we have here.

I never want kids but looking at my writing, at all the research I have done on our family history and all of my crafts and gardening knowledge and... there’s nothing to leave it all to. And it often makes me sad. I am not close with my nieces or nephews (my brother is very toxic as are the mothers of his kids so I refuse to have anything to do with them). My sister is also not having kids. Sometimes I tell myself legacy is an illusion and just like anything else, it doesn’t matter. It’s all bullshit.

Other times I just ponder on what those of us who choose not to have children indeed leave behind. It all feeds right back into that existential dread. Does anything matter? If it does, am I doing enough to leave behind enough love and light in the world for others? If it doesn’t, what’s the point in trying?

I think it has to come down to the notion that each individual life is small and irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, but within that small and irrelevant life we need to find things we love and leave behind what pieces of love and light we can. We need to live our truths even if we only ever mattered to a small circle of people who love us. And it’s okay to live an otherwise mediocre and not overly memorable life as long as we leave some love behind in the shadow of our inevitable demise. It’s sort of like pets, how their short lives are so full of love and friendship and light. They won’t be remembered by the entire world. But they will be remembered by those who loved them endlessly and that is their paw print on the world.

And making things, creating things, is a great way to do that, even more so when it feels pointless. Something I do want to do is finish the family history book I started. A scrapbook of family photos and stories I started years ago but haven't continued in some time. I want to pass it onto my sister before I die, or hopefully find somewhere safe to keep it, so that perhaps one of my nieces or nephews can access it should they ever be curious about this side of the family and the generational trauma.

Answers. That’s something I want to leave behind for them. And for the rest of the world, my stories.

I'll leave you with a song I find particularly inspirational during this time.

This year opened for me with doses of both cynicism and optimism. I kept trying to plug along despite the disappointments of 2023.

Well, the first half of 2024 really punched me in the gut with both writer burnout and my depression taking root and clutching on. It’s been hard to come back from.

I started a Substack account to ring in the New Year, but haven’t done much with it.

The exhaustion of social media and being so connected with the world still lingers. I hardly want to look at Instagram, Twitter, and only open TikToks a few select people send to me. Otherwise, I have little motivation to post or even try to create new content for any of those existing accounts. Hearing about numerous offshoots of these sites starting and the politics leading up to it all is overwhelming. Bickering rich people and divisive politics keeping so many distracted from the societal system collectively crushing the middle class while the rich laugh their way to the bank. It never changes, and continually parades on before our eyes.

I purposely avoid scrolling through my phone, unless it’s through the numerous gardening or Dungeons & Dragons groups I am in on Facebook (you know, like the old and boring millennial I am who still has an account there). Very little political content gets through on my Facebook, which is honestly a relief.

In this exhaustion, I got thinking: The line between author and “content creator” often gets blurred. We, as authors, write books and market them. How much of marketing needs to be “content creation” as we know it? I am personally tired of so many things competing for my attention that I don’t even want to add to the ocean of content and information and opinions drowning us day in and out.

I just want to write and publish books. These days, it feels so much more complicated.

That social media exhaustion led to writer burnout. While juggling true crime content on both Medium and Newsbreak while trying to write books and this blog, my flurry of writing came to a standstill when Newsbreak essentially cut off reads from non-U.S. writers. That little extra money I was getting from there really helped me out and had given me hope that I could, indeed, write full-time soon. That’s always been my goal, after all.

I didn’t want to let that bring me down, though, so I focused on Medium, who announced they were trying to eliminate AI generated content and wanted to encourage more long-form content for their paid writers.

Yet, I still felt drained, and have for months now. Even rereading my 2024 goals post from January, cynicism crept into my words. Now, I am less cynical and more tired.

It feels like my author platform needs a full upheaval and re-evaluation. To get my brain back into work mode, I’ve been been listening to the Creative Penn podcast. I’ve followed Joanna Penn and her self-publishing journey for yearsg. So, I returned to someone who inspired me to begin self-publishing to begin with.

Her podcast, and her guests on it, were a reassuring reminder that authors should only choose one or two social media platforms to frequently post on. I am not a video gal, so I definitely won’t be posting silly dances or epic rants anytime soon. But Instagram has always done decently well for me, as has Twitter. It became so hard to gain any traction or engagement on Facebook that I deleted my author page there.

I keep debating on whether Substack will be a worthy venture, or if I should simplify things further and focus on my website and newsletter list. If I centralize the latter, what do I do with Substack? I think my website, blog, and newsletter, accompanied by two social media platforms, could be manageable on the author platform side, while scaling back how often I post on Medium. I don’t want to get rid of Medium - I legitimately love what I do there. I love writing about current true crime cases and criminal psychology and topics in that realm as they relate to the “Beyond Dark” universe.

But I do need to carry on with that universe. And trying to stretch myself in so many directions has led to this chronic burnout I haven’t been able to shake.

Learning our limitations as artists and writers is important. Burning ourselves out is counterproductive and terrible for our mental health. If we are in a negative state, it becomes harder to create with authenticity and the voice our readers have come to enjoy. We can’t be everywhere at once, even online. And it isn’t fair to expect that of ourselves. We are not content creators. We are writers. At the heart of that is the love of words, pages, stories, characters, and this immersive experience we weave with our imaginations.

Don’t get me wrong. There is nothing wrong with being a content creator. It’s opened up a whole new world for so many people, and that’s beautiful. But sometimes, as writers, I think we tend to take on that title, too, and extend ourselves beyond our limits.

It’s okay to come back to just being a writer without the expectation of being all over the internet. I, for one, want to get back to writing my books and blissfully ignore the social media side until I need to market things. So, I think I will be doing that. Less social media presence, for now. Scale back on Medium to a few times a week. Focus on “Beyond Dark” and “Martha Holmes Mysteries.”

In this time, I’ll be looking at my author platform, and the business side of it, in a deep re-evaluation. Re-reading some of Joanna Penn’s extremely insightful books for authors and creating a viable plan instead of simply floating around lost. To love our craft is to sew that love into our stories. Disheartened cynicism poisons that.

So, there it is. Back to basics. Build back better. I’ll return to some socials soon when I am closer to finishing “Beyond Dark 2: Gravedigger.” Take care of yourselves, and each other. Much love! Thank you all for coming on this long journey with me. It is far from over.

Do the storms still make me

wild?

Does there remain a howling gale

which rattles bones

leaving me yearning

for the destruction

of a wreckage old?

When rain drops trickle

then pour down

in torrential torment

does it whisper to me

to leap through the puddles

as lightening flashes above?

Are those blackening clouds

still the one thing

that can make me feel

when all else leaves me numb?

Perhaps I grew accustomed

to screaming and bellowing

and hurling things

amid a detonated rage.

Perhaps I relate

to screeching winds against glass

when it pounds on windows

desperate to find refuge

where no one will take it in.

Or maybe too many nights

I cried in the sheets of rain

stinging skin, thank goodness

for the pain,

for something…

Or maybe I live

for the quiescent moment

it all blows over;

rain whispers,

winds murmur,

lightening dims,

thunder mumbles.

Could it be

that I’ve been seeking

my wild side once more?

No longer found

at the bottom of a bottle

or the end of a cigarette

in neon lights;

no longer found

stumbling home at 3 a.m.

to dreaded silence.

No, the wildflowers

resurrect my soul

in their drinking of the rain.

Trees bend and break

with tornado-esque gales

like I do.

The skies must release

their agony once in a while,

when the world

becomes too much;

when the screaming, crying,

desperation and rage

overwhelm everything.

We’ve never been much different,

the storm and I.

But now I stand in its power

to heal

instead of wishing

for my end.

Image by Enrique from Pixabay

Did Theresa Bull gaze at the death certificate of her now late husband, realizing that she’d messed up when she told her kids he shot himself when in fact he had drowned?

Or did she merely fold up the document, put it away where no one would find it, then deliver them the news of their father’s alleged suicide by gun after the fact?

How much did she know?

What did she do?

It couldn’t have mattered to her right then. Frederick was dead. It was over. She had to move forward. If she indeed messed up her and John Walker’s plan when she told the kids Frederick shot himself, it never showed, and the slip-up certainly never reached the ears of the police, which leads me to believe her kids never saw their father’s death certificate.

Image by Sergii Koviarov from Pixabay

The fact that he drowned wouldn’t become a known detail until his great-granddaughter ordered the certificate out of an obsessive curiosity almost a century later. Sometimes I wonder: if the gunshot had been listed on the certificate, would I have taken it as murder, or would I, too, have accepted the suicide story? So many times, I have read about real cases which unravelled with the drop of one minuscule detail.

This year, 2023, was the hundred-year anniversary of Frederick’s death. It seemed fitting to write about it and tell his story publicly online. I wish even one of his kids were still alive so someone involved could have learned the truth. Maybe one of them could have at least died with some closure. But they never received that, and it tore the family apart in the years to follow.

Sometime following their mother’s marriage to John Walker, the kids all stopped talking to each other and their mother. Despite being in Canada at the same time, Mom says that Ann and my grandma didn’t talk for quite a few years.

Frederick and Theresa’s only son, referred to as Fred Jr or “Uncle Fred” by one of my mother’s cousins who knew him, appears to have led a quiet existence following his father’s death. Their daughters, Ann, Veronica, and Theresa, all went on to have their own families and lives.

The cousin who so fondly remembered Fred Jr is one of Veronica’s sons, and told me that Fred, as an adult, got a job down on the docks due to his father’s excellent reputation among those who knew him. Fred Jr was born in 1916, and died in 1982. As of now, I have no idea if he ever got married or had kids. “Frederick Bull” remained a very popular name into that generation, so until I can find a way to narrow down the records, this remains a mystery.

“I used to see my Uncle Fred up until the 1970s, he used to take me to the pub on a Sunday, lunch time, when I was about 13 or 14,” the cousin told me. Fred would visit Veronica and her family in Norfolk during that time.

“I was young and he was a BIG London guy who was really cool,” the cousin said, but he didn’t recall Fred Jr ever discussing sensitive family matters.

Veronica, born in 1921, was still a toddler when her father died. Losing him, then having a stepfather enter the picture must have been a confusing time for her, being at an age where kids don’t truly comprehend the concept of death or the bizarre circumstances surrounding this one in particular. She grew up to marry a man named Evan Harold Costin, and they had three sons together. They raised their family in Norfolk. My mother refers to her as “Aunt Mickey.”

My grandmother, Theresa, was born in 1918, and was only five when her dad died. She didn’t stick around the family, going to London to become a dispatcher during World War II in the office where she’d eventually meet my grandfather, Cecil Thompson. Of all ironies, he was working in that office on modified duties… due to an injured arm. They married in 1946 right after the war and emigrated to Canada in 1947, eventually settling in Gibsons, British Columbia. It was a tiny oceanfront town then, and while it remains small today, it’s become a huge tourist place. My mother often reflects on how quiet it was back in the 60s and 70s when she grew up there. Theresa and Cecil had three kids; two sons and a daughter, all who grew up on the stunning Sunshine Coast, in a quaint little community where they both sought to escape their lives in England. (Grandpa has a story all his own which I will also research more of and write about after this series.)

The Sunshine Coast (photo taken by Lavinia Thompson)

While three of the four kids seemed to settle into a fairly normal adulthood, one wouldn’t shake the ghosts of the past. Annie was born in 1919, the second youngest. For whatever reason, be it family dynamics, coping with trauma differently than her siblings, or the weird sixth sense she seemed to have about her father’s death, Ann became a wild contradiction to her siblings. True to the family though, details of her life remain vague.

Ann married Hugh Anderson, a Canadian soldier she met in England (according to Mom’s cousin) in April 1943 and gave birth to a son, John, in 1949. They married in England, and John was born in Vancouver, BC, Canada. After they arrived in Canada, it becomes hard to track her. Not only is Ann Anderson a wildly common name, much like John Walker, but Canadian records aren’t as in-depth as they were in England.

That being said, records are scarce on Ancestry for Canada, I find. The 1921 Canadian Census is on Ancestry, but honestly I know so little about Hugh and his parents, that I could spend another decade the way I did John Walker sifting through records. I’ll keep looking, but for the sake of this post, I must settle for not knowing much yet.

“I know that when Mom and Dad came to Canada, they made their way to Alberta from Montreal and stayed with Ann and her husband,” Mom tells me. “Then my parents left the farm and went to B.C. because of the drinking. My parents didn’t drink much so I guess they were not too impressed.”

Mom tells me that Ann remained in Canada though, even after she and Hugh split up. They were off and on again for a while, apparently, until Ann remarried a man who we only know by his last name, McBride. I cannot find any marriage records for Ann and him, though. It’s possible that marriage was annulled, as that would erase any records of it ever happening.

What we do know is that John went to live with my grandparents sometime in the late fifties, when my mother was young, due to Ann having problems with her marriage and drinking. Mom says Ann found my grandparents and sent John to live with them for a while. He wound up staying there throughout most of his elementary school years. Mom recalls that she used to introduce John as her brother instead of her cousin.

The drinking and relationship problems seemed to plague Ann. It caused many problems in the family, though Mom says she thinks it was John’s refusal to go home that made Ann finally straighten out. By 1988, she was single. Mom says that was the last time she saw Ann, when she stopped at my grandma’s on the day of my dad’s funeral in November 1988. Mom was pregnant with me at the time my dad died in a logging truck accident on Remembrance Day.

My grandparents saw Ann and John after that up until Grandpa sold the house in Gibsons. I know Mom and John lost contact eventually and we don’t know what happened to him. To our knowledge, he remained out in Vancouver and could still be there. Mom says she think he went into communications or something after joining and serving in the Navy.

The Sunshine Coast (photo by Lavinia Thompson)

However, Mom doesn’t really recall where Ann’s belief that Frederick was murdered came from. Mom says that as a kid, she would overhear tidbits of conversation between my grandma and Ann. Ann definitely thought her father was murdered, and that it was no accident or suicide. But between her multiple marriages, her drinking problem, and her tendency for drama in those years before sobering up, her siblings simply called her crazy.

You really weren’t crazy, though, Auntie Ann.

She definitely showed signs of unresolved trauma, but I don’t think she was crazy to think such a thing. I came to believe the same upon looking into it. Did Ann have the same obsession with Frederick’s death in a time where she lacked access to the records and ability to access the information? Is that what made her seem crazy, the obsession with no way to back it up? The generational trauma felt by this death that sent ripples of poison through roots for decades to come?

Because it’s a pretty telling sign that you traumatized your kids when they don’t speak to you or each other for years until your funeral, and it’s far too late to heal the damage done, or come out with the truth. Theresa took the truth about Frederick and John and whatever love triangle and resulting violence to her grave. It resides in the dirt now, roots forever tainted by words unsaid, truths untold. My grandmother and her siblings kept swallowing that poison in silence, and took the rest of the secrets to their graves.

Theresa died on April 8, 1966 at 17 Jacksons Court, Brading Crescent, Wanstead, London, with an estate of £315, which would be just over $12,000 CAD today. In her later years, she cleaned houses to make ends meet as John didn’t work.

It seems he wasn’t terribly useful, either. John was discharged from his work as a ship steward by the time of the 1939 registry. They both died in a most unremarkable fashion, as most of us do, but without the affection in memory her kids gave to Frederick.

Even after her death, they wouldn’t speak much of her.

Back in June, I posted about the 100-year anniversary of Frederick’s death. Reading back on it, the ruminations stand true still. I reflected on why a century-old death and potential murder matters to me. Anyone can understand why Ann could have obsessed: it was her beloved father, whom her mother abruptly replaced with a man none of them even liked. Was Theresa so inherently selfish as to dispose of Frederick and let her kids be torn apart by it? Was John just a cunning man who got the woman he wanted at whatever cost, or did they act together?

Why lie to your kids if it was an accident or a suicide?

At the heart of it all, that’s the question we will never have answered. The speculation will forever swirl about like dead autumn leaves on the wind, while the toxic roots await underground for spring, for the next generation of young seedlings and flowers to pollute.

Photo by Lavinia Thompson

If there is anything I have taken away from all this, it has been standing face-to-face with mortality, the things we leave behind when we die, and understanding generational trauma on a personal level. I think, when we do that, we are more able to look at the future and stand tall in the affirmation that we won’t make the same mistakes, and we won’t become the same version of our ancestors.

I look at Theresa and I see a woman who wished to dispose of the husband she had in exchange for a younger, more useful one, even at the expense of her kids, and her reputation. With one little lie, regardless of the truth or intention, she left that legacy for herself. If she didn’t kill Frederick or have anything to do with it, she sure didn’t do much to dispel that, and she let her kids clamber their way through life, be it fleeing England after the war or falling to the bottom of the bottle.

It’s not at all what Frederick would have wanted for his kids, based on what I know of him. He left a legacy of love and hard-work and perseverance. His children never doubted his love for them. And that was robbed from them.

But I think it is his legacy, despite everything else, that stands out to me. Of all the generational trauma that has come since, of everything I have been through in my own life, and what my mother and grandmother went through in theirs, that shone through the darkness of his death and the ripple effects: love, compassion, kindness, and perseverance.

A house doesn’t make a home.

The house in which Theresa lived with John following her husband’s death, the ironically named Forget-Me-Not villa, wasn’t a home to her kids. They vacated and found walls and families of their own to call such. But no matter where they scattered to, they always had their father’s love to call home, too. And it seems that, despite their mother’s attempts to erase him from history, they never forgot that, or him. Neither will I.

See my post on the 100-year-anniversary of Frederick’s death.

Photo by Lavinia Thompson

Before I delve into my theories on what might have happened to Frederick George Bull, I first want to announce something: I believe I have found the John Walker who remained elusive and mysterious for so long.

It took hours and days of hunting records on and off Ancestry.com. I simply couldn’t bring myself to give up on the hunt for this man who provided such a family history enigma. In my last post, I discussed the numerous questions spinning in my mind as to why I couldn’t find him. One of the possibilities I posed was that John Walker wasn’t even from Essex. Or from England. Before I began hunting outside of England, a daunting and expansive search I wasn’t looking forward to, I began hunting through John Walkers in England who’s father died before 1924.

I spent hours sifting through National Probate records, hunting through who knows how many John Walkers for one with a wife, Theresa, as the recipient of his estate, if in fact he named her such at all. I hunted through the probates for the 1960s, the decade in which we have always presumed he probably died, as Theresa passed in 1966. No luck. I went through the entirely of the 1950s. Nothing.

Becoming hopeless, and not believing I’d find it, I delved all the way back to the 1940s. Nothing in 1949, 48, 47, 46, 45, 44, 43, 42…

Then, my heart skipped a beat to find a John Walker who died in 1941 and left his estate to his widow, Theresa Agnes Walker. Let me note that few John Walkers married a Theresa, let alone a Theresa Agnes Bull.

And no, much to my wild imagination’s previous ramblings, he was not, in fact, Jack the Ripper.

But there it was, on this probate, a John Walker who had lived at the ironically-named Forget-Me-Not Villa (the address where he and Theresa wound up after Frederick’s death, listed on the 1939 registry as their residence) in Essex, who died on March 22, 1941 in the Warrington General Hospital, leaving an estate of £755. That would be roughly £47,001 in 2023, or about $80,634 in Canada. A sizeable inheritance for a widow who cleaned houses for a living.

(John Walker's probate after death (Ancestry.com))

So was this the one? I continued searching. Why had he died in Warrington, of all places? Were he and Theresa separated at the time of his death? Had he been visiting?

I started a hunt for a John Walker who was maybe born in Warrington. Behold, again emerged that baptism record from Sept. 18, 1887. The birth place being Warrington had thrown me off of accepting it to start. Not only did the birth date match up, but as I hunted further into other ancestry trees, I discovered something vital: His father, George Walker, had died in 1916. If we recall, John and Theresa’s marriage certificate stated that John’s father had died prior to the wedding.

Warrington is located in northern England between Liverpool and Manchester, all north of London and Essex. Today, it’s a small city with a population of about 200,000. In the early 1900s, it was a town which embraced the industrial revolution to become a center for producing metal and leather products, after initially being a place known as a medieval market with tools and textiles.

John would have grown up witnessing the industrial revolution transform markets to factories, and would have even seen the introduction of electricity to the town in 1900. The first buses ran there in 1913. Metalworking became the prime industry of the town. As of 1901, it also linked Manchester and Liverpool via railway.

George Walker, an Irish man by birth, died on May 2, 1916. Elizabeth Walker, John’s mother, died in 1920. He had ten siblings. George and Elizabeth’s first baby, born in 1884, also named John, died shortly after birth. I couldn’t find much for employment regarding George (the census records can be hard to read) but John listed him as a merchant seaman on his marriage certificate.

Elizabeth Hanson, as was her maiden name, was born in Scotland in 1864. It seems her parents probably moved her when she was young. By 1881, a census record places her living as her sister’s domestic servant in England at 18 years old. She and George married in 1884, with the first John born that same year, though he died in infancy, as so many babies did back then. A daughter, Lilian, would be born the year before the second John. Census records noted that she, like most wives of that time, was a stay-at-home mother.

In 1891, the family lived in Barrow in Furness, Lancashire, England. In 1901, they’re in the same area.

(1901 census, Ancestry.com)

John would have grown up watching his mother live that double life of a sailor’s wife. In charge when her husband was gone working, in control of the home and the kids, making the day-to-day decisions and disciplines. When he got home, she would hand that control over to George. How different the two were in parenting styles is unknown. In the 1901 census, neither employment nor school is listed for John’s occupation, but one can presume he likely went to school, since he was 14. It was law for parents to enroll kids into some form of education by this point. It’s possible that census takers assumed kids were in school so didn’t bother noting it.

By 1911, I can’t find much on him once more. It’s possible he had already become a sailor and was out of the country at the time of the census, or he perhaps joined the military, but I couldn’t find records to back that up either way. His life between 1901 and his 1924 marriage is vague. George died in 1916, and Elizabeth died in 1920.

By then, John likely felt he had little left in Warrington other than his siblings, and there’s no way to tell what his relationship with them was. (Though as I did with Frederick, I will try to find living relatives who may know something.) Between here and 1924, he left his place of birth to seek something else, and somehow wound up in West Ham, Essex, to cross paths with none other than Frederick and Theresa Bull.

If he left Warrington after his mother’s death in 1920, then he would have arrived in West Ham at a time when the Bull marriage was beginning to struggle. The Spanish Flu pandemic was a year in, and work would soon dry up for Frederick. We know that an arm injury he’d suffered in 1922 plagued him into 1923, when he found himself unemployed and in and out of the hospital for treatments.

On the afternoon of June 8, 1923, Frederick vanished without a trace until his body was pulled from the River Thames off King George V dock on June 19, 1923. His cause of death was drowning, but “no sufficient evidence” to show how body wound up in the water to begin with. The coroner ruled an “open verdict”, which indicates some criminal element to the death.

It appears Frederick was murdered. But what happened? We’ve discussed a lot that led us to this part - family histories and how he went missing. So many questions remain. I have a theory, but let’s go through all of the possibilities, just to give Theresa and John the potential that they might be innocent.

(Image by 51581 from Pixabay )

Theresa’s original story of suicide is a possibility. The Center for Suicide Prevention notes that men aged 40-60 are more likely to die by suicide than young people and women because they tend to mask emotions and hide when they hit rock bottom. Frederick was a 44-year-old man who was unemployed and deeply troubled by his lack of ability to provide for his family after years of being a strong-bodied sailor dedicated to life at sea.

Something at the hospital, or perhaps an argument with Theresa, could have sent him off the edge. After leaving the hospital, Frederick could have wandered off until the docks were more vacant, then jumped into the water with his injured arm, letting himself drown and unable to swim up to save himself.

But there was no gunshot, as Theresa had allegedly told her kids.

Suicide by drowning is possible. But is it likely?

Not according to family accounts. Despite his kids feuding as they became adults, they all agreed on one thing: their dad would not have abandoned them like that. He doted on them, loved them, and was there for them. His family was his life. And with the Stratford Express even commenting on his happy family life, and how fond he was of his wife and kids, it doesn’t sound like a man who was about to end his own life. He was troubled, yes, but still attending the hospital to treat his arm. He was still present for his kids.

The Coroner ruling his death an open verdict also doesn’t necessarily indicate suicide. While an open verdict can be ruled in a case where a suicide is possible, there are various rulings a Coroner can make. According to a 2001 article in the British Journal of Psychiatry, titled “Open verdict v. suicide – importance to research” (Linsley, K., Schapira, K., & Kelly, T.), these deaths are classified as “suicide impossible” or “suicide unlikely.”

A death deemed as “suicide impossible” would be applied to a baby found deceased or deaths immediately following surgery; the type of deaths with no evidence or possibility of suicide. Frederick’s death doesn’t fit this classification.

A “suicide unlikely” is more of a gray area, according to this article.

“The category of ‘suicide unlikely’ was allocated to cases such as that of a young man who in a state of solvent intoxication fell from a window and of an elderly lady with dementia and who was prone to wander, found drowned in a small stream,” the writers say.

Despite the questionable nature of these deaths, there was no evidence of suicidal ideation or thoughts beforehand.

The writers do note, however, that suicides via drowning are more likely to be ruled as an open verdict if there is no evidence to suggest the person had any intent to commit suicide.

And it’s such a difficult ruling to make, given the time period in which Frederick lived, and that men in general are less open to talk about their problems. So many times, someone will commit suicide and their families will remain in disbelief, saying there had been no signs. Frederick’s kids were so young, that all they could really go on was their love for him, and the knowledge that their father loved them so dearly. Anyone in their position would have believed he wouldn’t simply abandon them. No one wants to believe their parent would do it, especially in that way.

But, if he really had jumped off a dock or somewhere into the water, and if he died the same day he vanished, why was he missing for two more weeks before being found? It’s possible his body was simply swept away into the ocean if he did jump in willingly, only to turn up by the dock two weeks later, bloated and floating to the top of the waves.

Therefore, the open verdict ruling could leave the door open to the possibility of suicide.

(Image by Hans from Pixabay )

In the same way that he may have killed himself, it’s also possible that Frederick met with a tragic accident at the docks. I feel like this one is less likely, though.

This was a man who spent his life at sea. He knew his way around docks. Had he merely wandered down to the docks in the middle of the day, even with an injured arm, he would have been around men who knew him. Colleagues and fellow sailors. He was respected there. Had he fallen off the dock into the water, even with an injured arm, there were plenty of able-bodied sailors who could swim to pull him out before he would have succumbed to the ocean.

An accident theory only seems plausible if Frederick had wandered off on his own, perhaps due to memory loss, or just wanting to be alone with his thoughts, troubles, and misery before returning home. Maybe, in his wanders, he slipped and fell, unable to pull himself from the waters with his injured arm. Maybe, in his final moments knowing he couldn’t reach the surface, he cursed the very waters he sailed for so many years, that they would finally take him when he was vulnerable and sought the comfort of the ocean, not the cruelty.

This would seem the most plausible and less sinister theory had Theresa not allegedly said what she did to her kids. Why would a mother tell her kids their dad shot himself when he simply met a tragic accident while injured? It seems like it would only add another level of trauma to tell the kids their father abandoned them like that when he didn’t. It seems exceedingly cruel. But then, so does the final theory.

(Image by Bob Bello from Pixabay )

Motive, means, and opportunity. The three ingredients to concoct a cocktail of murder. One of my favourite true crime figures, Lt. Joe Kenda of the show “Homicide Hunter” once said something that stuck with me as both a fictional mystery and true crime writer: If you can’t place someone in the room with the weapon with the victim, you can’t prove the crime. And it’s true.

Of course, I cannot leave out to potential for a robbery gone wrong, or someone Frederick didn’t know ambushing him for some reason or another. But, most murders are committed by someone the victim knows. Someone closer to home.

While I cannot place John nor Theresa in the same place as Frederick when he died, nor with any weapon to speak of, the circumstantial evidence stands fairly strong one hundred years later. And for a time when DNA or cameras couldn’t place anyone anywhere, circumstantial is all we really have to go on, as did the detectives of the time.

Frederick could no longer financially provide for his family. Theresa faced losing her freedom as a sailor’s wife she was so accustomed to with him gone so often, and the money that came with his career.

I believe that John Walker was a figure in the Bulls’ lives for sometime before Frederick’s death. The men possibly knew each other from working on ships or on the docks. They would have crossed paths somewhere, no doubt.

Frederick was unemployed at the time of his death. The Stratford Express reported that he was involved in an accident on July 20, 1918, which injured his arm and left him unable to work. Despite receiving compensation, Frederick was concerned when his job was filled. The man who had worked relentlessly for his entire life was suddenly left with no job and little money.

Perhaps John Walker, at the same age as Theresa, younger, more able to work, more useful to her, wandered into her life sometime in the early 1920s. Maybe John rented a room from the Bulls and was involved with the family, and perhaps Theresa, that way. Maybe this was when Theresa realized how bored she was of her marriage and her older man.

Maybe John had drifted that way from his time as a sailor. He and Frederick possibly crossed paths on the docks and maybe certain ships. Perhaps John and Theresa knew each other through Frederick and started an affair while he was gone. Theresa may have played the good wife when Frederick was home, but then opened the door to John once her husband was gone. She was still in her early thirties; by no means an old housewife yet. In fact, she was only 34 when Frederick died. She had an older husband and possibly a man her own age in her bed when Frederick was off working. Between the two sailors, she had a revolving door of male attention.

That is, until Frederick got injured and lost his job. That makes an affair a tad complicated to pull off when she is supposed to be a devoted housewife. Perhaps after four kids, years of the mundane routine of child rearing and running the house, and feeling like a single mother, Theresa wasn’t as in love with her handsome sailor as she used to be. Him losing his job could have been her final straw.

Maybe, Frederick became worth more to her dead. The National Probate reveals that Frederick had £100 to his estate at the time of his death. A quick Google search tells me £100 is worth about £7736.64 today. That translates to $12,955 in Canadian dollars.

It crossed my mind that John also could have possibly murdered Frederick and married Theresa for the money — except in 1923, from what I have read, he would not have any rights to the inheritance Theresa received from her late husband. That money was hers by legal right.

Still, that’s a lot of money for a woman desperate to keep a roof over her head, and to keep an affair hidden from an unemployed husband. And it all went to Theresa.

I don’t think noon at the hospital was the last time Frederick was seen. It is my belief that Theresa wasn’t truthful with the police and that she had some knowledge of what was to come. In telling her kids that Frederick shot himself, it indicates that she had some premonition that a gun was used in his death, though it wasn’t.

That premonition hints at collaboration. Premeditation. The Stratford Express wasn’t even reporting on Frederick’s disappearance until he was found. By then, he had long been dead. Theresa had to have been expecting him to come home that day. He certainly wasn’t going to work. And she should have been extra concerned if she knew he was suffering from memory loss. (Or was it possible he was merely suffering migraines from stress?) If he indeed suffered memory loss, and she still cared for him, would she not have reported him missing that day or the next?

Either that, or it was a convenient cover to explain why he had maybe wandered off. Still, it’s highly suspicious his disappearance went so long unreported. I don’t even know if it was Theresa who reported him missing, or someone in his family, or if one of the kids finally said something. But he left that hospital, vanished for two weeks, and turned up dead off the docks without so much as being reported.

The alternative here is that if John entered Theresa and Frederick’s lives — be it a boarder situation, or as a friend — it’s possible John made advances on Theresa which she rejected. Giving her the benefit of the doubt, I know as true crime enthusiast and as a woman who has been in the dating world over the years, some men simply cannot handle rejection and take it as a personal insult to their ego. Some resort to murder. Sometimes they kill the woman who rejected them, and sometimes they kill the man in the way.

Theresa had some premonition that a gun could have been used to kill Frederick. Did John plant that into her head? Did he threaten her or Frederick? Was he trying to force her into a relationship by killing her beloved and hard working husband? As a widow with no job and only the inheritance from her late husband to live on, which wouldn’t last forever, maybe marrying the man who killed him became her only option.

A tragic and heart-wrenching alternative, too. I don’t know which is worse: the possibility that she willingly had him killed, or stood by helplessly as a jealous man murdered him and forced her, essentially, into becoming his wife?

Did John threaten Theresa that he would shoot Frederick, only to shove him off the dock during some confrontation that day, letting him drown? Was it Frederick who confronted John about the potential affair with Theresa, perhaps? If John had put it into her head that he planned to shoot Frederick, then perhaps she told the kids that their father had killed himself to provide an explanation for the gunshot wound she assumed would be present for the autopsy.

But it wasn’t.

And then, Theresa allegedly told the kids he shot himself when he, in fact, drowned. She would have had his death certificate and the autopsy report. She would have known his death was ruled as a drowning. There was no reason to tell the kids such a gory, awful thing. It makes no sense.

It might have been the perfect murder no one suspected had she not done it. Because one daughter spoke of it years later, only to be brushed off and labelled as crazy.

But maybe she wasn’t.

Next time, I’ll delve into the aftermaths of how Frederick’s death tore his beloved family apart until the day Theresa died. Did she carry the secret to her grave leaving her kids to suffer the unexplained trauma?

(Image by StockSnap from Pixabay )

Britannica

https://www.britannica.com/place/Warrington

Ancestry

The death of a beloved father, a respected sailor, and devoted husband would cast ripples in the waters in which he died for many years to come. A century later, his great-granddaughter would spend hours, even years, staring at a computer screen, sifting through records, emailing archivists in London, and asking any remaining family who might recall the smallest detail about him.

In between it all was a life snuffed out somehow long before his time. And the words, the actions, the silence that all weighed so heavily over his children and generations to come remain baffling.

(Image by Public Co from Pixabay )

“It’s amazing what you learn after everyone is gone. Nobody ever talked about their family. Weird,” my mother recently said to me.

Indeed, it’s that silence which confounds me the most. The type that leaves gaping holes mere records cannot fill in.

Mom and I talk about this mystery often; discussing theories, possibilities, the fleeting snippets she recalls, and the bits and bobs I find along the way. We have talked in circles about the third person to enter into Theresa and Frederick’s lives. We have come to one agonizing conclusion: we know nothing about John Walker: the other man to enter the picture.

Somewhere, somehow, John walked into Theresa and Frederick’s lives. He was around when Frederick died, and stayed in Theresa’s life in the aftermath. I have searched records and pages and anything I can on Ancestry.ca and elsewhere. John Walker was such a maddeningly common name, and with no middle name to go on, it leaves so many possibilities.

What I do know is that John was born on or around Sept. 18, 1887. His father’s name was George Walker - also frustratingly common, and no middle name to go on. John was a Ship’s Steward, and his father was in the Seaman Merchant Service. George was deceased before the wedding. Those are the only concrete details I have of Theresa’s mysterious second husband.

She and John married on October 8, 1924. Any information I have for John has been gathered from the marriage certificate and the 1939 Registry. For a woman in Theresa’s position, marrying quickly after being widowed isn’t suspicious in itself. The certificate lists no employment for her at the time. She had four kids to take care of, and her first husband was gone.

Despite this being the “Roaring Twenties,” a decade during which women had much more independence and freedom following the strict gender roles of the Victorian Era, it would have been difficult for a widowed mother to join the ladies shattering societal norms and entering careers without obtaining childcare she likely couldn’t afford. Not all women had the luxury of pursuing new careers and paths to blaze. It seems Theresa was one of the less fortunate ones who remained stuck in the days of old and still reliant on a man’s income.

That is, of course, presuming she had nothing to do with Frederick’s death, and we must give her the benefit of the doubt.

What I know even less of is what happened at the time of Frederick’s death, and the period following. But I can attempt to piece it together with a few theories. First, I’ll try to piece together John Walker’s life with what little I have.

His location of birth is unknown, but the 1939 Registry states his date of birth as Sept. 18, 1887. However, on the marriage certificate, John listed his age was 34, which would place his year of birth at 1890 instead. However, since Sept. 18, 1887 is a date he bothered to remember later in life, I’ve leaned towards that being the accurate birthday.

I also found a record of a John Walker who’s father’s name was George. He was born on August 7, 1887 and baptized on Sept. 18, 1887. In some cases, baptisms were recognized more so than birthdays. This would have been a bit unusual in that time, as Civil Registration became law in 1837, making birth registrations mandatory. But it’s possible that some families still used baptism dates instead of actual birth dates. Finding a John Walker born on that day with a father named George who died in or before 1924 proved futile. I couldn’t narrow a search down to just one man under those specifications.

FamilySearch also adds that sometimes, baptisms happened several years after one’s actual birth. Therefore, finding John Walker’s birth may be impossible. Without knowing his death date (only that he died sometime in the sixties before Theresa), I can’t work backwards. Then, knowing less about his father, and without a mother’s name, I can’t even work back from his parents.

I reviewed crew lists for John Walkers born in 1887, and of course, there were numerous. This man is lost to time, and to the overwhelming amount of men who shared the same name. Perhaps this worked in his favour.

Who in the world was this man? One so mundane, normal, that he vanished into obscurity as so many of us do decades after we die? Was he a man with something to hide, and that’s why facts of his life are so hard to find? What was he hiding? I had many thoughts… a criminal on the run whose name isn’t even John Walker? Maybe he wasn’t even from Essex. Maybe he wasn’t even from England. Maybe he had killed someone before. Maybe, maybe, maybe. My head was spinning from the possibilities.

(Image by Peter H from Pixabay )

At one point, during a rant to my mother, I made an offhanded remark that made me realize how far off the path I had gone.

“For all I know, he was Jack the Ripper!”

Of course, John was not, in fact, Jack. (Or was he?) I had to get it together. Think logically. Like a detective.

So, when it comes to John, this is where my road of facts ends, and the unruly path of speculation begins; speculation I can only build around the known facts of Frederick’s disappearance and death.

After searching through newspaper archives with no luck, I emailed a London library to ask if archives existed there someone could perhaps find for me. The archivist emailed me back, most intrigued, and began a hunt. She got back to me with two articles from the Stratford Express she found about Frederick’s disappearance.

The first was published on June 23, 1923, four days after his body was found. It states that he had been missing since June 8. In October, he had been admitted to the Seaman’s Hospital with a “compound fracture of the left arm,” and had been an outpatient at the hospital to continue treating the injury.

(The Stratford Express via the London Library archives. June 23, 1923)

Medical problems had plagued Frederick over the years. Life at sea wasn’t easy. A record from the Seaman’s Hospital revealed he was admitted with a hernia on Sept. 18, 1909. He was discharged in October, with the record stating he was “healed.”

On June 8, 1923, Frederick was last seen leaving the Seaman’s Hospital at noon. A few days prior, he had “complained of pains in the head.” Investigators at first apparently believed he suffered a loss of memory, “for he was living on the happiest terms with his wife and four children, of whom he was very fond.” He was last seen wearing “a fawn raincoat, a brown soft hat, brown boots, and a gray suit. His left arm was in a splint.”

The Stratford Express reported on June 30 that Frederick’s body had been recovered. The National Probate records that his body was found on June 19, 1923 from the King George V dock on the River Thames.

(The Stratford Express via the London Library archives. June 30, 1923)

“Medical evidence showed that death was due to drowning, and the Coroner entered an open verdict of found drowned,” the Express stated.

Britannica Dictionary defines an “open verdict” as “an official statement or decision saying that a crime has been committed but not naming a criminal or saying that there has been a death but not naming the cause of death.”

Well, the Coroner did rule on a cause of death for Frederick. Something suspicious remained in the air about his untimely demise, but proving it was another story.

Indeed, Frederick’s death certificate from the June 22, 1923 autopsy backs this up. After years of hearing the old family story that Frederick allegedly shot himself on a ship, I found the information for the certificate and ordered it. The day it came in the mail, I opened it immediately upon getting back into my car. Shock and confusion came over me upon reading the Coroner’s note:

“Drowning, not sufficient evidence to show how he got in the water p.m.”

No mention of a gunshot wound. No bullet recovered from his body. For the Coroner to leave such a note indicated to me that they thought something more was afoot. This wasn’t simply the case of a man who lost his memory and wound up dead off the dock, it seems. While it remains possible Frederick’s death was all a tragic accident, it doesn’t appear that authorities were convinced enough to rule his death as such.

(Frederick's death certificate. Photos by Lavinia Thompson)

So, where did Frederick go after he left the Seaman’s Hospital that fateful day? How is it people didn’t see or notice him on the streets he’d called home for so long in broad daylight? Had he been suffering memory loss, would someone not have noticed him acting peculiarly? Would he not have asked someone for help? How is it Theresa didn’t see him after he left the hospital? Why didn’t he go home? Or did Theresa lie to police about the last time she saw her husband alive?

Next, I’ll explore what possibly happened to Frederick. Was it a suicide, an accident, or a sinister murder by an unhappy housewife and her lover?

FamilySearch

https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Birth-Baptism_Intervals_for_Family_Historians

Linsley, K., Schapira, K., & Kelly, T. (2001). Open verdict v. suicide – importance to research. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 178(5), 465-468. doi:10.1192/bjp.178.5.465

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-of-psychiatry/article/open-verdict-v-suicide-importance-to-research/945907AE8E37A8BC47D81B5AA806BC57

Ancestry.ca records

Sometimes rain

whispers gently

across prairies,

upon wildflower petals,

soaking the earth,

quenching a thirst

for life;

soaking me

with liberation,

heartbreak,

love.

To sprout something minuscule

from a wreckage

after crashing into

a house already in flames.

Tiny leaves

drenched,

reaching for the sun.

Not yet.

Not yet.

The clouds haven’t

passed me over yet.

Ashes doused,

smoke stirring,

one last choke for air.

Did you know

death would hurt you so

after the years you spent

torturing me?

Did you embrace it

or scramble to the end

for one more day?

Did you whisper or scream

your last words?

Did you ever think

you’d die alone?

That storm,

it lasted years.

Thundering, bellowing,

wind whipping, snapping,

pounding doors and windows,

cracking walls and bones,

throwing furniture array

until nothing remained

but wreckage

and ashes.

Your legacy.

And I,

still walk out in the rain

to stand at the edge

of some small town,

watching semis

roar by on the highway.

A silent reflection on

the night I almost

drove into one

for all the madness

you drove me into,

never hitting the brakes

in time to see

twisted metal,

desperate eyes,

shattered glass,

the end.

Rain pours down

to douse burning walls,

to soak me beneath

storms of indignation.

The day you set fire to

that home was

the day of reckoning.

Clouds dissipated,

black ribbons unraveling.

Heart-wrenching sobs

became gentle whispers

upon skin.

You can

start again.

He’s gone now.

Death never meant

to take you first.

(Image by WikimediaImages from Pixabay )

The ocean tides that have made up the last six years of my life came and went, sometimes with a ferocious rage, sometimes with a feeble attempt to crawl towards the shore while drowning.

Facebook memories has a funny way of either showing you the best moments of your life, or crushing you with the lowest point you have ever been at. As I scrolled through mine today, this one showed up:

Six years ago, I had that song on repeat as I emerged from a marriage as broken as it was, looking around lost, letting the withering petals of what remained on the foundational stem flutter to the dirt and die. The following era of my life would become one of soul-searching, drunk nights, single girl shenanigans, a pandemic that isolated me more than I could do so to myself, severe depression, and finally crashing so hard to the rocks peaking from the blue-green waves it left me unsure if I would ever feel steady on my own feet again.

(Image by Manuel from Pixabay )

I worked evenings at my school janitor job, and clung to that like a lifeline like it was all I had left. The last piece of an identity I no longer recognized. The night owl lifestyle became my norm. Work until 10:30 p.m., get home at around 11, write until three or four, go to bed, get up and do it all over again. It left little room to socialize or go to any art or dance classes like I thought I might want to, or to do, well, anything that typically happened on weeknights.

Weekends I either spent holed up at home, writing, or out at the bars, drinking and partying the pain of a lost marriage away. Dancing, surrounded by other drunk single ladies, high on vodka (I couldn’t drink rum after my ex-husband and I split up, too many memories attached), weed, and the intoxication of artificial escape.

I was unravelling the life I had wrapped around someone else, and felt like I had nowhere to go. So, I dove into vices. Cigarette smoke in neon lights. Vodka and crans, so many that, as the meme says, by the time Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” played, we were all small town girls living in a lonely world out on that disco-ball-lit dance floor, spinning around until the rainbow colours all blurred together.

(@thegladstork on Twitter)

And how that lonely world crept over me in mocking shadows when I’d stumble out of a cab and into my front door, greeted by the silence of my sleeping cats, and the suffocating emptiness of my house, the only sign of life being my excited dog.

Surrounded by weed smoke in the early morning tinge of light, wondering if my life would only ever consist of going out to the bars alone, becoming one of the single older women with whom I partied at the time at the 21 and over bar. I often felt like the youngest member of a real “Sex and the City” cast. Too much vodka. Too many cigarettes. Too many men. A toxic attachment to escape and casual sex. Not enough genuine soul-searching and healing. I only wanted to disappear.

Six years ago, I was crying on my kitchen floor because it seemed my world had crumbled down and would never get better. The landslide took me down. Buried me in my own misery, agony, and self-destruction. Soon, the drinking didn’t help me forget. It only made the pain worse. I wish I could go back to that girl who listened to this song on repeat until she felt numb. Until the tears stopped and she could only stare off into nothing. Blank. At the end of emotions, and on the edge of ending it. I wish I could hold her, there on the kitchen floor, and let her know we were going to be okay. To give her the light at the end of the tunnel she needed to get up off her knees and carry on long before she actually did. I wish I could hold her hand, soothe her the way no one else but the cats and dog did through the dark two years during which I was suicidal and drowning.

It was difficult to write during this time. The book I’d worked on for years, “Edge of Glory,” felt like a broken story I couldn’t complete. I could barely get a poem out of my soul. Was that it? Could I no longer even write? And if I couldn’t write, did I even have a reason to live?

(Image by Yerson Retamal from Pixabay )

I’d be driving home from work some nights and glimpse the lights of a semi-truck. Some intrusive thought in my head whispered that if I were to swerve into that lane, especially on an icy winter road on a -40 C night, it would look like an accident when the semi crushed me to smithereens. I remember the night I nearly did it. My hands shook uncontrollably. No tears. No emotions. Not until flashes of my pets at home hit me, sucking the breath from my chest. The headlights approached. One question hit me.

What would happen to them if I never made it home?

I choked on a sob, and remained in my lane when the semi thundered past me. Silence descended on me in the seconds following. My heart pounded. Darkness swallowed the highway beyond my headlights. My hands clutched the steering wheel until they were white. I turned on “Landslide” once more and left it on repeat for the remainder of the drive.

When I got home, I looked around: the cats, sleeping, until the dog’s ecstatic barks at the door awoke them. None of them aware of what I had almost done. I once more collapsed to my kitchen floor and sobbed for hours. The dog sat with me, his head in my lap, his big brown eyes compassionate and worried. The cats circled me, purring and consoling. My babies. My reason to live, even if I couldn't write again. They needed me. At least someone did.

It would take until New Year’s 2019 for me to begin emerging from that dark road. I quit drinking for a few weeks, and when I started again, I had cut back considerably. I quit smoking cigarettes for good. Once weed had been legalized in Canada in 2018, I continued that within moderation, as it helped more than the prescription anti-depressants had. Enough to ease the anxiety of every day life, to function, to clear my head. To think with clarity for the first time in two years. I journalled, read books about healing from childhood trauma and mental illness, and really explored the depths of myself and why I had gone down a road so ominous and foreboding, it was no wonder it felt like I had no one watching over me: why would anyone, human or angel or spiritual guide, want to travel that one with me?

(Image by Nile from Pixabay )

That summer, I decided on a transformation. I changed my wardrobe, dyed my hair a dark cherry red, and it would remain that shade for a long time. It felt so me. So new, yet familiar. So liberating, yet so grounding. That I could, in fact, change, both outside and within. Big floral patterned maxi dresses, red hair, and a soul still under construction.

That winter, I shelved “Edge of Glory” and gave myself another chance at writing. I switched genres to mystery/crime fiction, and started my “Beyond Dark” series. This was it. The outlet I’d needed. It fed my long-time true crime obsession, and allowed me to explore a main character that had been in my head for many years. It felt as liberating as my self-transformation had. In 2020, I published “Beyond Dark 1: Belladonna.” And, in 2021, I published “Martha Holmes Mysteries 1: The Lost Girls.”

The two series allow me to explore two avenues of my life. “Beyond Dark” enables me to delve into not only my true-crime obsession, but my trauma and the darkness that envelopes one’s soul in the agonizing aftermath. “Martha Holmes Mysteries” is a novella series that is allowing me to explore my feelings and journey from being divorced and desolate, to being single and wild and the soul-searching that accompanies it all.

In 2022, the unthinkable happened to me: after those six years of being single, of dating around, screwing around, hitting rock bottom to climb back up again, a June night came around where I would discover the answer to Martha’s question: is there life after love?

The answer is, yes. Both in being single, and in finding it again. For on that June night, I met the man I would fall in love with that summer. It changed everything I knew about relationships. Someone calm, reassuring, compassionate, funny, and who actually put in the effort to show he cares. It’s taken so long for my nervous system, between the childhood trauma and the marriage in which I was used and cheated on, to become accustomed to the newness of genuine human connection and compassion. In many ways, I still have a long ways to go.

But, God, if I could go back to that version of myself bawling on kitchen floor, wondering how to end things. How to stop the pain with death. To let her know that love comes back around. Do the healing work, dear girl. Cut ties with toxic people, even family members. Become your own person not built around another human being. Discover an authentic self not tied to your trauma and mental illness. Become another genre, as did your writing. Love will come back in a new form. Healthy. Genuine. Compassionate. Gentle. It comes back, and envelopes you in a safe haven that doesn’t have conditions attached.

It comes back, and loves you in all the ways the person before couldn’t or wouldn’t. In all the ways you learn to love yourself, even if you aren’t yet whole or completely healed. Because you don’t need to be either to receive love again, be it platonic or romantic. We deserve it regardless.

That mirror in the sky Stevie Nicks wrote of is merely a reflection of who we are when we look up to see how far we’ve come. It isn’t the complete reflection of who we will become after we survive the landslide.

(Image by Tatjana Posavec from Pixabay )

In this minuscule span of time we call a life, we spent much of it scrambling for reason, purpose, a way to be remembered, and clinging to these breaths, these moments, with desperation to make them last.

The past becomes a series of scattered flashbacks hard to let go of. Sometimes, we delve further into the past, into lifetimes far before our own, to seek answers, to solve mysteries, to maybe validate the notion that life isn’t waste of time. Maybe there won’t be a day when someone says our name for the final time before that, too, becomes dust in the wind, thoughtless particles passing through the world unseen.

As someone who has been suicidal multiple times in my life, starting from when I was a teenager, I exist in a weird place when it comes to mortality.

(Image by Martina from Pixabay )

I never planned on living to 34-years-old. Trauma wrecked me. It seemed like no matter how many times I pieced some semblance of myself back together, it was never authentic, never enough. If I was never going to feel whole, if I only ever felt like a shell of a human, that I would never catch up with the world, then what was the point?

Life is short. It could have been so much shorter. Since surviving those demons, I want to do everything. Travel. Write my books. Feel the rush of freedom, the liberation that comes after stepping out from the darkest catacombs after many years stuck trying to find a way out. Maybe I spent my childhood broken and yearning to die, but there has to be more, right?

Life is long. Sometimes it’s too long. The world, society’s politics, the way humans treat one another, how expensive it is to merely live a life I never asked to be born in, is all exhausting. If all we do is spend these years slaving away for bosses and corporations who would replace us in a mere day if we never returned, and many of us never truly get to follow our wildest dreams, then what’s the point?

In my search for a balance between restless whims and existential dread, I began exploring my family history and the generational trauma that followed long lines of children who became broken adults. I don’t consider myself to be overly attached to the concept of family. Maybe growing up witnessing and experiencing domestic violence and abuse robbed me of knowing what family is like, so I detached.

Yet my great-grandfather’s death has always fascinated me. Frederick died under mysterious, even suspicious, circumstances. I’ve written extensively about it already on this blog in my “Family Murder Mystery” series, and will be adding more.

I began delving into research for the next installment of the series, and a few days ago, Ancestry.ca showed me this upon logging in.

(Screenshot via Ancestry.ca)

June 8, 2023, is the 100-year anniversary of Frederick Bull’s bizarre death. From the day he went missing to the day his body was discovered, many things don’t make sense. Was it a tragic accident, as was the official ruling? Or did he commit suicide, as his wife claimed? Or did something more sinister lurk in the shadows of their marriage?

One thing is for sure: Frederick’s tragic death, and what happened after, ensured that a full century later, after the silence once bound by trauma broke with the liberation of time’s passing, someone still talked about it. In some ways, writing about it immortalizes it. It may not be as high profile as Jack the Ripper terrorizing Whitechapel only a few decades prior, but like every cold case, it still matters.

It matters to me.

And why? I never met the man. I’ve only conversed online with my family members over in England. My grandmother never talked about him. In fact, I didn’t know about the family mystery until after she died in 1999. She took her secrets with her to the grave. I never knew her siblings, either, who also maintained a silence about Frederick’s death until their own passing. They remembered him from when he was alive, but didn’t discuss his death.

That positive remembrance, their memories of a loved father, should be enough to let him rest. So, why isn’t it to me?

(Image by Willfried Wende from Pixabay )

Trauma never truly lets us rest. I could blame that, or my lifelong obsession with solving mysteries. Reading and writing were always my escapes from a tumultuous childhood, and I devoured true crime documentaries and books long before I should have been allowed to. The two go hand-in-hand.

I think it started with intrigue, the want to solve a mystery, yet it became so much more. The journey through Frederick’s life and death has taught and shown me how generational trauma passes down. It explains why Grandma never liked discussing her family. That, paired with Grandpa leaving an overly-religious family after being blackballed over his first marriage (this one may need to be a post on its own), explains why they both came to Canada shortly after World War II. They fled across an ocean to escape the ghosts of their pasts, only to find there are some things we can never outrun. Addiction carried on in my uncles. My mother wound up in an abusive relationship for a decade.

This was an era where mental illness and recovery from trauma wasn’t much of a thing. You just swallowed it and carried on until you either chose to process things, or it killed you in one way or another. Addiction. Suicide. Emotional unavailability. The unbearable weight of chronic stress and mental issues and the way it manifests into physical ailments. It crushed some of those who came before me and seeped into my mother’s kids, too.

My brother chose a life of crime and to push people away, to remain angry, to take it out on the only family he has. I stood for years on the brink of addiction and suicide and toxic behaviours of my own. I also took it out on my family at times. My brother and I don’t even speak now. The aftermaths of trauma and the way we chose to deal with it, the people we chose to become, drove a wedge between us.

The reaching roots of trauma can be poisonous. Some people keep swallowing that until one decides to dig up the roots to plant a new garden. It’s like the roots became so toxic, they poisoned themselves. Shriveled up in the dirt, finally needing to die out, exhausted, leaving only silence and remnants in their wake.

(Image by u_3heuehh9 from Pixabay )

Perhaps I still speak Frederick’s name so that the roots finally die for good, leaving no emotional charge attached but only lessons. It isn’t only his story. It is the story of a whole family who came after him and Theresa. Perhaps a sign that life isn’t a waste of time if we live with love for those around us, accountability for our own actions, passion for what we do, and leave a legacy of dignity and respect despite preceding adversities. Not everyone’s name will be on someone’s tongue in a century - we can only dream to be so lucky - but the way in which we remain on someone’s tongue, even for a short time, matters more.

Frederick’s death a century ago began a long string of family trauma. Immersed in the noxious roots deep beneath the dark earth, I keep digging at them until the answers sit exposed to the sunlight.

But whether or not I ever solve the mystery behind his death, I gained an understanding of how and why trauma got passed down, and how whispered tales in one decade can become a string of lies exposed in another. It became a massive part of my own healing process to better understand my relationship with mortality, and life after being suicidal. I came to understand who he was, and why investigating his death means so much to me. It made me understand myself.

And maybe that is what, someday, has to be enough.

Visit my "Family Murder Mystery" series here.

(Image by Bruno from Pixabay )

This was quite the read: a needy, insecure girl named Ruth with a complicated relationship with her emotionally unavailable mother, yet one who dotes on Ruth’s brother, Tim, the golden child of the family. Ruth becomes starstruck by her fabulous, famous actress aunt, Vanessa. Upon entering university, begins spending as much time as possible at Vanessa’s mysterious, luxurious, and eloquent home, Wilton Place, which holds family secrets that threaten to turn Ruth’s world upside down.

Ruth is an extremely relatable character for those who never feel good enough for their mother, then watch that mother cater to a sibling. The reader watches Ruth grow up from an awkward child and teen into a blossoming young woman under the heavy influence of her aunt.

Despite Ruth being relatable, I found this book to be too long. It felt like it took forever to get to the story. Even about 70 percent of the way through, I still found myself wondering what the story was about. There is a lot of fluff and filler about how Ruth spent her time at university and Wilton Place. It became repetitive very quickly, with only tiny drops of mystery to keep the reader going. It built up to a rushed final third of the book and to a reveal that, frankly, felt like a let down to me.

The climax and plot twist were predictable and Ruth’s actions towards the end were cringe-worthy. Curiosity regarding the family secrets were the only things that kept me reading. The romantic plotline near the end didn’t interest me at all. In fact, it almost made me not finish the book.

I felt like the romantic plotline destroyed Ruth as a character. C.E. Rose spends much of the book focusing on Ruth’s search for an authentic self away from her family only for her to mimic and copy Vanessa until the very end, giving Ruth a conclusion that felt inauthentic, as if Ruth never went through much character growth at all beyond becoming just like Vanessa. Ruth gave up her future and her potential music career for a man instead of venturing out to find who she really is, stunting her growth completely. Ruth’s character arc started out strong, but felt like a flop near the end.

That being said, Rose did some excellent things in this story. Her writing of Vanessa’s manipulation of Ruth and mental issues without revealing the entire picture right away was really well done. The book displays human relationships as what they are: complicated, tangled, and often living in the shadows of secrets from the past. Rose also wrote the resentful mother-daughter relationship with accuracy, as well as the Golden Child Syndrome that ran strong in the family. She approaches topics like mental illness, suicide attempts, and sexuality with sensitivity and consideration.

I would liked to have seen more focus on the family mysteries and how Ruth unraveled them, instead of on her mundane day-to-day life. This book had tons of potential, but I think it needed some more editing and rewriting. All in all, an intriguing read that deserves a chance (other readers might just be less picky than I am).