Cathleen Lavoie wants one gift this Christmas — one that’s so simple yet seems utterly out of reach.
A home.
“To have an Extreme Makeover,” she said with a wistful smile. “For Ty (Pennington) or somebody to give me a bungalow, wheelchair accessible, where I’ll be able to have my family back.
“That’s what I’d like — to have my family back.”
She was a working mom of three who decorated for the holidays and baked fruitcake.
“I can’t do that this year,” she said. “I can’t even decorate the tree with my kids. My whole life has been turned upside down. Everybody is split up.”
She’s living in a nursing home, surrounded by the dying and suffering from crippling anxiety.
“Hell.” That’s how Lavoie describes her life now.
“I cry every night," she said. "I miss my children, my home, my surroundings. They put a diaper on me like a little baby and lift me into bed. Then they give me medications for anxiety that sometimes work and sometimes don’t.”
It’s when they don’t work that the horror of that night is too much to stomach.
“I see him coming at me with the gun and he pushes my head onto the couch, then POW!, everything goes silent,” she said.
All Lavoie wants now are her kids back and someone to help her regain even a little independence. She says she doesn’t belong in Laurier Manor with seniors, but there’s no other option.
“I don’t know why I’m here. It’s for people who can’t take care of themselves, but I have a brain, you know. I just need rehab.”
Lavoie says she's regained some movement in her hands, which has her thinking maybe anything is possible with the right assistance.
Her children have suffered, too.
Her daughter Leeanna, 6, wakes from nightmares so terrified she thinks the father who’s come to comfort her is a killer.
“Our life was good,” son Christian, 14, wrote. Now he lives with his father in Quebec City, the memories like an alarm that sounds without warning.
His 16-year-old brother lives in yet another home as his mother yearns for them to be together — even if their lives will never be the same again.
“All I can do is dream of tomorrow,” she said.
—with files from Scott Taylor
