Perspectives on the Circumstances of L.M. Montgomery's Death:
Was It Intentional Suicide or an Accident?
(c) Mary Beth Cavert 2014, 2025
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2008
In the summer of 2008, L.M. Montgomery's granddaughter, Kate Macdonald Butler, revealed that she had been told by her father, Stuart Macdonald, that the author had left a suicide note by her bedside at her death. In 1981 (before his death in September 1982), Stuart gave the note to Dr. Mary Rubio, Montgomery's biographer, who kept its contents private until her Montgomery biography, The Gift of Wings, was published later in 2008. Rubio explained that the note seemed to be about Montgomery's journals, that she was ending her authorship of them and this note was perhaps the final page of a longer missing document: "Lucy Maud suffered unbearable psychological pain. But there's 'a much wider context for understanding the final note found on bedside table of Anne's creator, biographer says" -- The Globe and Mail 24 Sept 2008 Read more about LMM's journals and Mary Rubio and Stuart Macdonald in the article on the BIOGRAPHY page. |
TEXT of note (dated April 22) found by Dr. Stuart Macdonald at the time of Montgomery's death, (April 24, 1942): "This copy is unfinished and never will be. It is in a terrible state because I made it when I had begun to suffer my terrible breakdown of 1940. It must end here. If any publishers wish to publish extracts from it under the terms of my will they must stop here. The tenth volume can never be copied and must not be made public during my lifetime. Parts of it are too terrible and would hurt people. I have lost my mind by spells and I do not dare think what I may do in those spells. May God forgive me and I hope everyone else will forgive me even if they cannot understand. My position is too awful to endure and nobody realizes it. What an end to a life in which I tried always to do my best." (575-6) Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings. Copyright © 2008 Mary Henley Rubio, published by Doubleday Canada. |
LAST ENTRIES
Handwritten Journal, July 8, 1941: "Oh, God, such an end to life. Such suffering and wretchedness."
Postcard to George MacMillan, September 15, 1941: "Am no better dear friend & never will be. You do not know the blows that have fallen on my life for years. I tried to hide them from my friends. I feel my mind is going."
Letter to cousins: October 8, 1941: "...he has broken our hearts...and it is that has broken me" (Rubio 570).
Letter to George MacMillan, Dec 23, 1941: "This past year has been one of constant blows to me. My oldest son has made a mess of his life, and his wife has left him. My husband’s nerves are worse than mine even."
The letter she received from George MacMillan, January 1, 1942: "I am always in hope that your health, in God’s good providence, may take a turn for the better, and that you will have a fresh realisation of His goodness and abounding grace, which will bring peace and joy and hope to you. I trust you received the letter I sent you when I got your former postcard [September 1941], counselling you not to give up hope, but to rest in a sense of God’s loving care for you."
[This letter is one of the very few letters that Montgomery saved.]
Last entry for handwritten journal, March 23, 1942: "since then [July 8, 1941] my life has been hell, hell, hell. My mind is gone -- everything in the world I lived for has gone -- the world has gone mad. I shall be driven to end my life. Oh God, forgive me. Nobody dreams what my awful position is" (Rubio 573).
Montgomery created two versions of her personal journals, the handwritten ones and a typed version, one for each son - she instructed them to publish her life story someday, presumably using the typescript.
Last note for typescript version of journal April 22, 1942 -- "I have lost my mind by spells and I do not dare think what I may do in those spells. May God forgive me and I hope everyone else will forgive me even if they cannot understand. My position is too awful to endure and nobody realizes it. What an end to a life in which I tried always to do my best."
If the note found by her bedside, written on April 22, was intended for the typescript version, it is very similar to the last handwritten entry in March. Was this paragraph, written on a scrap paper by her bedside, a note of farewell, as Stuart Macdonald thought, and/or the same kind of note she wrote for other journal entries, intending to add it to her typescript life story later? While she intended for each son to have the full version of her private journals, this note instructs Stuart to only publish the typescript content from the first nine volumes written in the ledgers.
The tenth volume was to be withheld from publication. Volume number nine ends on September 29, 1936:
"I have come to the last page of this ninth volume. It is a terrible record. I shall begin another because I must have some confidant -- some outlet for anguish and worry. The new one will not be any better but it can hardly be worse! Everything I hoped and dreamed and planned for has gone with the wind. I am broken and defeated. Well, so are many others...What we call death is just discarding a worn out personality and putting on a new. And it cannot come too quickly for me."
She added a note to it on December 25, 1940: "Oh, it was. So bad I had to stop it altogether. So bad that this one seems like heaven by contrast."
Parts of her September 29 entry, relating to reincarnation, are also included in her letter to George B. MacMillan, March 1, 1936, but in a more positive context. Rubio and Waterston included almost all of Montgomery's tenth volume of handwritten journals in their (lightly edited) Selected Journal of L.M. Montgomery, Vol V. 1935-1942. 2005.
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For most of her life, Montgomery was able to rally her spirits in hard times. But in the late 1930s and 1940-42, she lost the capacity for resilience. In The Gift of Wings (2008), Mary Rubio details the destructive effects of Montgomery's medications and the actions and behaviors of Maud and Ewen's son, Chester, during the last years of her life and concludes that he was "in the end, her undoing" (Rubio 574).
It is true that Montgomery's husband, Rev. Ewen Macdonald, suffered from severe depression, painful headaches, serious bronchitis, and episodes of mental illness. She worried about his fear of suicide in the three years after his first breakdown in 1919. She discussed suicide, on 10 May 1922, after reading William Lecky’s comments on it in History of European Morals – she agreed that it could be acceptable if life was too much, “But it is a cowardly thing to do if the doing of it leaves our burden upon others—ay, and a wicked thing…I don't think I would ever be really tempted to commit suicide as long as I could get enough to eat and wear by any means short of begging. Life, with all its problems has always been an extremely interesting thing to me.” She always maintained a positive outlook that there would eventually be a “Bend in the Road” toward better times.
The year 1934 was humiliating and especially hard for both Maud and Ewen after the school and job failures, unexpected marriage, and early pregnancy of their oldest son. Ewen was affected deeply and spoke of suicide on three occasions during the year. In June, she admitted Ewen to the Homewood Sanitarium in nearby Guelph for eight weeks; both of them were able to get some much-needed rest. Montgomery does not mention suicide in her journals after this year, but of course she stopped writing in her journals in late 1936.
Ewen Macdonald is not to blame for Montgomery's most extreme distress in her last years. She cared for him and tried to treat his illness and frankly acknowledged her own mental health challenges; both of their health issues coincided and were elevated with mutual stresses from difficult lawsuits and congregational issues. She used Ewen's illness as a cover story for her distress because, as bad as it was, it was less devastating than the real trauma -- the weightiest factor was the behavior of their son, Chester (Rubio 571). Neither of them could cope with his ongoing amoral behavior nor share it with anyone else.
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In 2012 Vanessa Brown (who assisted in the appraisal of the "suicide note") determined that the April 1942 scrap of paper seemed to be instructions to Stuart to use the typescript version when he published her diaries and not include the last entries (the tenth volume) from her handwritten journals. Brown also noted that Montgomery crossed out would and inserted will in the sentence, I hope everyone else will forgive me even if they cannot understand. In Brown's view, the note was a letter of formal instruction, but she also sensed it was partly "a final note of farewell."
[The L.M. Montgomery Reader, Volume Two, 2014. "Archival Adventures with L.M. Montgomery; or 'As Long as the Leaves Hold Together'” (2012) Vanessa Brown and Benjamin Lefebvre (371–86)]
Was Montgomery imploring everyone to forgive her for her inability to prevent the harm her son was causing, or the things she wrote that would hurt people, or an action she might take?
In 2013 Mary Rubio wrote more about the uncertainties surrounding Montgomery's death after her 2008 biography was published. With years of editing LMM's personal journals as a backdrop, Rubio could see the dilemma facing Montgomery by 1940: deeply disturbing things had happened in her life (and family) which were her true-life story, but they were things she would not want published or read by her grandchildren. She could not write the worst of them.
She also did not know how much longer she could wait to see how events turned out. Could she continue to record and craft her life story, or had she lost the ability to continue writing -- was it time to stop? Montgomery wanted to control her own legacy and how she would be remembered. However, she was taking numerous medications for injuries and pain management, she had lost a great deal of weight, and she was aware of changes in her thinking processes and mental state. She did realize that she was losing control.
Rubio wished she would have questioned Stuart Macdonald more before his early death in 1982: Was there any other clear evidence of suicide or was it their (Stuart, Dr. Lane, Anita Webb) reaction after reading the words on a scrap of paper that contributed to this conclusion? Did Stuart find the note or did Anita, Maud's long-time friend and household helper? Was Anita's perception of Aunt Maud's death because of what she saw or what she was told? Were there other papers there or was the "note" the only item? Could Dr. Lane have been concerned that his famous patient died under his regimen. Were her doses adjusted to account for her weight loss? Did the doctor give her an injection that morning, as he did at other times, and could she have unknowingly self-administered medication in addition? Was there evidence she had taken pills and how many? Where was her son, Chester, at the time?
Read Anne Around the World: L.M. Montgomery and Her Classic, 2013: "Uncertainties Surrounding the Death of L.M. Montgomery, p. 45. [partial text]
Did her words "what an end to a life" indicate an intention on her part or an expression of the anguish of her general state of mind?
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"I am companioned by thoughts of old laughter and joys, shadowy footsteps of dead or absent friends, voices of the vanished years." Montgomery journal entry, 21 May 1909.
It is clear that Montgomery was very frail and weighted down with a thick cloak of depression, whatever its origins, and she lacked strength and the medical care to overcome it. Her last note also reveals her isolation and the root of her heart-sickness, "Nobody realizes it." She was alone, her closest confidantes were absent -- she had always depended on her trusted intimate friends to help her emotionally, to "rinse out her soul." In addition, her own remedy of accessing her "dream world" where she could retreat and refresh did not work in her altered states. All of her supports had fallen away, and she was desperate for relief.
Did Montgomery purposefully take a fatal dose of pills as Macdonald Butler understood from her father's comments over forty years ago? Rubio emphasized that if Montgomery was rational, she would not have ended her life on purpose because it would bring shame upon her family and legacy. If her death was intentional, would she not have disguised it, and made it seem natural, if she was lucid? While there may still be further revelations about L.M. Montgomery's death, it is not a certainty that it was her intentional doing.
Maud admitted that "l have lost my mind by spells and I do not dare think what I may do in those spells." This disclaimer could indicate her desire to survive and her fear that she might harm herself or someone else when she was not in control. Whether or not her last actions were the result of intention or accident, her son, doctor, and long-time friend who witnessed the aftermath, could see it was by her own hand. What no one knows is what her state of mind was at the time.
Was her death pre-meditated or post-medicated? Dr. Mary Rubio's presentation at the University of Guelph in 2008, for the Anne centennial and launch of her Montgomery Biography, The Gift of Wings, with responses from Montgomery's descendants and relations:
The World of Lucy Maud Montgomery.
