Bad news always hits worse when you are not expecting it.

It was late at night. I was robbing myself of sleep and putting off the horrors of going to work the next day through the usual method: scrolling down social media.

I do this a lot (who doesn’t?) and on that particular night, I was knee deep in the Stranger Things memes, celebrity scandals, and cloying quotes of affirmation that make up my Facebook feed. Then, one image in particular caught my eye.

It was Megan Follows, the actress who played Anne of Green Gables in the 1985 iconic version of the story. She was dressed up in the red braids, straw hat, and faded dress of her character. It was a picture familiar enough to my eyes since I grew up drenched in all things Anne of Green Gables, but what really made me stop dead in my scrolling was the quote beside the picture. It said:

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.

—The Creator of Anne of Green Gables.

That was it. There wasn’t any actual name. Just the link to some clickbait fluff article.

So I promptly took the bait, really really hoping that by “creator of Anne of Green Gables” they meant the show runner of the new Netflix series, someone from the old show, anyone but who it would be: L.M. Montgomery: the author of the books herself.

I couldn’t believe those dark words had been been written by her.  I wasn’t ready to believe she had ever been miserable enough to do what might be hinted at in that dreadful dreadful paragraph. It wasn’t possible. Her books were so full of light, and joy, humour…and of life.

When I read LM Montgomery (and I’ve read as many of her books as I could find) I could distinctly feel the beauty that was in a landscape she described..I could feel it come alive to my senses and fill me with every good thought.  When I read L.M Montgomery, she talked so earnestly of elves and spirits, of ghosts and fairies, that I could almost believe the stuff of legends. I could almost…almost believe that magic exists.  The towns she wrote into existence were so full of real people—they were odd enough to be real that’s for sure—that I think they helped me understand some of the real people I’ve had to put up with.  Her tellings of friendship rare and fine, and of souls alive to the romance in the world (romance most sensible people ignore)  made me think perhaps I wasn’t such a freak. Perhaps I did belong to some tribe of people whose souls were made up of the same stuff as mine.

With some of that going through my head, I clicked on the link. I read the article. It was LM Montgomery. She had killed herself.  Apparently, in her later life, she had become addicted to drugs, succumbed to despair over her addiction and, when she couldn’t take it anymore, she wrote a suicide note, (very likely) purposefully overdosed, and died.

I promptly burst into tears: the weeping, sniveling kind go tears that (as any L.M. Montgomery heroine would tell you), is not at all romantic. But that was right. That was the way it should to be. Because I didn’t feel Romantic anymore. I felt ugly. 

It was ugly what had happened to this beautiful soul.  It was ugly the way that her love of all things beautiful was drugged away and snuffed out.

And, because I know that woman’s soul like I know my own, (she wrote her soul out in her books and I recognized it as one like my own), I knew she suffered more than most.  I already knew, through a lot of lived experience, that someone more keenly alive to the joys and beauties of life is also set up to suffer even more at the ugliness in life.  She would have seen the horror and pain and ugliness in drug addiction that the more sensible people around her would have been blunt to.  But, since the drugs were strong, she inevitably succumbed to them, probably seeing every shadow on her path to Hell along the way.

I was miserable for days.  I mourned my lost mentor like hadn’t even mourned some of my own relatives.  For she was a mentor to me. In those days that followed that night, I reflected on just what this writer had done for me.  And the more I thought, the more I realized that she was the first person to teach me how to really use my imagination.  When I was just learning to read, before that even (when I watched the movies), she taught me some of the most basic skills any creative artist can have. She taught me how to compare concrete things right in front of me, like the wind, or a flower, or a river to abstract things I would never see, like a bat-woman, or a pixie, or molten silver.  She taught me the pleasure of naming places and filling them with ghost stories and tragic histories that never happened.  She taught me to see the world of nature in light of the world of the fantastical:

“The Wind Woman is going to be out in the fields to-night. She is tall and misty, with thin, grey, silky clothes blowing all about her—and wings like a bat’s—only you can see through them—and shining eyes like stars looking through her long, loose hair. She can fly—but to-night she will walk with me all over the fields. She’s a great friend of mine—the Wind Woman is. I’ve known her ever since I was six. We’re old, old friends”

– L.M. Montgomery. Emily of New Moon

Thinking the way Emily thought in the quote above, drawing my own comparisons between things I could see and things I couldn’t, were the first steps I ever took as a creator.  Making up an impossible story around one glowing image became the whole cornerstone for my creative process as a writer.

I think it was only very recently when I learned to appreciate how much L.M. Montgomery helped me.  It was only recently when I realized just how profoundly dependent most people are on already existing stories to imagine things.  In a creative writing class I undertook to teach recently, I tried to get most kids to tell me an original story, only for them to tell me instead, brick by brick, a story that already existed.  Adults are even worse at it. Far far worse. They (with plenty of exceptions I’m sure) question why the process of making something up is even valuable. Or, they just downright laugh at it.

But thanks to L.M. Montgomery, the doors to the world of raw fantasy were open to me.  Thanks to L.M. Montgomery, I would never, could never, question the importance of that Faerie Realm where your mind could go no matter where your body was. I could never dismiss my imagination as unimportant.

But why did she have to die like that? How could she, who wrote so much joy, be so miserable that she caused her own death?  Why is it that people who see the most beauty suffer the most?

The complete horror I felt, knowing that someone who cast so much light into the world walked in darkness herself, reminded me of a similar feeling I once had.  There was someone else like this I’d once cried over: Vincent Van Gogh.   In the late nineteenth century, the artist Vincent Van Gogh painted, raved, committed acts of self harm, was derided as useless lunatic… and produced some of the most astonishing beams of beauty that were ever captured in paint.

I didn’t really know that much about the painter’s life until that wonderful old show, Doctor Who, flew into my life and produced an episode about the artist; one of the best loved episodes of the whole show still.  In it, the Doctor and his companion fly to the artist’s town and find him being mocked by all of his neighbors.  The Tardis team does their usual thing: saves him from a monster and what not. In the process, they cheer him up quite a bit and make him feel a bit more understood.  As a final gift, the Doctor and co. decide to take him to their time— his future— and show him how his paintings were loved by the whole world.  They corner an art critic (Bill Nighy in reading glasses and a bow tie) and ask him to explain “where Vincent Van Gogh stands in the ranks of artists.”  What Nighy says next are some of the most comforting words about art and suffering that I’ve ever heard. 

“He transformed the pain of his tormented life into ecstatic beauty.  Pain is easy to portray, but to use your passion and pain to portray the ecstasy and joy and magnificence of our world, no one had ever done it before. Perhaps no one ever will again. To my mind, that strange wild man who roamed the fields of Provence was not only the world’s greatest artist, but also one of the greatest men who ever lived.”

—Doctor Who Vincent and the Doctor

I consider myself to be a bit of an arrogant twit.  Allow me to explain.  It is usually one of my priorities to think about the problems of the world deeply enough so that I can come up with some kind of answer.  I take a lot of pride in the fact that I usually have a good answer on hand to some of those more abstract and painful“why’s?”. . . hence the arrogant twittery.

But this time I don’t feel like I have an answer. I don’t know why someone who is born to sail- and to lead others- through the highest starry depths of the sky are also the ones who crash and burn like no practical person ever crashes or burns.  I don’t know why the biggest hearts always bleed the most, and I certainly don’t know Montgomery’s – or Van Goph’s – secret of turning such  pain into such cloudless beauty. I don’t understand how someone who helped me live so much could die like that.  I’ll never understand it. I’ll never understand the pain that she went through, that drove her to suicide. I’ll never understand why she died.

But what I can do is thank her. I can thank her for teaching me to use my imagination. For showing me that there are kindred spirits out there whose sails are powered by beauty. I can thank her for showing me pictures of unclouded bliss that weren’t cloying, were never goody-goody, and just felt true. I am the woman I am today because I read L.M. Montgomery as a girl. My love of beauty, my solemn belief  that being surrounded by beautiful things is just as important to human growth as food or shelter or relationships all started with the simple Canadian woman who poured her sensitive soul out for us.

So thank you, L.M. Montgomery. Thank you for starting my life. I earnestly pray God saves your soul and keeps you in His paradise! 

Image at top: Megan Follows as Anne Shirley in 1985’s Anne of Green Gables. Photo Courtesy of IMDB.