Random Access

Helena Stahls seems to specialize in subjects that no one wants to talk about.
She talks a lot about suicide and its stigma. Her daughter Donna Lee Zampieron was just 34 with two young daughters, when she chose to end her life Dec. 15, 1999.
She left “the typical note,” says her mother, one saying that her family and friends would be better off without her. “How terribly wrong she was,” says Stahls in a summary she has written about those dark days and the trauma that followed.
The suicide was devastating to Donna Lee’s husband and daughters, her mother and father, her brother and her many friends.
“I felt that I was going crazy,” says Stahls. “When Donna Lee passed away, I truly thought I was losing my mind. I was so exhausted all the time, I slept 20 hours a day.”
Donna Lee, a talented figure skater who was good enough to be signed by Holiday on Ice for a European tour, had two terrible strikes against her.
Not only did she suffer from depression, but she was diagnosed with Crohn’s and Colitis just before she was to be married.
“It’s a devastating disease because you can’t see it,” says the longtime Mississauga resident. “People look fine and you don’t know that they’ve been in the toilet 30 times a day and vomiting all the time. It is not a pretty disease and no one wants to talk about it.”
Between the Crohn’s and her depression, Donna Lee was on a yo-yo string that kept pulling her back and forth to Trillium Health Centre. She had shock treatments for the depression.
The medication for the Crohn’s and the medication for the depression often clashed, leaving Donna Lee in a fog.
Through all her troubles, however, Zampieron always had a couple of sources of joy: her family and her skating. She taught the Learn To Skate program in Mississauga arenas for years. Even near the end, she would have a friend sign her out of the hospital, go to the rink and enjoy the physical and psychological liberation of skating, then go back to her hospital bed.
To honour Donna Lee’s memory and help make sense of a senseless act, her mother organizes the annual Gotta Skate event at Iceland Arena. It will take place Nov. 11 this year, with free skating, demonstrations, a silent auction and mystery packages available for purchase.
Stahls also uses that event to talk about a subject that makes society squeamish: suicide.
Most people who commit what is technically called “complete suicide” do so because they are mentally ill, says Stahls. “The media don’t see to want to talk about it because they think if they talk about it, people will want to do it.”
Having dealt with her own painful grieving, Stahls now helps others for whom the loss is still too horribly fresh.
She attended a support session at Bereaved Families of Halton-Peel the year after Donna Lee’s death, took the facilitator training, has jointly led numerous groups since then and now works 22 hours a week as part-time program coordinator for the charitable organization.
“It’s a place I can talk about Donna because my friends and family don’t want to hear it anymore,” she says. “It’s not like a cold, though, I’m not going to get over it. It will be with me for the rest of my life.”
All of the volunteers at Bereaved Families, which has its offices on Century Ave., have personal experience with similar loss.
“When I say I understand, I do understand,” says Stahls, who tries to pass on the coping strategies to others that make her life — not the way it was before— but a little better.
“Helping other people takes away the pain a little bit,” she says. “I have a big hole in my heart that will never heal but slowly, it just gets smaller and smaller.”