Canada was playing the United States in the gold medal game in Vancouver. When Sidney Crosby shot the spellbinding winning goal seven minutes and 40 seconds into overtime, Jack Windeler, an 18-year-old with an easygoing manner and supersharp mind, was jubilant. "He was high-fiving everyone and was so happy," says his father, Eric Windeler. "Jack was overjoyed when they won."
And then it was time for Jack to leave his parents, brother and sister, and catch a bus back to Kingston, Ont., where he was a first-year student at Queen's University. With his parents and their dog, Taffy, he walked to the subway station at Yonge and St. Clair. "I hugged him and Sandra hugged him," Eric says. "And we told him we loved him, just like we normally did, as we sent him off."
On a Saturday morning one month later, the police phoned. They were sending an officer over right away. "We went into three minutes of the most amazing panic you can imagine," Eric says, his voice beginning to break. "Jack was the only one unaccounted for."
A police cruiser pulled up, and the officer delivered shattering news. Jack, their firstborn child and a sweet, cerebral young man with unbounded promise, had died in his residence room. It was suicide.
Discovering Jack's hidden depression
Even in the cruelest, most cutting moments of grief and shock, it didn't occur to Eric and his wife, Sandra, to hide the truth about what had happened. The day after the suicide, Sandra sat at her computer and achingly, lovingly prepared Jack William Hanington Windeler's obituary for The Globe and Mail. "We lost Jack on March 27, 2010," she wrote, "when his first year at university became too much for him and he sought peace instead."
Jack left a rambling handwritten note on two pages of lined paper. The family realized he had been hiding a depression so severe it had crushed his will to live. For some reason, he felt like he couldn't reach out for help. "Jack hid his pain from us," Eric says, "likely afraid or embarrassed to speak about it."
Page 1 of 6 – Find out what Jack's parents' next steps were on page 2.
