I n the summer of 2002, Terence arrived in Brandon following his first season with the Roanoke Express. On the ice, it couldn’t have been a more successful debut. He had made history, becoming the first Inuk to play professional hockey, and while the first two lines of his rookie statistical record—9 goals and 16 assists—didn’t suggest much, the third one did—218 penalty minutes. Though undersized, Terence was fearless, tormenting the opposition, getting under their skin, and scrapping when necessary; in other words, he played hockey the Tootoo way. In a nontraditional southern U.S. hockey market, he immediately became a fan favourite, and almost from the start number 22 Tootoo jerseys started popping up in the crowd. Though some had picked Roanoke to win a championship that season, the Express were knocked out in the first round of the ECHL playoffs. Before leaving for home, Terence ordered his sticks for the 2002–2003 season, but he was hoping to take another step forward and make the jump to the Norfolk Admirals of the American Hockey League, then the number-one farm team of the Chicago Blackhawks. Terence had understood from the start that it would be a difficult road from hockey’s low minors to the National Hockey League. But if long odds fazed the Tootoo brothers, they never would have left Rankin Inlet. And the truth was, they were closer to their dream of suiting up together in the NHL than they had ever been. Upon arriving in Brandon, Terence moved in with Jordin, sharing a basement bedroom in the home of his billets, Neil and Janene, on the outskirts of town. It was a great summer. Jordin was a junior hockey celebrity—a star in a one-sport, one-team town—the Tootoo brothers were together once again, and though the family burdens remained, they seemed far, far away. During the day, Jordin and Terence trained hard for the upcoming season and, at night, they tore up the town. On August 27, with summer quickly drawing to a close, Jordin, his girlfriend Meghan, and Terence went out to sample the Brandon nightlife as they had so many times before.
I need to tell you about my brother, Terence.
Growing up, he was always a caring guy who looked after other people before he looked after himself. I remember that as a kid, as hard as he was on me, he was always there to protect me. In the community, everybody admired him for being the way he was. He carried himself with laughter and he always had a positive vibe wherever he went. He was always so caring, and very charismatic. He wasn’t a guy who said a lot. He wasn’t the life of the party. He sat back quietly. But when he spoke, you listened. He never showed any negativity. Maybe that hurt him, because he couldn’t express those darker feelings. Just because you always seem happy doesn’t mean you’re a happy person.
I was more of a daredevil. I didn’t care about the consequences in the moment. Terence was a guy who thought twice and considered the worst-case scenario. He was the one who friends relied on for the right answers on anything that lay ahead. And he always had those answers. He always came through. He wasn’t the biggest guy, but a lot of friends and family members looked to Terence when they had to get things done. Even if it was a two-man job, a three-man job, Terence found a way to do it by himself.
When people were around him, they would watch what he did. They followed his lead. He carried himself with a lot of confidence. Growing up, his buddies looked up to him. He was kind of the leader of the pack. He was always willing to try something new to test it out before anyone else did, just to make sure it was okay.
He was quiet, except in the dressing room. It was like he turned into a different man when he put on his hockey equipment. Growing up, he wasn’t much of a talker in public, but in the dressing room he was a very vocal guy. He wasn’t afraid to make speeches there, because he was in his comfort zone.
On the ice, he had the same style as I do. He was a great skater. He played hard. He wasn’t afraid to drop his gloves. He caught a lot of players off guard, because he was a southpaw who shot the puck right-handed but punched left-handed.
Terence was really close to my dad—a lot closer than I was. He was his right-hand man, because he was older. He was always by Dad’s side, looking after him—really, sometimes babysitting him. Out on the land, Terence was Dad’s guy. He was always around to do whatever he was told to do. When my dad needed help, Terence was there. As much as he loved to stay in town on weekends, Terence sacrificed that to go out on the land with my dad. And when Dad went on a bender in town, it was Terence who went to find him.
My mother and Terence had a great relationship, too. I think my mom thought of him as her saviour. When times were tough, she leaned on his shoulders. If it wasn’t for Terence, I don’t think our family would be together today. When things got rough between my parents, he was the mediator. That was a lot to put on a kid. The solution was always: “Call Terence. Terence will calm things down.” That’s the way it was.
When Terence moved down south to play hockey, that’s when things started to get really tough at home. And then when he left us, that’s when all hell broke loose.
THE LAST TIME I saw Terence was that night out in Brandon. In a couple of days, he was going to be heading to Norfolk, Virginia, for his tryout with the Admirals, and so we were partying hard because I wasn’t going to see him until the next summer. At the end of the night we all jumped in his vehicle, all pissed up with not a worry in the world. We’d done it a hundred times. No big deal.
We lived out in the country, fifteen minutes outside of Brandon, with our billets, Neil and Jeanine. But my girlfriend, Meghan, lived five blocks from the bar where we were.
I said, “Let’s just stay at Meghan’s house—spend the night here and go train in the morning.”
Terence said, “No, I’m going to go home.”
Being the younger brother, I wasn’t going to force Terence to do anything he didn’t want to do. He was always set in his ways. If he had something in mind, he was going to fucking do it. That’s just the way he was. So, the plan was to meet the next morning at the Keystone Centre, the Wheat Kings’ rink, to work out.
I said, “Are you sure you want to drive home? Just fucking stay here.” But he left. And I guess as soon as he pulled onto the main drag, the police lights went on. I didn’t see that. He had no cellphone, nothing. He got pulled over and the cops recognized who he was, because we’re both well known in Brandon. They tested him and he was over the limit. They told him, “We’re going to drive you home to where you’re staying and we’ll just leave it at that, but we’re going to impound your car.” Instead of taking him down to the station, they dropped him off at my billets’ place at three o’clock in the morning. Neil and Jeanine were light sleepers. They always seemed to know when I came home. But I guess they didn’t wake up.
The protocol is that when you drop off someone who is intoxicated, someone sober has to be there to take responsibility for the person. But it was all hush-hush that night. Because Terence was one of the Tootoos and that was a pretty recognizable name in Brandon, the cops decided to keep it quiet. Because of my popularity in Brandon and Terence’s in northern Manitoba, the police tried to keep everything on the down low. All of the cops knew who we were. Heck, I was dating the police chief’s daughter. They knew where I lived and decided to bring Terence to my billets’ house and keep everything under wraps.
They just said, “Okay, here’s your place, go ahead and we won’t say anything.” He went into the house and things must have been going a million miles an hour in his head. I’ve wondered about how I would have been thinking if I’d been pulled over—Holy fuck, I’m supposed to go to the States in a couple of days and now I’ve got a DUI. They might not let me back across the border. What if I can’t play hockey anymore?
My brother must have thought his life was over. He must have been thinking, So, fuck, this is it. All the work I’ve done has just gone down the drain. And everyone would know. It would be humiliating. I think he just couldn’t deal with that being in the public eye. Everyone thought that Terence was this great guy, and that’s how he wanted to be perceived. Everyone makes mistakes, but for him, with all that pressure coming at him from different angles, I just don’t think he had the will inside him to fight it anymore. Instead, it was like, Fuck, this is it. I’m done. I don’t want to deal with all of these people thinking I’m not this perfect, perfect guy.
THE PLACE WE STAYED at out in the country had a gun in the garage, a 12-gauge shotgun, because we’d go out hunting in the fields behind the house all the time. As best we know, Terence went downstairs to the basement where our room was and took off all of his clothes except his underwear. He set his clothes by the bed and then wrote me a note: Jor, go all the way. Take care of the family. You are the man. Terence. He set the note beside the bed and walked out.
I have analyzed that letter over and over ever since. He knew I had the skill to go all the way and take care of the family. And in Brandon, any time we were out in public, everyone was all over me—so his last line was “You are the man.” I felt bad, but I didn’t mean to be the man—it just kind of happened. He had to have been incoherent. Fricking blacked out. He couldn’t have known what the hell was going on. It was kind of chilly that night, but he went out in just his underwear—no shoes or nothing.
He went to the garage and grabbed three shells and the 12-gauge. Then he walked down to where there was a little trail. There was a fence there. He jumped the fence and fired off one shot there, into the air. I don’t know how Neil and Jeanine didn’t wake up. Then he put the second shell in, pulled the trigger, and it only clicked. It misfired. But he was so determined. Then he put the third shell in. That was it.
WHY DID HE DO IT? I’ve gone back over all the details a million times, what happened with the police and all the other stuff. We’ll never know the whole answer. My parents talked about suing the police, but I wasn’t involved in a lot of that. I do know that the officers involved were questioned and then formally admonished, but as far as I know that was it. I can’t speak on behalf of my parents about what exactly they were fighting for. I understand that you feel you need someone to blame, but from my perspective, when it’s suicide, you can’t blame anyone because you’re being selfish, you’re thinking of only you, and it only creates more problems.
There’s a lot of suicide in Rankin Inlet, and in other northern and First Nations communities. I understand the part about the lifestyle up there, and being isolated, and feeling that there’s nothing out there, so fuck it. It happens all the time. Part of Terence taking his own life had to do with feeling like he didn’t matter, like he was no big deal. And then there are all of the extracurricular activities: booze and drugs. There’s nothing else there. People think they’ve got nothing else to give, so Fuck it, I’m done. A lot of young kids, a lot of these ten-, twelve-, and thirteen-year-old kids grew up the same way we grew up. Their families are very dysfunctional and booze is the biggest reason for that. It’s like a fucking switch is flipped. I’ve seen it firsthand. And those kids want a way out.
But with Terence, it was also about all of those years spent putting up with shit and being a role model, and then letting people down. He must have said, I’m spent. My hockey career’s done and what else have I got? And my brother was fed up with all of the bullshit he had to deal with at home—picking Dad up when he was drunk, breaking up fights, seeing shit being thrown around the house. He was the middleman and I was the kid sitting in the corner watching all of this shit going on. We’d wake up the next day and, for my parents, it was like it had never happened. You absorb all that. In the end, I think part of Terence’s reasoning for taking his own life is that he didn’t want to deal with that shit anymore. Having Mom calling or Dad doing something terrible, having to be the mediator. He was a young kid himself, but at the same time he was like a fucking counsellor, a person stuck in the middle who can’t be a kid when he wants to be. And now here he was an adult, still sending his hockey paycheques home to Mom.
Terence wasn’t an outspoken person. He was a guy who held in a lot. He’s the same way my father is—he holds in a lot of his anger and his frustration until he has a few cocktails and then it just starts coming out. Terence was the spitting image of my father in that way. He loved to party, and he was a fucking great guy, but he partied for all the wrong reasons. He partied to get drunk. That day, he was drunk and he got pulled over by the cops and it was like, Fuck this—I’ve let everyone down. My parents. The people of Nunavut. This is my only way out. He was depressed and fed up, but he didn’t want to show that weakness because he was the older brother. He was the first pro Inuk player, a big role model for everyone, and he didn’t want to show any weakness. And you know, that’s how my dad is— you’re never going to see him show any weakness. If he’s sad, he’s never going to cry. They always say a true man cries, but no one has ever seen my dad do that. His job is to make sure that everyone else is looked after and that everything is going to be okay. And that was Terence.
At the end of the day, suicide is selfish. You will never know what really leads to a suicide. You can speculate all you want. But I was with him until the bitter last hours before he took his life, and I never knew he was hurting inside because he never showed it.
THE NEXT DAY I woke up at my girlfriend’s place around ten o’clock and called the house. There was no answer. No one was around. Neil and Jeanine had gone to work. I figured that Terence must have fricking passed out because he was so blitzed. I went to the rink at eleven and he wasn’t there. Again, I figured he was pretty tanked the night before, so he was probably still sleeping.
So I went to work out and got home around 12:30. I saw his shoes there. I went downstairs and his clothes were there. And the note was there. I read it real quick and thought, What the hell is this? But I didn’t think anything more of it than that. I crumpled it up and threw it in the garbage. (After all was said and done, the Brandon Police picked up the note. I don’t know what happened to it after that.) The only thing I was thinking was, Where the fuck is he? Where’s his truck?
It was mid-afternoon when Neil called me and told me that the Brandon Police had called to tell him that Terence had got a DUI the night before, and that his car had been impounded. What the fuck? But there were no text messages from him. No phone calls.
That’s when I began looking for him. I thought that maybe he took off to the States on a bus or something, or just got out of Dodge to get away from everyone. Get across the border before all the shenanigans went down. So I called all of the bus stations, but there was no record of him. By then it was six o’clock at night. I was wondering, Where the fuck did he go? He must have bolted town. That’s what I was thinking. Then Neil came to me and said, “I hate to ask, but you know the gun you always use when you go out hunting? Have you seen it?” I checked the garage. No gun. Fuck. But we used to hunt geese out back all the time, or just go out there to shoot the gun. So he could have been doing that.
By then, it was getting dark out. Neil and I hopped the fence. We walked around calling his name: “Ter, are you here?” Nothing. We did that for at least half an hour. Nothing. That’s when we called the Brandon Police and told them we had a missing person. I told them exactly what I thought: that he was probably out in the bush somewhere. The gun was gone. They said they’d bring the search dogs.
We had been out there just an hour before, so the dogs picked up our scent first and followed it for fifteen or twenty minutes and didn’t find anything. We had a meeting with the cops and they said they’d come back the next day after our scent was gone because Terence was definitely out there somewhere, and he had the gun.
They came back at seven the next morning. They hopped the fence and the dogs started going apeshit. It was still kind of dark. I was standing by the garage with Kelly McCrimmon. Neil went over the fence to take a look. Then all I could hear was his screaming. I just fainted into Kelly’s arms.
The night before, if I had looked to my right, five feet into the bush, it would have been me who found him. Thank God, I didn’t.
All that time, right up until we found Terence, I never thought that he would have killed himself. It didn’t even cross my mind. Never. That was the last thing I would have thought. He loved hunting and, you know, Terence was a survivor. He was a guy who could fucking rough it. In my mind, I was thinking, Well, he’s probably built a little hut back there, he’s trying to hide, to hide from everyone. That’s what I was thinking.
By that time my parents were in the air flying to Winnipeg, because I’d called them and said, “Hey, look, I don’t know where Terence is.” They’d jumped on a plane that got in at ten o’clock in the morning and we found him at seven. It’s a two and a half–hour drive from Brandon to Winnipeg. Kelly, Neil, and I made the trip.
At the airport, they have a quiet room where they bring people when there’s trouble. When my parents arrived, all hell just broke loose in there.
The drive back to Brandon was a bit of a blur. My mom was so out of it, we thought she might have to be hospitalized. When we got there, she wanted to identify the body to make sure it was Terence. I eventually convinced her not to see him. Neil went in to identify him. I wanted our last memories of Terence to be of when he was happy—not of what he did to himself, not of the way he was then.
Eventually, we cremated him. They ask you what kind of clothes you want him to wear for the last time. I picked out his clothes. Terence was a casual guy, a T-shirt and jeans guy. I picked out a nice plaid shirt that I remembered him wearing.
SINCE THAT DAY, it’s been hell for my parents. You can see in their eyes that they’re still hurting. Every day, I think of Terence, but for me it’s joyful now. It’s not that I’m over his death, but I understand that I have to move on. But for them— they’re still in pain. I can’t imagine being a parent and losing a kid.
My dad’s never, ever going to show emotion about it, though. That’s just how he is. And my mom is my mom. She’s going to be that way forever. I’ve tried to help them get professional help and stuff, but they’re not interested. They don’t want to talk about it. That’s how they grew up. It’s frowned upon. Any unpleasant issues, any issues at all, nothing was talked about. Communication was very minimal. And even to this day, when I try to ask questions about certain situations, it’s as if they’re on the defensive. It’s as if I’m always walking a fine line with both of my parents.
At some point you have to get over losing someone, but my parents haven’t. They talk like they have, but once they start drinking, that’s when everything comes out. I understand that. I understand that perspective. I’ve told my mom that I can’t imagine what it must be like for her. But it’s been over ten years now. You have to embrace Terence’s life and let his memory live on. But to them, it’s an issue. They say I don’t understand, and that’s an easy way out, an excuse.
I had to ask my parents some questions about Terence and how he was brought up. They got their backs up. Why the fuck are you asking us? Why do you need to know? I ask my mom questions and she says, “Don’t ever fucking ask me questions like that again. Don’t you ever fucking bring up shit like that again.” They weren’t even direct questions. You’ve got to kind of work around things with my parents. You’re walking a fine line. You don’t want my mom to snap because you don’t know what’s going to happen. And you know, as a child, that you don’t ever want to see your parents hurt themselves or your siblings. That’s the fine line I’m walking every day. My dad pushes my mom to the brink of taking her own life some days, and she talks about suicide and it’s like, Holy fuck, what the fuck is going on?
So, for our family, the truth is that it’s been hell. It’s tough sometimes for my parents when they’re lonely. I think Terence’s death is something they’re never, ever going to let go of. Terence was their pride and joy.
Back home, they still keep his room just like it was when he was alive. Obviously, we have a lot of great memories and that’s what we’ve got to embrace. I walk into his room all the time when I’m alone, and I look at all the old pictures and hold his trophies and all his medals and stuff like that. It brings me joy, because it’s something that will never be taken away from me.
ONE OF THE QUESTIONS I had to ask my parents was about Terence’s ashes. My understanding was that, after we cremated him, the ashes were going to be spread on the land near our cabin. But nothing was ever said as to when this was going to be done. I thought there would be a little ceremony, but I never heard anything more about it, and just assumed that whatever was said had been done. But nothing ever came up about it. So I had to get that straight. I finally asked them directly: “What did you do with Terence’s ashes?”
My mom said, “We still have them.”
“What? I thought you guys were going to spread his ashes out by our cabin.”
“No, I still have them up in our room.”
I went to their room with my sister and saw the box, and we had a little conversation about the whole situation. Corinne said we couldn’t tell them what to do. But, as a family, we should be able to have a ceremony about letting him go and having his spirit in our hearts. The whole thing kind of rattled me.
I understand from a parent’s perspective that it’s hard to let go. But my parents go to bed and his ashes are still right there in their bedroom. It’s something you’ve got to be able to let go of. For my parents—for my mom, especially—it’s hard. And that’s holding her back and causing a lot more stress in her life. It’s kind of sad to see. She uses anger as a coping mechanism. And that’s not how it should be. You can’t keep going back to something that’s in the past.
I’ve talked to her a bit about it. She tells me I don’t understand the pain it causes her. It’s just the same story over and over again. It’s not that I’m completely over the whole situation. But I’m not a parent.
TWO WEEKS AFTER Terence died, I was back with the Wheat Kings. Terence always told me that he wanted me to do what I loved, and so I felt like that was the right place for me to be. I wanted to stick to our goal. We loved playing hockey. When I decided to keep playing, I think I really got a lot of respect from my parents. I was at a point in my career when I could have just fucking said I’m done, called it quits, and that’s it—and have had something to blame it on. But that’s not what Terence would have wanted. He would want me to be doing what I love, so that’s what I did.
I was angry early on, for sure. But you can’t dwell on it. You can’t keep asking yourself those questions because, fuck, you just get so wrapped up in it. It consumes you. It’s not that it’s wasted energy, but it’s energy you know at some point you have to put somewhere else. For me, it’s not so much a daily battle as a daily, constant reminder of how important life is.
I went back over the night that Terence died all the time— for five years. But I would do it only when I was partying, when I was alone at night all pissed up. That’s when I would start thinking. And then I’d have another shot to try to put me out of my misery, to pass out. Or I would use women to keep my mind off of it. I needed that to help release the weight off my shoulders. For many years I blamed myself for Terence’s death. What could I have done? Why didn’t I do this or that? Why was I partying so much with him? When my mind started getting clearer I realized that if you grow up with physical and mental abuse, you have to deal with it.