WRITING TO REMEMBER

She doesn't recall turning 16, or what it felt like to fall in love
for the first time. She doesn't remember getting married, or even
giving birth to five of her children.

Linda Macdonald now sits in her Surrey apartment, next to a picture of
the one child who still speaks to her.

She pieces together information others have offered about her first
life.

The life she can't remember.

One day, when Linda was four, she waited on the sidewalk for the bus
that would take her to preschool. It drove right by. By herself, she
chased it down the street until the driver stopped and let her on.

Linda heard this story from her mother, who said she had always been a
fiery child; a gregarious Leo who loved to be in the spotlight,
dancing and singing.

Born in Vancouver and raised in Ottawa, she started vocal lessons when
she was 12, and was already singing with the Orpheus Operatic Society
at 15. The music - like Linda's personality - was loud, social and
attention-grabbing.

Linda met her husband in high school. Two years older, the dark-haired
Tony Curtis look-alike was brainy and serious - a stark contrast to
her character. He went to Queens University, while Linda planned to
attend teachers' college. After his first year, however, they decided
to marry. The couple asked Linda's parents for their blessing, but
they refused, worried that 18-year-old Linda would distract her
boyfriend from school.

A few months later, they eloped. Linda's mother was so upset when she
found out Christmas Eve, that she kicked her out.

Although she has no memory of being forced to leave home, Linda
imagines how painful it must have been.

Shortly after her husband graduated, the couple started their family.
Linda had five children in less than four years, before she was 24.
All the while, they moved from city to city, depending on where her
husband found work. She estimates they moved at least 14 times.

In August 1961, Linda began showing symptoms of what would now be
diagnosed as deep postpartum depression.

Between periods of wellness when she was her normal, perky self, she
had strange, hallucinogenic episodes. She would wake in the middle of
the night and vacuum.

The deeper the depression went, the more it may have developed into
psychosis.

After two years, her family doctor recommended they make an
appointment at Montreal's Allan Memorial Institute with Dr. Ewen
Cameron. Past president of the American and Canadian psychiatric
associations, his credentials were impressive.

Linda's husband took her to the Allan Institute and left her there.
Within three weeks, she was sent up to the "sleep room."

According to Linda's medical records, she was admitted March 28, 1963,
and treated as a schizophrenic, without being diagnosed as one.

In the sleep room on Ward 2 South, she was subjected to 109
electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) treatments in less than five weeks.
Almost 70 of those were Page-Russells, which consisted of an initial
jolt of 150 volts for one second (a standard ECT is 110 volts),
followed by five shocks of 100 volts, to produce multiple
convulsions.

Along with two Page-Russells a day, she was kept in a drug-induced
sleep for at least 86 days, while being subjected to "psychic
driving," in which she was forced to listen to messages on an
endless-loop tape.

It was all done without evidence of a mental illness.

Her parents visited her once, and later told Linda she had been a
zombie, speaking gibberish, nodding in and out of sleep. They thought
it was the schizophrenia. They trusted the doctor.

Linda's mind was wiped of all memory. Nurses had to toilet-train her
and teach her to eat with a fork.

It would be more than 20 years before she would learn what was done to
her at the Allan Institute.

Early one morning, in September of 1963, Linda's husband was about to
leave for work.

The house was missing the sounds of their five children, who had been
living with family members for the previous six months. She didn't
notice.

At age 26, she had no memory of her children, or that she was
married.

The stranger who was her husband led Linda to the couch and brought
her breakfast, lunch and some pills. He showed her a strange device
called a telephone, and told her not to use it.

He locked the door and left.

Linda sat on the sofa, motionless, and stared at a big black box on a
stand. There were markings on the TV's buttons, but she didn't know
how to read them.

Linda's Family was given specific instructions upon her discharge:
Don't teach her anything unless she shows a keen interest; don't let
her have much contact with her family; and don't remind her of her
past.

They were told if her memory came back, her illness could return as
well.

She was only told that she went to an institution because she was
sick, and Dr. Cameron made her better.

When she was released into her husband's care, there was no follow-up
or counselling - just a daily prescription of 28 pills.

Linda remembers meeting three strangers at Thanksgiving - her mother,
father and sister. She finally saw her children at Christmas. All five
of them, even the two-year-old twins, were more intellectually
advanced than she. The oldest approached her and said "Hi," prompting
the others to do the same. But they gravitated towards their father.
The twins cried.

Looking back now, Linda suspects they must have been
frightened.

When they eventually came to live with her, she just regarded them as
other people's children.

Linda didn't think it unusual she did not have a past. She was an
eager student, dependent on her teacher - her husband.

She learned how to play guitar. By the fall of 1964, she could
scramble an egg.

She conquered the most difficult task - learning to read - around the
same time, by studying children's books.

In 1965, Linda learned to drive again. It was also at this point she
understood she was a mother with children, and decided to let go of
the family's nanny so she could take over household duties. In 1966,
she auditioned for her first play.

She longed to know what it felt like to be pregnant, and had her sixth
child that same year.

Although Linda was relearning how to be an adult on the outside,
emotionally, she was naive and innocent. She lacked social skills and
often acted out in a childish way.

And she felt left out of her own life. Everyone knew more about Linda
than she did.

There were also severe marital problems, and Linda divorced her
husband in 1972. In the process, she lost her children.

With fierce conviction, she set off on her own, determined to find out
who she really was.

She began dating another man, and made money singing in clubs. A quick
learner, she got her first job at a church. When that ended, she moved
in with her parents in Ottawa.

On a day in 1976, Linda was in her mother's kitchen when she heard
beautiful voices lofting from the record player. She was drawn to the
sound, but didn't know why.

"Who's that?" she asked her mother, who looked back,
stunned.

There were two voices filling the room, one singing a beautiful
mezzo-soprano. The other, a soprano, was oddly familiar, and she
listened, entranced.

The recording was of Linda at just 18, singing with her
sister.

But as her knowledge of her past grew, so did the frustration of not
being able to relate to what she was being told.

She decided to leave and start again. In 1978, she moved to Vancouver,
living off odd jobs and singing in bars.

No one knew her name. No one knew her past.

Jan. 16, 1984, was a cold, rainy morning. Linda, now 47, walked into
the Vancouver building where she worked as a rehabilitation officer
for the unemployed, grabbed a bundle of newspapers and took them with
her to the 12th floor.

She lit a cigarette and walked into her office where she dropped one
of the papers on her desk. Her eyes caught the front page.

Linda's cigarette dropped to the floor. She fell to her knees and
scrambled under the desk to find it. She threw the paper against the
wall.

Trembling, she shuffled down the hall, got a cup of coffee and
returned to her office, closing the door behind her. She gathered up
the newspaper and read how, from the 1950s to the early '60s, a Dr.
Cameron used brainwashing experiments - at one point funded by the
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency - in an attempt to cure mental illness.

Cameron (who died in 1967) had subjected patients to ECT treatments in
an attempt to "depattern" their brains, wiping them of memory and
experience. He then administered untested combinations of
barbiturates, anti-psychotic drugs and hallucinogens such as LSD, to
keep patients subdued but responsive to psychic driving, replaying
messages to replace their memories with his own ideas.

Scenes of Linda's life began coming back - relearning to read and
write, a failed marriage, the loss of her children. She was angry and
horrified.

She read how nine of Cameron's victims were suing the CIA for funding
the project.

Linda picked up the phone and called the reporter who wrote the
story.

"I want to be number 10."

The CIA funded Dr. Cameron's experiments from 1957 to '60. Having been
admitted in '63, Linda went on a search to find out who paid for the
project when she was a patient. To her disbelief, she discovered it
was the Canadian government.

She sought legal counsel, and in 1988 her case was taken on by lawyer
Thomas Berger and colleague Ron Shulman. It was then Linda discovered
her medical file and learned of the experiments to which she had been
subjected.

She decided to sue the Canadian government.

Having frequented Berger's office often in the last four years, Linda
was used to its warm, comforting tone when she arrived on a November
day in 1992.

But the atmosphere was different. Linda had the first sense of it when
she was called to the Gastown building. She knew it was about
compensation.

Berger and Shulman were standing waiting for her, and Linda
immediately sensed disappointment. They showed Linda a letter from
justice minister Kim Campbell, and asked her to sit down to read it.
Linda's eyes scanned the legal jargon, picking up just enough words to
understand.

The Canadian government would compensate Linda and every victim who
could establish they had been subjected to depatterning - there were
80 - with $100,000 each.

If accepted, Linda could never again sue the government, the Allan
Memorial Institute or Dr. Cameron's estate.

It wasn't an admission of fault. There wasn't even an
apology.

Linda was stung, but relieved. After years of fighting a seemingly
endless, frustrating legal battle, she was ready for it to end.

She picked up the pen.

Linda began to write her book eight years ago.

The compensation money was long spent. A large portion was used to pay
her mother back for past loans. The rest was gone. When she wanted to
publish her music, Linda bought soundboards, microphones, amplifiers
and recording equipment. Wanting to become a TV personality, she spent
thousands on a broadcast course.

But writing the book wasn't just another impulsive
idea.

After conflict with management at her job, she left on medical stress
leave and immersed herself in the task of getting her story on paper.

If she could just get it published, she thought, maybe her children
would read it and understand she didn't abandon them.

Or, at the very least, maybe it would help others suffering with
depression or complex post traumatic stress disorder. Linda started
seeing a psychologist herself for the condition.

For a year, she spent every day at her computer, combining her own
memories with the information she gathered over time from friends and
family about her first life.

Her roommate walked her two shitzus, Bo and Jazz, and brought dinner
to her desk, at which point Linda would resurface to watch CNN and eat
before returning to relive some of her most haunting memories. She'd
cry over the keyboard and become infuriated at the scenes coming back
to life.

She never did return to work. As she spent month after month of long
hours hunched over her writing, her health began to deteriorate. After
fighting a mental battle for so long, she now found herself struggling
physically. She developed emphysema, and her hips began to give out.
But promising plans with a publisher kept her going - until 2006, when
the arrangement fell apart.

Linda continued the project on her own.

Looking back now, Linda wishes she had taken her case to
court.

"A hundred thousand dollars was not enough to compensate for what they
did to those people and me. It was not."

While her children know of the case and what was done to her at the
Allan Institute, all but one has drifted away over the last 10 years.
Linda suspects they grew tired of her pleading for their
understanding.

"I chase them to try to understand. Understand. Please understand. I
needed them to know the story. And they didn't want to know."

She holds on to memories of the years she was with them - from the
birth of her last child to when they went into their father's custody
and never came back.

As soon as Linda opens her eyes in the morning, she forces herself to
get up.

It's OK to revisit her past when writing her book, but if she does so
while lying in bed, the sheer weight of the thoughts may keep her from
rising at all.

They claw at her strength - the fact she can no longer muster enough
air in her lungs to sing, that she only received one card last
Mother's Day; that it's raining outside and she won't be leaving her
apartment today.

Not that she gets out much. She spends most of her time at home, where
the rhythmic gasps of her oxygen machine are a constant reminder she
can only move as far as the tubes allow.

A picture of the 71-year-old's younger, healthier self is mounted on
her wall; her vibrant red hair wisping away from her eyes. Although
she still has the same familiar wide smile, Linda is thinner now.

Her contact with the outside world comes from visits by home-support
workers, the HandyDart driver who drops her off at the grocery store,
and an occasional journey by scooter across the street to the mall.

But she'll think about these things later, when she's writing
again.

For now, she swings her legs over the bed, stands as tall as her body
allows, and walks to the mirror.

"Today is Sunday. My name is Linda Macdonald and I am
beautiful."

She still has to remind herself who she is.