Mike Was Here

Michael Brott, Dec 1984 - July 2020

As regular readers of this newsletter know, I turned the stories of eleven young people who died of drug poisoning in Ontario into short animated films. But there was a second phase of the We Were Here project, which allowed me to collect six more stories from across Canada. This is the second in this series.

Miranda couldn’t help but observe that Mike seemed to find any excuse to pop into her office and chat. She was in a new job with a Vancouver film production company, where he was employed as a driver. She was immediately drawn to him, appreciating how easily he put people at ease, and how attentively he listened to her. For their first date, he got them tickets to see the Canucks, Miranda’s first hockey game. She had recently arrived from Australia. Mike was originally from Toronto (and a diehard Leafs fan).

Miranda enjoyed how appreciative he was of little things she did for him. She noticed that he saved notes and keepsakes from their early days together.

By moving to Canada, Miranda’s plan was to get a foot in the door as a screenwriter, then make her way to LA. Events conspired against that, starting when the US cancelled the green card program that would have allowed her to work there. She and Mike had talked about getting married to allow him to move with her, but the disruption in their emigration plan didn’t change that. He proposed on a beautiful winter day at Wreck Beach.

Miranda and Mike on the beach

A month later, everything shut down due to Covid, so they ended up with a seaside Zoom wedding in April 2020, dressed in bride and groom hoodies. There were only six people on the beach, with their friends and families watching from multiple time zones. One advantage of the digital ceremony is that Miranda has footage of the beautiful toast Mike gave.

“It started raining on me this morning while I was running, but we stuck with the plan, and sure enough, it’s a beautiful almost cloudless day out here. We’re in some pretty scary times right now with this virus, but it got me thinking about just staying the course and taking care of those you love. The sun will always come out. Mazel tov!”

Their honeymoon period - and in fact their entire marriage - was spent in lockdown, both of them out of work while film production was on hiatus. It was a strange but precious time when they could focus on one another. There was lots of hiking and paddleboarding for their physical and mental health. Mike tinkered with his motorcycle, customizing it and fawning over it to the point they often joked he loved the motorcycle more than Miranda. He dabbled in photography and made YouTube videos where he interviewed people he found interesting. He DJ’d for an audience of one: his new wife.

In an effort to replace some of their lost income, Mike took up day trading, which may have been too close to gambling to be safe for someone in recovery from addiction. Miranda knew that drug dependence had been part of Mike’s past, but he assured her that it was no longer an issue. On the day he died, he had made some trades that lost money, which Miranda believes may have triggered his relapse.

Miranda was completely shocked to find his body in their washroom, and couldn’t imagine what had caused his death until the police surveyed the scene and explained that evidence pointed to drug use. She has to constantly remind herself to accept what she didn’t know at the time. Immediately afterwards, she felt like she was on the world’s worst scavenger hunt, trying to piece together his history with addiction and come to some kind of understanding about what Mike might have been going through. She learned he had been on suboxone (a harm reduction medication) but weaned himself off it, perhaps at the wrong time, given the ensuing stress brought on by the Covid pandemic.

Miranda is still writing in various forms but is no longer attracted to the hectic life of a Hollywood film career. She facilitates a grief support group for people who have lost a partner to a drug-related death. She has also started a website and newsletter, where she shares her experiences as a young widow. In 2025, a personal essay she submitted to the Canadian Nonfiction Collective took third prize in a national competition. She explains her purpose in putting her writing out into the world:

When I was 35 my beloved husband died from an unregulated toxic drug supply. It altered everything irrevocably. I found myself dealing with a traumatic loss that affected everything in my mind, body and soul in a world that didn’t understand.

I share my grief experience and some of the hard-earned truths I’ve discovered along the way. If you’ve lost someone, I’m sorry, and I hope this helps you to feel seen. If you want to support someone who’s grieving, welcome, they really need you. And I also hope to reduce some of the stigma around substance use related deaths.

With a bonus cancer diagnosis and treatment thrown in the mix to keep me on my toes – as if I didn’t already know how precious life is – I persist. Thriving? Not quite. But despite having fear and anxiety as my constant companions, I remain cautiously optimistic enough to buy tea bags in bulk and endeavour to have a meaningful life.

Miranda writes thoughtfully about the dark side of “bright-siding” and the importance of letting anger and sadness be. She shares some things that have helped her, like tending the rare orchid Mike bought her, and indulging in the occasional ugly cry among some non-judgemental trees and rocks. She also explores questions about what happens after death, taking comfort in the principle of physics that says a person’s energy can never be destroyed. Miranda introduced me to this magnificent quote from writer Aaron Freedman:

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.