Senator Patrick Brazeau has broken his silence about his darkest hour — the night he slit his throat with a cleaver and started bleeding to death on the kitchen floor.



It was Jan. 18 and Brazeau had done his best to drink away his mess. But 12 Molson Export and a bottle of Scotch were no match for the tornado in his mind. Prosecutors had dropped a sex assault charge against him but his trials for fraud and impaired charges loomed. The suspended senator had never felt so alone, so broke. He had forgotten the pride and confidence that had propelled him to become a national aboriginal leader and later the country’s youngest senator. He could think only of the towering fall that had played out on the nightly news.



His world had collapsed around him. Hope had faded and he thought he had no good reason to live.



“Everything just came to a tipping point. … I’m not proud of that moment, because I let a lot of people down,” Brazeau, 41, recalled.



“I’m just glad to be alive … and I’m a damn lucky guy I still have my family with me,” he said.



In interviews during a canoe-camping trip to an island 60 kilometres north of Ottawa in the Gatineau River, Brazeau shared intimate details about the night he tried to kill himself, and spoke of hope — now that he has it — for his future.



The island is north of the Paugan Dam near Low, Que. Beavers swim in pairs, the common loons dive in the morning-still water and a woodpecker’s rat-a-tat-tat on a white pine sprinkles sawdust from the sky. It is a place the senator calls “peaceful,” particularly when the sun dances on the river as the easterly wind picks up. It is a traditional corridor for Brazeau’s people, the Algonquin. This is where they hunted and fished long before the river was dammed in 1928.



In his own words, Brazeau didn’t know the depth of his rock-bottom.



He found out, shortly before 10 p.m. on Jan. 18.



First, he slashed his left arm repeatedly, then texted a picture of the real-time gore to his girlfriend. Then he texted her that he was going to kill himself. If that was a call for help, his next act was anything but. He locked the door, and as a music mix ranging from AC/DC to Kid Rock played on, he laid down on the kitchen floor and, with a cleaver in his right hand, slit his throat from under his left earlobe across to the right side of his Adam’s apple.



“I remember the blood just starting to gush,” he said.



Then he remembers his dog, a Lhasa Apso named Ti-Père, licking his forehead.



His girlfriend had called a neighbour when she got his chilling text. That neighbour raced over only to see Brazeau (through a window) on the floor in a pool of blood. The neighbour called 911, and paramedics broke down the locked door. Brazeau started struggling with the paramedics. He wrongly thought he was going to be handcuffed and sent back to jail, one of his biggest fears.



He lost consciousness and, after 30 hours in a medically induced coma, woke up alone in a room at the Hull hospital. At first, he thought he was having a really bad dream.



He also felt regret of the worst kind.



“I had regrets that I had failed in my attempt to kill myself,” he says. He’s ashamed he had that regret, but that’s how he felt at the time.



Months later, not a day goes by without him saying he’s glad to be alive.



BORN ON Nov. 11, 1974, Patrick Richard Brazeau was raised in working-class Maniwaki, Que., some 130 km north of Ottawa. His neighbourhood is a patchwork of residential homes and commercial buildings. His family home sits on a corner, where his father Marcel (now in his late 70s) once ran Depanneur Brazeau and later his mother, Huguette, a daycare. So everyone knows his family.



His father is Algonquin, and his mother, who died 12 years ago, was white. He was raised with a foot in two different cultures, but it was hard for him to fit in with either. In his own words, he was too white for the on-reserve folks, and too Indian for off-reserve folks.



Still, he had a better childhood than many. Two parents with jobs and a corner store full of food.



His inability to truly fit in with either culture fortified a defence-mechanism within Brazeau, who says he had to walk around as a tough guy, one to never show his soft interior. The reality is that he’s an emotional man who spent years building his confidence.



He developed a tough shell to counter taunts as a boy. His father was strict and enforced school as a priority. Brazeau only went to the dentist on PD days so there was no missing school. His mother always rolled out the comfort mat, notably when a young Brazeau was having problems, mostly with girlfriends. She could calm him down with few words.



As a young, rising political star in the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples, he used his life experiences to try to relate to both off- and on-reserve aboriginals, and later in the Harper government, to which he remained loyal until he was expelled.



The Senate appointment in 2008 took Brazeau by surprise, he says, especially after he had brushed off the Tories when they asked him to parachute into Quebec as a candidate in that year’s election. He said, at the time, he never thought he was Harper’s “token Indian” but now he believes otherwise.



Less than five years later, he was ousted from caucus and voted out of the Senate after his sex assault and fraud charges.



His sexual assault trial heard ugly testimony. A woman told court he had pushed her down a flight of stairs, hit her head against a wall, pulled her pants down and tried to penetrate her with his finger. Eventually, the charge was dismissed due to lack of evidence. He did plead guilty to simple assault and cocaine possession, but was granted an absolute discharge, sparing him a criminal record.



The outstanding fraud and breach of trust charges are related to disputed Senate housing expense claims for his primary residence in Maniwaki.



Brazeau said he’s hopeful that he’ll beat the fraud charges if the case goes to trial next year.





IT WASone of those sharp conversations a father shouldn’t have to have with their son.



Marcel Brazeau lost his father at 15, left the reserve days later, and went on to become a successful businessman. He helped raise three sons and, on Jan. 25, he sat across from his youngest and delivered words Patrick Brazeau will never forget.



It was time, his father advised, to stop playing the victim. It was time for him to “get up and fight for my life,” Patrick recalled. “If I followed in his footsteps, everything would be OK.”



His father hadn’t had it easy, but he never folded the hand he was dealt.



Patrick Brazeau became a political high roller early in life. At 27, the U of O law student took a summer job at the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples. He was later elected national chief at 32. Two years later, in 2008, he was appointed to the Senate of Canada and showed up for work in a Porsche.



In his own words, his political ascent was built on these foundation blocks — consensus, knowing the file, charisma and good looks (he’s a former model).



But the foundation of his personal life was less solid.



He’s never liked being alone. It’s why he had such a hard time in a jail cell after his arrests. It’s also the reason he’s had more girlfriends than most. His father has pictures in the living room of all nine of his grandchildren. Five of them are Patrick’s.



To say his last three years have been “pretty difficult” is an understatement. He’s been in more mud than most politicians are in their entire careers.



But he’s taken his father’s advice to heart, and is now fighting “to save myself.” He’s in therapy five times a month and has completed five months in rehab, where he said he didn’t disclose any intimate details about his troubled life. Still, he learned a lot — not from the counsellors, but rather from the other patients.



“It’s time to get back to the basics and start appreciating life,” a humbled Brazeau said.



Unlike most, his problems were intensified because they made the news. “I remember waking up, opening the blinds and seeing the media parked outside. It was tough. It was like an 18-wheeler coming at you.”



Patrick Brazeau says a difficult, honest talk with his father has put him on a new path. Chris Mikula, Postmedia.



The senator hopes the story of his suicide attempt will help young aboriginals.



His message is simple: I tried it. Don’t do it.



“There’s hope. There’s another day,” Brazeau preached.



He had lost hope on Jan. 18. “I couldn’t cope anymore.”



He now tells everyone he meets that he’s lucky to have lived another day. He spent Mother’s Day with his infant daughter. He seemed happy again. But his life is a “work in progress.”



He hasn’t seen a paycheque in a year because the Senate has reclaimed what it considers questionable housing expenses filed by Brazeau, who has yet to be tried on the charges.



He said he can now count his close friends on one hand, and three of them are family.



His mind is getting straight again, and his ambition has returned. One of his goals is to sit in the Senate again and “really make a difference.”



But, he says: “I’m still not out of the woods yet.”



gdimmock@postmedia.com



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