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“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.