The “official” cause of the death of Lucy Maud Montgomery in 1942 was “coronary thrombosis”, or — in layman’s terms — a heart attack. In the 66 years since then, that was always accepted to be the truth.

However, the final entry of her journals, written almost a month to the day before her death, reads much like a suicide notice. Some fans and readers have speculated since then.

March 23, 1942
Since then, my life has been hell, hell, hell. My mind is gone — everything in the world I lived for has gone — the world has gone mad. I shall be driven to end my life. Oh God forgive me. Nobody dreams what my awful position is.

(The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Volume V (1935-42), p. 350)

In today’s Globe and Mail, Maud’s granddaughter — Kate MacDonald Butler — reveals that Maud’s death was not from a heart attack. She had taken her own life by way of a drug overdose. The choice to reveal this information was spurred on by a series on mental illness and depression entitled “Breakdown”, which was published in the same newspaper earlier this summer; as well as by all the attention LMM has been receiving this year, as it is 100^th anniversary of the publication of Anne of Green Gables.

In the article, Kate MacDonald Butler writes: “I hope that by writing about my grandmother now there might be less secrecy and more awareness that will ease the unnecessary suffering so many people experience as a result of such depressions.”

globeandmail.com

UPDATE (Sept. 23): CBC Arts has reported that LMM’s suicide note, and the context surrounding it, would be included in Mary Rubio’s forthcoming biography on the author.

UPDATE #2 (Sept. 24): Today’s Globe and Mail features snippets from an email interview with Mary Rubio, whose biography of LMM will be published and released on October 25. She offers that it may not necessarily be true that Maud took her own life, although it was true that her youngest son, Stuart, believed it to be so. Also, Rubio believes a note, written two days before her death, found on LMM’s bedside table after her death, may not have been a suicide note, but rather was to be the final page of the tenth written volume of her journals.

In folding the note into his pocket on April 24, 1942, Montgomery’s son [Stuart] “would not have known” that 175 other pages were somewhere in the house, which Montgomery prophetically called “Journey’s End” when she bought it in 1935. Rather, he “interpreted this page as a single stand-alone note written solely to explain her final despondency, and it is easy to see why he did.”

Dr. Rubio notes that the other 175 pages have never been found and, among several scenarios, suggests that Chester Macdonald “very likely” discovered them after the removal of her mother’s body, and destroyed or hid them. Mr. Macdonald, who died at 51 in 1964, had unimpeded access to all parts of the house. He knew his mother’s writing habits and “he had good reason to think” whatever she had written “would contain much about him,” very likely highly negative.