Detroit Free Press: A love remembered
A love remembered
Birmingham woman chronicles a marriage
August 19, 2007
BY KIM NORTH SHINE
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
Freep.com
Within five days of the suicide last summer of her husband, Sherry McLaughlin was hiking a Colorado mountain to scatter his ashes at the same scenic spot where they had joyfully celebrated 10 years of marriage six years earlier.
Within weeks, McLaughlin, mother of an autistic child, businesswoman, photographer, author and devoted journal-keeper was writing about her rewarding and challenging marriage to Doug.
“I have to pour out my thoughts on paper before I can sleep,” she says.
Her thoughts and stories, wrapped in a strong belief in God and prayer, would go into her latest book, “Lessons from the Loveseat,” which is intended to remind readers that the quality of their relationships is directly connected to the quality of their lives.
McLaughlin is a longtime Birmingham resident and a physical therapist who founded the Michigan Institute for Human Performance in Warren. McLaughlin’s three books have all been published through her own company, ML Publishing in Warren.
In the “Loveseat” book, published in June, a year after her husband’s death, she writes about loving a man whose nearly lifelong depression was a secret to her until his life was about to be over. The book also is intended to dispel some of the shame associated with mental illness.
The couple married in June 1990 — Sherry says she wanted to marry Doug after their second date.
In a letter to her husband in the book’s last chapter — “Rewriting the Tragedy” — McLaughlin tells him about her visit to Flattop Mountain in Estes Park, Colo., where on their anniversary he had asked her to spread his ashes when he died.
“You would have loved it up there. The deafening silence. The view from the top of the world. “I wanted so badly to be holding you then,” she wrote in the letter. “I know you were in so much pain and I know in the depths of my heart you fought demons of depression valiantly until you could no longer fight.
“I am not angry with you. I just really, really miss you …”
An extraordinary life
In her books, McLaughlin tells of other extraordinary parts of the couple’s life.
“It’s hard to believe I’ve started a business, raised a special-needs child, helped raise three other children and been widowed all before 40. It’s incredible,” McLaughlin said.
“It was an amazing story. It was an incredible love story right up to the end.”
Her first book, “Lessons from the Couch,” documents her experience with a life coach following a life-changing event that goes unnamed in the book but, as she reveals in her follow-up, was her husband’s first suicide attempt in February 2005.
In her next book, “Lessons from the Journey,” she tells of her struggles through business difficulties while raising an atypical family made up of Joshua, their 14-year-old autistic son who has almost no verbal communication, and Jon, Doug’s much younger and struggling half-brother. Jon moved in with the couple in 1992 at age 14 when Sherry was about four months pregnant with Joshua and two years into their marriage.
“I was 25 and raising an infant and a teenager,” she says, not at all complaining. “We went from a family of two to four like that.”
Jon was raised by the McLaughlins. He graduated from college and married in 2005. Just as Jon was moving out in 2002, “another family crisis arose,” McLaughlin said.
They took in Sherry McLaughlin’s cousin, Christina Cortez, who was living in California, using drugs and struggling to mother her 2-year-old daughter, Evelynn Shubin-Cortez. “Our family was now six,” McLaughlin said.
“Doug got through to her,” and Christina is now engaged and is “an amazing woman.” Evelynn, now 6, “is our pride and joy.”
“We were a funny-looking family,” McLaughlin said of her patchwork clan of different skin tones and disparate ages.
The family became a familiar sight on Wednesday nights in downtown Birmingham, where they would walk in single file, as requested by Josh, and have dinner and make other stops as part of the family night started by Doug 11 years ago.
Doug McLaughlin was a self-employed woodworker and interior designer whose work may be found in many fine homes in Oakland County. He also left his talented handiwork, some of it done with his son, behind in his own family’s home.
Family night has gone on without Doug, and McLaughlin has somehow found time and energy to pay close attention to her own family, her professional family and her patients, while carving out a successful career.
“She is just one of those amazing, inspiring people,” said Carolyn Krieger-Cohen, a physical-therapy patient who has come to respect McLaughlin’s spiritual advice as much as her physical healing and is helping promote her books “because I have such respect for her.”
“I believe people can learn a lot from the way Sherry lives her life . . . and her deliberate choice to see the glass half-full. Actually, completely full. . . . At first glance this looks like a sad story. But it truly is not . . . because of the woman Sherry is.”
McLaughlin calls her books “anti self-help.”
“I’m not going to tell you how to live your life,” she said. “I’m telling you my life story.” If lessons come from it, then great, she said.
“There have been people who read the book and said, ‘Wow, you really put yourself out there,’ ” she said.
“I just wanted to tell the story of our lives. It doesn’t need to sell a million copies. If it helps just one person, it’s a success.”
The lessons in her books revolve not only around marriage and family but also around relationships in general, personal ones and business ones.
From grief to work
Business is a big part of who Sherry McLaughlin is.
Within three months of her husband’s death, she was back at work at the Michigan Institute for Human Performance, which she founded in 1998. MIHP has offices in Warren and Farmington Hills.
In addition to providing physical therapy, MIHP also offers athletes performance-enhancement training and is home to a think tank, where physical-therapy professionals get together to brainstorm, study research and look for nontraditional treatment methods.
She also is a speaker and a consultant and an instructor in kinesiology and orthopedic techniques at Macomb Community College. In addition, her practice is a sponsor of Speed Stacker clubs at local schools. The skill of stacking cups speedily is good for nerve health, she said.
McLaughlin and her six coworkers see 115 to 140 patients per week, and she is working to push the field of physical therapy in new directions.
Her goal is to start a nonprofit organization that helps physical-therapy professionals share research into alternative therapies and be a repository of information.
Doug’s decline
It was at work one day in February 2005 that McLaughlin received a phone call that would lead to the discovery of her husband’s long-kept secret about his depression.
He called, crying, saying he was having a breakdown. When she got home, she found him. He had attempted suicide.
At the hospital, she met a woman who later became her life coach and the impetus for “Lessons from the Couch.”
“I realized how wonderful it was to sit on a couch,” she said. “If you would have told me I needed to talk to somebody, I would have laughed. I was handling life.”
But she wasn’t. “I had no idea that this rock-climbing, mountain-biking, talented woodworker would wake up in the morning in a darkness that was so heavy he couldn’t move.”
He would finally tell her that, for years, possibly since his mother had died of cancer when he was 8 years old, he had suffered from depression.
After the suicide attempt, he started taking medication. The darkness lifted, the nightmares ended and the suicidal thoughts subsided.
But, he told his wife, it “was like walking around with cotton in my head.”
“For an intelligent, higher-level thinker, that was hard,” she said.
He quit the medication in February 2006. In July, he killed himself. She found him when she came rushing home from work after a phone call.
“The last time we talked, he said ‘I’m so tired I can’t do the business anymore.’ ” She said they would talk about that later. “I said ‘I love you,’ ” she recalled. “That last phone call was such a gift.
“The point I hope comes across in the book is a lot of people battle depression and there’s a shame about it. “If he had had cancer, he’d be a hero. Depression is an illness.”
His father’s son
What she didn’t realize until after he was gone was how similar the quiet worlds of depression and autism are.
But in autism, which some would consider a curse, there also is a blessing.
“Josh doesn’t understand death,” she said. “He thinks of his dad like, ‘Jonny went away to college and he’s coming back.’ ”
She plans to tell Joshua’s story in an upcoming book called “Lessons from the Silence.”
Joshua will begin his freshman year at Seaholm High School in Birmingham this fall.
“My goal for Josh is that he will be employable, and they say he is,” McLaughlin says.
“I wish Doug could be here to see it. I will miss Doug. Josh will never have to feel that.”
Contact KIM NORTH SHINE at 313-223-4557 or kshine@freepress.com