Sarah James planned to jump from her sister’s sixth-floor balcony in the late winter of 2020. She changed her mind when she considered the problems her suicide might cause her sister. Better to be hit by a subway train, James reasoned. In the years that followed, she would stand on station platforms and wait for a train to jump in front of. Each time, something stopped her. “Somebody is pushing me back,” she said. “Maybe that is God.”
The stress of her life as a temporary foreign worker, and the pain of being away from her family in India, had broken James (her name has been changed). She’d endured nearly two nightmarish years as a caregiver for an elderly couple in Etobicoke. The wife she cared for refused to allow James to live in the condo. James woke up at five each morning to catch the bus from her sister’s apartment in Scarborough to Etobicoke—a three-hour journey. The wife insisted James clean the condo with bleach, filling the house with chlorine fumes. She wouldn’t provide her with food or let James cook for herself. Instead of eating, James told me, she often drank Canada Dry. The carbonation made her belly feel full.
