Janet Ogilvie wore high heels and business suits to work, and she never left the house without makeup. Saturdays, she went shopping, but not for essentials. She could never have enough pairs of black shoes.
It was the early 2000s and she was an administrator at the University of Guelph’s animal teaching hospital in Hamilton, Ont.
She was ambitious and wanted a bigger, more important job. She went back to university in Toronto for a masters in business after having a family.
Six weeks into the degree, tragedy struck. Her oldest daughter died after a Type-1 diabetic crisis. Amanda was 19.
Janet went right back to work and kept working on her MBA. She didn’t know what else to do. She wanted her life to be normal, so she tried to do normal things.
Things got bad. After four months, she left work and never returned. Instead, she would end up running a P.E.I. alpaca farm. That journey took years.
After she left work in Guelph, Janet didn’t eat and she didn’t sleep. She didn't cook or clean, shower or brush her teeth. She didn’t go outside.
But she did a few things.
She cried. A lot. And she drank. A lot. She stayed up late. In her mind, every night going to bed meant waking up one day further away from her daughter. She wanted time to stand still, so she could be as close to Amanda as possible.
And she got really good at counting to nine from doing Sudoku puzzles all day, every day. The mindlessness of the number game helped.
“One to nine, one to nine, drink some wine,” she thought.
Her doctor diagnosed her with post-traumatic stress disorder in 2008. She’d only heard of soldiers getting PTSD.
“My doctor is crazy,” she thought.
Eventually, she got into Homewood Health’s substance abuse and trauma safety program in Guelph. There were seven people in her group, four of them veterans.
One was from Halifax, but his grandmother lived on P.E.I. in Seaview. He used to go to the Island when he was a boy. He talked about it in therapy, constantly.
“I can’t believe anybody lives like that,” Ogilvie thought at first. “I don’t know anybody who lives like that. It sounds very foreign to me.”
Slowly, however, she began to have second thoughts.
“But I still want to run away and that sounds like a pretty peaceful place to go.”
Things improved when Ogilvie got home from the hospital, but it took time for her younger daughter, Rachel, to see it.
“When I got home, she realized things were better.”
But that didn’t mean life was fixed. She told Rachel she needed change.
“Rach, I need to do something good for me, I need to do something positive for me and this is what I want to do.”
Still, she worried about ruining her other daughter’s life more than it already had been. They had been fighting terribly since Amanda’s death.
“I’m not going to force you to come.”
Ogilvie had finished her MBA, graduating at the top of the class.
She looked at the big, important jobs listed in The Globe & Mail. This is what she’d wanted, but now she just felt dread.
She decided she wanted to move to the Island. She wanted to live in the country, on a farm. She wanted to escape everything. Rachel agreed.
“Well, what are we going to do?” she thought.
Cattle were out of the question. She wasn’t going to learn to manage cows. She may have thought about sheep, but wasn’t a big fan of them.
She didn’t know where the idea came from, but she started thinking about alpacas. She spent about three weeks researching the animals and the Island. Then she decided.
“I’m going to P.E.I. and I’m going to raise alpacas,” she told her family in 2009.
She visited the Island with Rachel after setting up a meeting with a realtor.
“I’ll be going to be there Monday. I want to see some properties.”
They drove down Saturday afternoon and arrived Sunday evening. Ogilvie met the realtor Monday.
“Now, really, where do you want to live?” he said.
“On the Island, by some water? I don’t know. Isn’t that where everybody wants to live?” she said.
He showed her a few properties and one stood out. A house and barns were already there. Both barns had electricity and water, and the house was renovated.
Tuesday morning, Ogilvie went back to the realty office and made an offer.
Then she and Rachel jumped in the car and headed back to Ontario.
She was off the Island only about an hour when she got a call.
“You just bought yourself a farm. No counteroffers. And by the way, you move in Jan. 15,” the realtor said.
It was the first weekend of October.
Between October and January, Ogilvie sold her house. The day she sold it was the second anniversary of Amanda’s death. Janet also spent as much time as she could on Ontario's alpaca farms.
Six weeks after her arrival in January, the first herd of 30 animals arrived from Nova Scotia. She bought them sight unseen. She’d bought other animals in Ontario, but they didn’t arrive until August.
By June, she’d put up over 2,000 feet of fence. She gutted the barn because it was set up for cows and horses. She changed the milk house into a little shop.
And she put a sign.
“Visitors are always welcome,” it said. She didn’t know anyone on the Island yet.
Life didn’t magically get better when she got there. It got worse. Things wouldn’t get better until she stopped drinking in 2014.
Today, Ogilvie owns Green Gables Alpacas in Tyne Valley. It’s been almost 13 years since Amanda died and the anniversary was coming up when she talked about it.
“October is not a good month for me,” she said.
She doesn't want that to change, though. She never wants to lose the feeling she has for Amanda, no matter how painful. That’s why she still has Amanda’s ashes, she said.
“I’ve kind of made peace with that grief. If I ever got to a place where I didn’t feel that, that deeply, deeply saddens me, if that ever happened.”
She doesn’t think she’ll ever get to that place, though.
“When I need her to come to me, I can feel all of that and I’m actually grateful that I still can and I never want that to go away.”
She doesn’t have to deliberately think about Amanda. She’s just a part of her life.
"I can be back to that moment, that day when the police officer showed up at the door, in a heartbeat,” she said.
“I still feel the anxiety I felt then.”
But with her farm, she’s found some relief.
“Everything that I did here has actually been quite therapeutic and I didn’t intend it to be that.”
People living with PTSD have two common hallmarks, she said.
“One is isolating and the other is avoidance. I avoid Ontario, very well. I don’t like going back there.”
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But an alpaca farm doesn’t allow its owner to isolate or avoid, she said.
“The fact that I have animals on my property forces me to come outside every day. And the fact that you show up to my property forces me to interact with people."
And the animals do more than keep her busy.
“They don’t judge me, it doesn’t matter how bad a day I’m having.”
Rachel has also benefited from the farm, Janet said.
“She credits coming here with sorting things out for her.”
These days, Ogilvie makes her own material from the animals she raises.
And shopping?
“I don’t shop the way I used to shop anymore, at all. I probably have not bought another pair of black shoes since I’ve been here,” she said.
“The things that used to be important to me just aren’t important anymore.”
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