Olivia Chow breaks her silence

The Toronto Star:

After Jack Layton died Olivia Chow cried all day.

She couldn’t focus after his passing two weeks ago in the home they shared near Kensington Market. She’d felt his death coming closer the evening before — “I could tell, I’d been taking care of him” — and called his family and friends to come and say goodbye.

But she knew she had to pull herself together. She became the symbol of grief for a nation, the NDP leader’s tearless widow who stood near her husband’s casket in the foyer of the House of Commons, at City Hall and, finally, during the funeral at Roy Thomson Hall.

That’s still her image. But in the mornings when she swims laps at a nearby pool, her arms cutting through the water in the clean strokes Layton taught her, nobody can hear her scream.

“I can cry, I can freak out, I can wail and nobody notices,” Chow said in an exclusive interview with the Star in the very room in which Layton died. Otherwise, she said she’s getting through it without her husband of 23 years.

“All in all, I’m coping,” she said, looking pale, with dark circles under her eyes. She wasn’t up to the Labour Day Parade this year that was dedicated to her husband. Next year.

“The mornings and late at night are the hardest so I do ritual things then . . . I make the bed, I make it very carefully (and) several times . . . When there is chaos around you, you feel things are in order.”

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