Joannie Rochette knows she will eventually have to go home, but she’s just not ready yet.
When the charity fashion show is done and the skating tour has wrapped, when the interviews have run and the well-wishers forget, there will still be a half-empty house on Île Dupas where she will have to sit with her father in the stillness. But maybe in the summer. Not now.
She has avoided the solitude of home so far, partly by choice, partly by accident. After she flew home from Vancouver, dread led Ms. Rochette and her boyfriend to take the scenic route to the family home just northeast of Montreal, adding hours to the trip. During the week she took off to arrange and attend her mother’s funeral, solitude was fleeting.
For now, the ice calls. The 24-year-old is back training and has a new cause with the Heart and Stroke Foundation. She will soon set out on her annual two-month, paid figure-skating tour across North America. The quiet, contemplative part of grief must wait until her cause is properly launched and the bills for the year are paid.
So far, she has zipped through denial, depression, anger and back again, and she knows she’s not done facing the emotional swirl over the sudden death of Thérèse Rochette. In the space of an hour-long conversation, every attempt to change topics inevitably leads back to mother, and those silvery eyes glaze over with tears once again.
“I think I'm still in denial. I know she's dead, I know she's not there any more. I saw her in her casket, even if she didn't look like herself. It was shocking. When I saw her at the hospital in Vancouver, she was still warm, her hands still had a normal feel. But I was so far away from home, I thought I would walk into the house and she would still be there,” she says, sinking into a sofa in a downtown Montreal hotel suite.
“I didn't believe it for a couple days. Even now, it feels like I'll just go home and she'll be there.”
The nightmare that made Joannie Rochette into an Olympic legend is well known. Her mother went to Vancouver for the Olympics on Feb. 20. On the 21st, Thérèse, 55, died suddenly of a heart attack. On the 23rd, Ms. Rochette stopped crying long enough to nail her short program. On the 25th, it was the long program and a bronze medal. On the 27th, a gala skate. And on the 28th, she carried Canada’s flag into the closing ceremonies.
In a week that leaves most people curled up in grief, she put on her costume, applied her makeup, strapped on her skates and soldiered on, covered only by her thin, fragile smile. It’s all a haze for her now.
Less known are the anger and guilt Ms. Rochette carries.
Thérèse Rochette was a heavy smoker and fast-food junkie who went into a spiral of declining health after a 2002 car accident. Unable to work, she went from a physically demanding job to being a near shut-in who had trouble climbing stairs.
Smoking was a constant source of conflict between daughter and mother. The skater remembers being 8 and trapped in a car with the windows up, her mother smoking at the wheel. Thérèse Rochette would catch a bad cold and smoke. She tried nicotine patches once, but would peel them off, have a smoke, and stick them back on. A few years ago, she had a cancer scare. She quit for three days, then celebrated the all-clear by lighting up again.
“When she passed away, at first I was mad at her for not taking care of herself. I was mad because I didn’t understand why it would happen at that precise moment. I was jealous of the athletes who had their parents. I was so saddened by it. My mom was smoking since she was 12 years old. I have tried so hard to make her quit. We were constantly fighting about it.
