Barbara Grief sat behind her daughter, Sharon Shore, throughout her testimony at the Law Society of Upper Canada hearing that will determine whether Ms. Shore is able to practise law.
Sometimes, Mrs. Grief looked angry, sometimes sad, but she wept like a child only yesterday, when her daughter's character witnesses came forward and spoke glowingly about her kid, for you are always a kid to your mom, even when she is 73 and you have just turned 50.
It was, I thought, a telling thing: Mrs. Grief loves and guards her daughter as fiercely as that daughter loved and guarded hers, and that is what lies at the heart of this story.
Ms. Shore, a student lawyer, is the subject of a complaint from prominent Toronto counsel Marlys Edwardh and Liz McIntyre, who once represented two nurses on whose watch Lisa Shore, her 10-year-old daughter, died at the Hospital for Sick Children.
The nurses pleaded guilty to a single count of professional misconduct for their failure to properly assess and monitor the little girl, who went to hospital for the excruciating pain that set in after she broke her leg.
But at one point, the nurses were facing more serious charges of criminal negligence causing death, and it was in the context of that proceeding that Ms. Shore failed to disclose a brief report from a Boston doctor who decided the pain was probably in Lisa's head.
Actually, Ms. Shore did it twice.
The first time, a month after Lisa died on Oct. 22, 1998, Ms. Shore was barely functioning in her grief. Horrified that the doctor -- his consult with Lisa was hurried and grudging, and so superficial he even got her age wrong -- would malign her daughter's suffering, she tossed his two-page report. The second time was in late 2002, as the nurses' preliminary hearing loomed. Ms. Shore saw that note for the first time in four years, and again failed to disclose it to the Crown attorney, meaning that Ms. Edwardh and Ms. McIntyre never saw it either, theoretically meaning their defence of the nurses was crippled.
In practice, however, before she was scheduled to testify, Ms. Shore confessed to the Crown attorney what she'd done, in the process so damaging her own credibility as a key witness that in part because of her, the criminal charges against the nurses were dropped.
She clearly remains appalled by her conduct. She agrees its effect was to thwart the administration of justice, albeit in a temporary manner she ultimately rectified.
Even now, she appears baffled by how she could have done what she did. As sometimes happens, it took a stranger, looking from the outside in, to figure it out for her, in this instance, a question from panel member Heather Ross.
She asked, in her kindly but piercing way, if in Ms. Shore's analysis of her conduct back in September of 2002, it occurred to her that perhaps "your own set of moral values were in conflict with your desire to protect your child's memory"?
To my eye, it was as though the proverbial light bulb went on over Ms. Shore's head. Slowly, she replied, "The answer is yes . . . without that, it is inconceivable to me now that I did it. It's the only explanation -- yes."
Indeed, I believe Ms. Ross nailed it, though she may not know how very much she nailed it.
What has not been acknowledged is the fact that for a very long time, Sharon Shore and her husband, Bill, were not merely advocates for their daughter Lisa, they were her only advocates.
This was as true when Lisa was alive as when she was suddenly dead. Ms. Shore was a good, articulate and informed parent who knew that in the big, modern-day hospital, a vulnerable patient needs someone sturdy to go to war on her behalf.
Thus, when Lisa was an in-patient, Ms. Shore stayed with her; when she was an out-patient, she asked for specialists. When Sick Kids wrote off Lisa's persistent leg pain as psychological, Ms. Shore took her to a Boston hospital, where save for the one doctor, she was diagnosed with a real physical ailment -- reflex sympathetic dystrophy, a kind of nerve damage.
When this otherwise healthy child abruptly died, the Shores could get no answers for the longest time -- not about how Lisa died, or why, or what had gone wrong.
There would never have been a coroner's inquest into Lisa's death were it not for her parents' persistence, and that inquest, and the jurors' verdict that Lisa's death was a homicide, really drove all else that followed -- the police investigation that led to the criminal charges and even the casual way Law Society prosecutor Sean Dewart could yesterday refer to Lisa's treatment at Sick Kids as "the substandard care and misdiagnosis" she received.
All true, but none of it would have been known if Sharon Shore wasn't the kind of mother her own mom is. None of it would have been possible.
By September of 2002, when Ms. Shore failed for the second time to tell the authorities about the Boston doctor's dismissive note, she had been fighting alone for her daughter for so long I believe she knew no other way. She had been without allies, outside her own family, so habitually that she would have lost any ability to tell foe from friend, or right from wrong. She was her daughter's keeper, no one else. Only the hardest heart could fail to understand this, and forgive.