Son returns to mother after 11-year absence

SARA MINOGUE

A Nunavut boy who was taken away from his mother 11 years ago was scheduled to return today from the Philippines to Gjoa Haven and the mother he hasn’t seen since 1985.

For more than a decade, Susie Bergen has lived without knowing exactly what happened to her son Jeremy, who was just seven years old when his father packed up both him and his eight-year-old sister for a two-week vacation – and never returned.

Three years later, Randy Bergen sent a letter from Hong Kong, the first of several in which he told Susie that she would never see her kids again.

In October last year, Susie was in Edmonton looking after a nephew who had recently lost a leg to frostbite after a hunting accident and was recovering in hospital when she got a call from the Philippines. It was her ex-husband, now a diving instructor at a popular resort island, telling her that their youngest child was becoming too much for him to handle.

“I was so happy after all these 11 years…” Susie said. “I was so happy and the first thing I said was he should have come back long ago.”

But getting her son home was a different issue. Randy told Susie her son was in a psychiatric institution, where he was being heavily sedated to control violent behavior. To get to Nunavut, he would need an escort, a supply of medication, and a plane ticket.

After spending six months in Edmonton with no job, Susie had no money to pay for an international flight. She appealed to the government of Nunavut’s Department of Health and Social Services and the RCMP for help, but to no avail.

Randy eventually agreed to bring Jeremy, now 17, to Canada himself, on his own dime, if Susie could pay for airfare from Vancouver to Nunavut. Even this was beyond her reach.

The father and son arrived in Vancouver on April 11. RCMP were present to speak to Randy, but instead, learned that the abduction charges had unexpectedly been dropped a few years ago.

The pair moved in with friends in Nanaimo, while Susie’s sister-in-law, sympathetic to the decade-long saga, organized a fundraising effort through the local radio station and collected enough money for Jeremy to make the final leg of the trip on his own.

It was at this time that Randy took Jeremy to a psychiatric nurse in Vancouver for an assessment. The nurse afterwards told Colleen Harrington, a family lawyer in Gjoa Haven who had been helping Susie since October, that Jeremy had no psychiatric illness and did not need medication.

Susie was relieved at the news after spending the past several months “stuck by the phone being miserable.”

After losing two of her children, Susie says, she continued to work at school but dropped out after finishing Grade 11 due to depression, a condition she now treats with Prozac. Anxiety has prevented her from holding a job for several years. Now, however, she’s more relaxed.

“I’m happy when I wake up. I’m not the angry person when I wake up.”

A home he doesn’t know
Meanwhile, her son prepares to return to a home he barely remembers and says he knows “absolutely nothing” about.

Asked what he was thinking about on Monday morning, he describes a photo on the wall of the house where he’s staying:

“I’m looking at a picture of a dog sled team, the thing is the dogs are poodles. It’s just stuck on the wall. It’s been there since I got here.”

Jeremy spent most of his childhood on the island of Boracay, a small narrow island about 7 kilometres long and famed for its white sand beaches, where visiting tourists regularly outnumber the local population of about 7,000.

He’ll arrive in Gjoa Haven this afternoon, in time to see about seven weeks of the midnight sun, which started on May 22, and which counters a month of darkness every December and January.

Jeremy is fluent in Tagalog, the main Filipino language, but not Inuktitut. He quit school in fifth grade – “boring” – but says he hopes to go back to school in Nunavut.

If he doesn’t like it, Jeremy says, he can always return to his dad, who he describes as “a nice guy.”

A broken family
Randy and Susie first met in the 1980s when Randy, originally from Toronto, moved to Gjoa Haven to work as the senior administrative officer for the hamlet.

Things took a downward turn, Susie says, when they moved to Cambridge Bay, Nunavut’s western regional centre, and the pair eventually divorced when Jeremy was five and a half. Susie says the split was mainly due to her decision to go back to school with her kids.

Both parents fought for and won joint custody.

The following year, Randy asked Susie to sign some papers so he could take the youngest children on a holiday overseas. Without reading the documents too closely, Susie signed.

“A year later, I’m going crazy looking for my kids,” Susie says.

Susie eventually called the local RCMP. Both of the kids were listed as missing children.

The eldest daughter, now 18, is still living in the Philippines with her boyfriend.

Harrington, who has made several phone calls to the department of Foreign Affairs, the government of Nunavut’s health and social services department, the father, and the RCMP since Susie first contacted her in October, says the ordeal is not over.

“It’s going to be tough for everyone – for the family here and for Jeremy. He’s lived in the Philippines for the past 10 years; there’s still snow on the ground in Gjoa Haven. There’s going to be a lot of adjustment.”