Kids are committing suicide, parents are in a panic, and schools that neglect to protect students are lawsuit targets
By Denise Balkissoon
Mitchell Wilson had a short life. He was born in March 2000 at Markham-Stouffville Hospital to Craig and Shelley Wilson. From the age of three, he had trouble running and jumping. He climbed stairs slowly, putting both feet on each step before moving up. He fell often, and sometimes he couldn’t get up on his own. His doctors thought he had hypermobility syndrome—joints that extend and bend more than normal.
When Mitchell was seven, his mother was diagnosed with an aggressive melanoma. Her treatments left her distant, sometimes testy and mean, and in so much pain that she rarely left her bedroom. “I sort of kept Mitchell away,” Craig Wilson told me.
“He basically didn’t talk to his mother during the last four months of her life.” Wilson often left his son to his own devices while he took care of his dying wife and ran his family’s industrial knife business. Mitchell spent most of his time in his bedroom, playing video games. He comforted himself with food, and by the time he was four feet tall he weighed 167 pounds. Once, in a Walmart, he fell to the ground and his grandmother had to ask store employees to help her lift him.
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Toboggans and cross-country skis, woolly sweaters and brisk sub-zero air call for piping hot chocolate. The Leslieville dessert shop Bobbette and Belle has taken the humble cup of cocoa to new, paroxysm-inducing heights. In the mug, extra-brut cocoa powder is blended with Swiss chocolate, full-fat milk and a bit of sugar. Then the house-made vanilla marshmallow on top is blowtorched to order until it’s cloaked in a crisp, bittersweet, golden brown shell that gives way to a gooey interior. It’s an irresistible hit of fancified nostalgia. $4.25. 1121 Queen St. E., 416-466-8800.
Tim English, 46
