Mark William Francis Wilson’s life began and ended with an accident.
It is his mother, Alexandra Wilson, who presents things this way. In July 1992, Mr.me Wilson goes camping with the man who will become Mark’s father, forgetting his birth control pills.
Twenty-seven years later, Mark died alone in his apartment in Quebec, from fentanyl poisoning.
Between the two events unfolds the life of a complex, shy being who had difficulty accepting who he was.
My son wanted to be like everyone else, he wanted to disappear in the crowd.
Alexandra Wilson, mother of Mark William Francis Wilson
From her pretty Ottawa home, Ms.me Wilson tells the story of his son. A moving story, which shatters the idea that young men who are victims of overdoses are all impulsive people driven by a desire to be marginalized.
Because from a young age, Mark is the exact opposite.
“He was really, really not a risk taker. He rode a skateboard once, broke his arm and never tried again,” his mother illustrates.
Rather, Mark is driven by an unhealthy desire for conformism. This is what pushes the boy, first raised in English, to reject his mother tongue when he begins to attend a French-language preschool in Ottawa. To the point of completely forgetting his English.
“He didn’t want to stand out,” his mother explains.
As a teenager, Mark displays values that contradict those of his mother’s liberal ones.
“My son wasn’t just conservative: he was reactionary,” says Ms.me Wilson.
He makes homophobic remarks – a sign that his mother will not understand until Mark himself comes out of the closet, at 25 years old.
“It’s one of my great regrets that I didn’t admit he was gay. Because it’s classic — homosexuals are often the most homophobic,” Ms.me Wilson.
Obviously, for a young man obsessed with the idea of being like everyone else, being gay is inconceivable.
Mark soon develops a strange passion for right-wing French intellectuals. He idealizes France before the 18th centurye century, where social norms were rigid and parents decided who their children married.
“Mark would have liked to live in such a society because the problem of how to choose a girl, a woman, would have been solved for him”, believes his mother. Mark indeed dreamed of having a girlfriend to correspond to the norm of the majority, but did not know how to approach women.
A “revelation” due to LSD
Alexandra Wilson doesn’t know exactly how and why her son got into drugs. Perhaps to alleviate this evil of living which did not leave him and which led him to diagnoses of social phobia and depression?
It was when he revealed his homosexuality to her, during a meal at the restaurant, that Mme Wilson hears his son talk about drugs for the first time. Mark announces to him that he has discovered his true sexual orientation… thanks to a “revelation” that occurred under the influence of LSD!
PHOTO MARTIN CHAMBERLAND, THE PRESS
Alexandra Wilson, mother of Mark William Francis Wilson
Alexandra Wilson then feels an immense joy to see her son finally understand who he is… mixed with an intense surprise.
“I said to him: LSD? You ? “says M.me Wilson, still stunned.
At the time, Mark was studying law at Université Laval. Shortly after, he attempted suicide by cocaine intoxication. But that, his relatives will only learn after his death.
In Quebec, Mark begins dating a trans woman – a way, his mother analyzes, of projecting the image of a man who dates a woman while living his homosexuality.
The last months of Mark’s life are chaotic. He saves his lover from an overdose of heroin cut with fentanyl. One night, a hooded man breaks into his home after throwing a rock through his window. His mother now wonders if it was a dealer who wanted his money.
His owners, exasperated, ask him to leave the apartment. Mark has to move.
On August 2, 2019, the young man was found dead on his sofa. Cocaine, methamphetamine and fentanyl are detected in his blood.
He is 26 years old.