Death by Freezer

"Did you hear about Maurice Levasseur? He killed himself. Yup, locked himself in a freezer".

This was the rumour going like wildfire around my friends. I was fifteen years old and it was now being told to me by my friend David.

Maurice Levasseur was a longtime local from Port Perry who was very active in local events and community spirit.

It was hard to believe what I was hearing. It just seemed like yesterday that he was leading us all in a cheer to inspire the local Junior C Hockey Team to victory. The team's name was the Mojacks as it was sponsored by "Mother Jackson's", a local factory that made pies.

Maurice would spell out the word Mojacks one letter at a time telling the crowd, "Give me an 'M'" and then we'd all yell out the letter as loud as we could. Maurice would usually get mixed up with the letters and often he yelled out the wrong spelling.

This just made it all the more enjoyable. At the end he'd finish with a loud "AND WHADDYA GOT??"…asking everyone to yell out the word we just spelled...which spelled properly would have been Mojacks but often we were forced to yell out "MOJASS!" or "MOACKS!" or whatever it was that Maurice had just spelled.

Nonetheless, anything that started with an 'M' and followed with an 'O" was close enough for us and we all cheered on anyway. Maurice really was the highlight of each game.

This is why I found it so hard to believe that Maurice would have ended his own life, and in such a horrible way, dying alone in a freezer.

It was with saddened hearts that David and I walked back to his place. When we arrived, David's parents were outside with his Grandfather, getting ready to take him home.

"Mom, did you hear what happened to Maurice Levasseur?" asked David.

"Yes, poor man died of a seizure".

"Seizure?? I heard he died in a freezer"

"No. Who told you that?" they asked.

"Grandpa did!" David said. He then yelled to his Grandfather who was very hard of hearing and recently had a minor stroke which affected his speech. "Grandpa! How did you say Mr. Levasseur died?"

David's Grandpa, having great difficulty speaking had to breathe out heavily with each word to get it out..."fffffiezure" is what I heard him say.

It soon became clear that David mishearing his Grandfather was the start of this rumour regarding Maurice's cold demise.

The funny part was ten years later, I was sitting one night in the Port Perry donut shop and the table beside me had a couple of guys sitting at it. They were talking about old memories of the Mojacks and the one guy asked the other if he remembered Maurice Levasseur.

"Of course I remember him. He was great. What a horrible way to die though."

"I heard he was getting something out of his freezer when he had a seizure and he fell in and froze to death."

"Yeah, that's what I heard too".