“My god, what are you doing to me?” says Brenda Gould, remembering the words she shouted into the sky that fateful day in 1989. The Port au Choix woman had just learned that her 22-year-old son Brendan, known as Ben, drowned while fishing off the coast of the Northern Peninsula.
It wasn’t the first time tragedy knocked at Gould’s door. Eleven years earlier, in 1978, her husband Gabriel, 35, also drowned while fishing.
Gould says worry set in that day when her husband, who had gone out in boat with his older brother Finton, didn’t show up for supper. She kept her eye on the skies, fearing bad weather had struck.
“I knew something was gone wrong,” she recalls. So she grabbed her four-year-old son Larry and drove the coastline in her car. But the weather was too much.