Day of Mourning: Tracey Csordas' Story

Ashley: Hello and welcome to Health and Safety To Go, a podcast from the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety. The National Day of Mourning, marked in Canada each April 28, is dedicated to remembering those who've lost their lives, suffered injury or illness on the job or experienced a work-related tragedy.

Threads of Life is a Canadian charity dedicated to supporting families after workplace fatalities, life-altering injuries or occupational disease.

We're joined today by Ambassador Tracey Csordas to learn about her brother Bryn and how Threads of Life was able to support her family after Bryn’s life was taken in a workplace accident.

Tracey, thank you so much for being here.

Tracey: Thank you for having me.

Ashley: Tell us about your brother Bryn. What were some of the things he loved and what kind of work did he do?

Tracey: My brother Bryn was an amazing guy. He loved to tinker with cars. Anything re-fixing, remodeling refinishing cars, he did. He absolutely loved his dogs. We used to call him “the Dog Whisperer.” And he loved spending time with his, he called him, his little man Brayden. So, they were very close. It is a friend of his. It is her son and Bryn lived next door to him right from the day he was born. So, they just bonded this relationship and they were inseparable.

He loved quadding, anything outdoors, my brother loved. He was just an incredible person. He was the type of person that was covered in tattoos and swore like a trucker and people would often judge him by how he looked and how he talked. And then when they got to know him, he had the biggest heart of anybody that I know.

Taking care of the man next door who was in his 80s, Bryn would look after him, make sure his lawn was cut, make sure nobody bothered him. He took care of my mom. He took care of everybody.

Ashley: Sounds like an amazing guy. Tell us about the day, and please feel free to take your time, that Bryn didn't come home from work.

Tracey: That day will be forever engrained in us. And each moment, as it was happening, was almost slow motion and just so unreal. So, that day I was working in Mississauga. It was during COVID-19. It was very unusual for me to be that far from home, but I was out in Mississauga, and I was in a meeting, and my phone started to ring. And it was my mom and my other brother.

So, in this particular event, both my brothers were affected. Both my brothers worked at the factory, but my brother kept calling and hanging up, calling and calling, and I kept hanging up, I'm in a meeting. And then my mom called and I was like, oh my gosh, my mom just probably wants some stuff from the grocery store, and then I answered the phone and the panic in my mom’s voice, I will never forget. And all I was told was that Bryn had been in an accident and I needed to come and meet them at the hospital.

So, I closed my computer, off I went. And on the way home, I'm making plans for the dog, making plans to pick up my daughter from work, and letting my son know that their uncle Bryn’s been in an accident. And the conversation was, “Oh he's probably done something and we're going to have to, like he's broke a leg, we're going to be driving him around. We're going to be feeding him, and he's going to want us to wait on him hand and foot.” And then, as I got about a block away from the hospital, my brother called to say that I needed to go and share with my mom that Bryn wasn't coming in the ambulance.

He wasn't coming home, that he didn't make it through the accident. And at this point, we still didn't really know what had happened. So, we pulled up to the hospital. My mom was there and I had to tell her that Bryn wasn't coming to the hospital. And I just remember my mom screaming and dropping to the floor.

We had to pick her up. We took her outside. We were sitting on this bench outside and crying and just trying to wrap our heads around what had happened. And then a police officer – I work quite frequently with police in Branford – and a very familiar police officer walked up, and I remember him looking at me saying, “Oh my gosh, Tracey, please tell me you're not a Stoneman.” And I said, “I am,” and he just gave me the biggest hug and he said, “Okay, we're going to go to your house. We're looking for your other brother”.

So, they were looking for my brother Michael. My brother, Michael had watched everything happen. He had watched my brother walk across the roof and across a skylight that had been rusted over, and he watched him fall through the skylight. And he went down and tried to do life-saving measures on Bryn and couldn't, and then he went into fight or flight mode, and he just got in the car and drove. He didn't know what to do.

So, we were looking to make sure he was okay, and having to find him and bring him back, so that the police could make sure that he didn't do anything because he was in such shock after watching everything. So, as we learned a little bit more about what happened during the day, then people started coming to the house. Victim Services came to the house, and it was all just a bad dream. It seemed in the moment that it was all just a bad dream. And that day, we will never forget that day.

I remember wanting to go down to the factory because I couldn't sit with the thought that my brother was like, lying there on the floor and I couldn't be with him. My brother and I lived two blocks away from each other. So, we saw each other every single day. I walked by his house every day. He walked by my house every day. We were really close, so the thought of him not coming home that day… And there's still days today that we, you know, I'm like, “Oh, you know, Bryn would really want to know that.” And it's really hard, not to be able to tell him that, and to finish growing up with him. Even though we're adults, we still needed to grow up.

So how do you not do that? And his nieces and nephews, uncle Bryn knew everything, he knew how to make it better. If I wasn't connecting with one of my kids like parents sometimes do, he would connect with them and they could go to uncle Bryn. He was a safe place and they could talk to him about anything.

So, him not coming home from work that day just didn't seem real for us in the moment. It just to couldn't be happening to us. He was so safety conscious that this just couldn't be happening to our family, and it did.

Ashley: I'm so sorry. I can only imagine what that must have felt like. And to have your brother be impacted, too, and have been there, my heart breaks for your family. I'm sorry. Tell us a little bit about how you came to be involved with Threads of Life.

Tracey: I think it was a day after, one of my co-workers brought me a pamphlet for Threads of Life. And I didn't really know what it meant, I still didn't know what my name was at that point in time. So, I tucked it away with all the other pamphlets of information that everybody brought. But his neighbour across the street had lost a family member in a workplace fatality and he was sharing about my brother and what had happened and she gave him the pamphlet and the information for Threads of Life.

And I tucked it away for a long time. And I was very involved in what was happening with the company through the courts and through the Ministry of Labour. And I was very fortunate. I had a very good Ministry of Labour contact that understood that I needed to have a voice. And I couldn't have a voice in court because it's essentially between the company and the Ministry of Labour. And the family is not a part of that process.

So, he kept encouraging me to reach out to Threads of Life. They have a Speakers Bureau that you can use your voice and you can make an impact. So, about two years after my brother passed away I decided to look them up and, you know, do a little conversation with them. And they had a family forum not too long after, so I applied for the family forum and was able to go.

I packed my suitcase, anxiety unpacked my suitcase, packed it again. I was going, I wasn't going. How was this going to help me? What was this going to do? And I put my stuff in the car and I went. And I did it on my own without anybody knowing, I needed to do it for myself first before I could share it with my family.

And we went to this beautiful place out in Nottawasaga, that area, and I went in. I was nervous as anything and then got into this family forum and realized I'm not the only one here. We did a ceremony at the beginning where we have to take a picture and we honoured our family members. At the beginning, we were able to go up and light a candle, share a photo with the rest of the group, and then they gave us these sessions to attend. And what a life-changing experience, like it was my pivotal turning point in my healing process to learn different ways to cope with the loss of my brother, to understand that I wasn't the only person – that there were families like me that sit around these tables and support each other. And, from the outside looking in on my first family forum, I'm like, for all intents and purposes, these families should be so angry. They should be mad. They should be furious. But instead they took their grief and they supported everybody in that room. And I watched different people at different stages share and be vulnerable and still support each other. And it was truly a pivotal turning point.

And then I wanted to become a speaker. So, I did the Speakers Bureau and we went and there was a bunch of us, and that group of people, still, we have a Facebook Messenger group that we message each other, and we still support each other even though we met for two days three years ago. We're still supporting each other.

So, I loved that. Then, I actually became the RDC for a short period of time with Threads of Life.

Ashley: What’s the RDC, just for our listeners who might not be familiar?

Tracey: Oh, so that is the Regional Development Co-ordinator for Central Canada. So, there was three of us. I have moved on to a different role now but I will never forget that role and those people. And I was able to reach out even further in sharing the story and getting deeper with Threads of Life and the amazing work that they do in supporting families like mine in so many different ways. And to be a part of that was a gift and an honour for me to be able to do that for my brother. Because the best way I can honour my brother is to hopefully save another life or impact people to think about their safety and to look that way.

Ashley: Absolutely. What a beautiful way to honour Bryn’s memory. And that's actually a perfect segue into our next question, which is, if you had one piece of advice, or one thing to tell people about workplace health and safety, what would that be?  

Tracey: Oh, I don't just have one piece. That's so hard to narrow it down.

Ashley: Feel free to share a couple or a few.

Tracey: I would say to really, really look after your own safety. If you feel you're being asked to do something unsafe, which essentially was the case with my brothers, don't be afraid to question it. There is a path in place to allow you a safe workplace. And you can certainly refuse unsafe work and follow that process.

That process is in place for a reason. So, if you feel you're unsafe, or you feel that you're being asked to do unsafe work, please refuse it. You have that right to refuse it without being penalized. A lot of people work paycheque to paycheque, and I can tell you when I share my story with my photos, I share the story of my brother's paycheque pinned to a guardshack wall that had been abandoned, and his company didn't come out and give it to us. They made us drive to where my brother was killed and pick up this paycheque that was pinned to a wall in a dusty shed.

And from that, your life is worth far more than your paycheque. Your family would rather have you at the dinner table, then have to do what my family's doing. So, my advice would be please refuse unsafe work and follow the proper protocols that have been put in place to allow you to refuse that work.

But also, if we're given safety protocols and we're given safety, don't think that it's just one time, it'll be fine. Follow those and use those safety mechanisms that have been given to you and take them seriously because just not using it one time is one time too much. And you could end up in our situation and I wouldn't want any other family to end up in our situation.

Ashley: Is there anything else you'd like our audience to know before we wrap up?

Tracey: I just want everybody to really take a moment to recognize workplace safety and recognize the outcomes of it. I've said it already once, but your family would rather have you home at the dinner table. And if you report unsafe work, that's okay. That person might be mad at you for a moment, but their family will be happy that they got home safe.

So, I just want everybody to be safe and everybody to come home to their families. And if we can share this and just get one person to listen, it's amazing. If we can get more people to listen, it's amazing. I will forever be without my brother. We will never be able to grow up and he has missed so much already. When Brayden graduated grade 8, my brother promised he'd be there and he couldn't be there. So Brayden's mom pinned a picture of my brother and Brayden in his suit pocket so that he had him in his suit pocket.

You want to be at those events. You want to be at that graduation. You want to be at that driving lesson. You want to walk that child down the aisle. You want to do all the things, and our family is not able to do that anymore. So, I just want everybody to please recognize workplace safety is so, so important and should be at the top of everybody's mind.

Ashley: Absolutely. Tracey, thank you so much for taking the time to share your story and Bryn’s with us today. Threads of Life’s Flagship fundraiser Steps for Life follows the Day of Mourning and kicks off national Safety and Health Week in North America. More information about this event can be found at www.stepsforlife.ca and at www.ccohs.ca. Thanks for listening and stay safe.