Because death is one of the realities of life, This is How We Got Here is a work that speaks to all of us.

Things become ever more complicated when someone chooses to take their own life. Questions are often left unanswered. The guilt can be consuming. And those left behind find themselves wondering if they maybe could have done more.

In This is How We Got Here by Métis Nation playwright Keith Barker, family and friends have their lives ripped apart when a young character we never meet dies by suicide. The message of the play ultimately ends up being an uplifting one—proof of the resilience of the human spirit, and a testimony to the impact all of us have during our short time here. But before there is peace, there is undeniable pain.

Barker acknowledges there is, very much by design, a universality to the story told in This is How We Got Here: at some point we all experience loss. But, rooted in the suicide of two brothers who were also close family friends, the play is deeply personal.

Barker traces the play’s genesis back to the early 2000s, during the holiday season. He was at a restaurant in small-town Ontario, sitting across from a man he’s called his uncle his entire life, even though they aren’t related by blood.

“He was the first person to ever hold me at the hospital,” Barker says, calling his bond with his uncle and his uncle’s wife unbreakable.

The couple lost both their sons to suicide. Knowing the holidays can be hard, Barker and his own wife often visited at Christmas.

“One morning my uncle was like, ‘I just need to get out of the house—do you want to go for breakfast?’ ” Barker recalls. “So we went to this little restaurant in this little town—Longlac, Ontario. There were people sitting across from us, and they just kept looking over. I felt the buzz, but I didn’t know what it was. I asked my uncle, and he said, ‘To everyone in town, I’m known as the person who lost both his sons.’ I actually watched him navigate having to be in a town where everyone knows his truth, knows who he is, knows everything.”

What struck Barker was how people would go out of their way to avoid addressing the suicides.

“I was watching the dynamic of, ‘No one talk about it,’ ” Barker says. “We’re in such a weird world right now where we all lose people, but when it comes to how to mourn people and honour people, we don’t know the rules. People didn’t know whether or not they should be saying, ‘Hi’ to my uncle, and they’d talk to him in a weird way. Like, ‘Hey, Tom, how are you doing? It’s good to see you. How are you feeling?’ He’d be like, “I’m okay.’ And he’d tell me, ‘Everyone is always talking to me this way.’ ”

As he watched, Baker saw a story that needed to be told. And he realized that he could do so without having to come at it from a personal perspective.

“I knew it wasn’t just his story,” he says. “It’s a story that a lot of people are experiencing right now.”

This is How We Got Here features a couple, Paul and Lucille—separated after the suicide of their son—dealing with the breakdown of the family bonds that once held them together. Lucille’s sister and brother-in-law refuse to discuss the death, the event putting a strain on both family relationships and previously tight friendships.

Heavy as that sounds, Barker notes that the Governor General’s Award–nominated play is, while rooted in loss, also about how we come through tragedy.

“When you say a play is about suicide, some people are like, ‘I don’t want to see that,’ ” he relates. “But there’s also so much humour in the play. For my sister and my mom and me, when anything is hard, we immediately default to jokes. When we went to visit my Auntie Jan and my Uncle Tom for the first five years when they were really in the depths of their despair, we all laughed so much.” They prioritized playing board games, hanging out, and making each other smile.

“Think about the funny things we do when we’re dealing with our emotions and complexities,” Barker continues. “There’s so much relief in humour. I remember a playwright said to me, ‘I really believe laughter and humour open the heart so that it can receive the hard things.’ And I thought, ‘That’s it!’ That’s why this play had to be funny.”

Ask anyone who’s lost someone close to them about it, and often they’ll share a story about an animal who appears, like a sign, from the beyond. Maybe it’s a bird who lands on a windowsill and starts pecking on the window, or a beaver stopping for a look around while swimming by in a lake.

“My wife lost her father—he had a heart attack and passed away,” Barker relates. “Days later, they were all sitting in the living room when this overweight cardinal landed in their bird bath. It was really struggling, and they were like, ‘Oh my God, it’s a sign.’ They nursed it back for a bit, gave it some food, and then off he went. Which was a sign that, ‘Hey, somewhere, he’s okay.’”

What turns things from the darkness to the light in This is How We Got Here is the appearance of a fox who is beyond clever, even by fox standards.

“Not to give anything away, but you can’t hang onto things,” Barker says. “You need something that gives you hope that allows you to move forward through the grief to the other side of things.”

A big goal with This is How We Got Here, Barker says, was to honour those who people like his uncle have lost.

“Part of the process is being angry and holding hard feelings as you process things,” he ruminates. “So part of the play is about honouring the choices people make. To not judge why they did it, but understand that they were in a place where they felt they had no other option.”

Ultimately, though, what Barker hopes people really get out of This is How We Got Here is that at some point the pain stops. Not surprisingly, given the play has a personal side for him, he’s seen that firsthand.

“My uncle moved out to the West Coast—he’s on Vancouver Island now,” Barker says. “I asked him, ‘How is it?’ and he was like, ‘No one knows my story here—everyone just talks to me like someone who they know now, and not for things that have happened in my life.’ He’s completely free.” GS

“This is How We Got Here” plays the Firehall Arts Centre From April 13 to 28.