Father-son murder-suicide: Milton woman says husband needed help

Yesterday would have been Noah Kosalka’s seventh birthday.
Around four in the afternoon, in the front yard of the Milton home where one month ago her husband killed their son and himself , Tanya Brancalion handed seven children tiny boxes with butterflies inside.
Surrounded by friends and family, the kids carefully opened the boxes and released the fragile monarchs. All flew skyward, except for the one butterfly that landed on Noah’s cousin, Peter, fluttering on his shoulder.
The sight prompted their grandmother to break down. In life, Peter and Noah, just a few months apart, were like brothers.
“It’s hard because I have so many emotions,” Brancalion says earlier Tuesday. She’s sitting on the couch in her living room, her small frame wrapped in the animal-print blanket Noah took with him everywhere.
“I loved Noah so much. He was everything and he’s gone, and sometimes I have to just think that they’re both just dead. Because if I let myself think about how it happened, then the anger and the fear and everything consume me. Because the thought of my little boy being scared, for even a second, kills me. The thought that he died in his own home, with the person who is supposed to protect him from the world ... Some days I can’t let that in because I’ll fall and I can’t get up again.”
The past four weeks, she says, have felt like one long blur. No good days and bad days, but good minutes and bad minutes.
Brancalion, 33, still doesn’t know what happened Sept. 8. The coroner hasn’t yet told her the cause of death.
That information won’t bring back Noah, she realizes, but would help if it told her he didn’t suffer. She and Kosalka had their problems, their marriage was breaking down, but never did she think he would hurt their child.
Elfin-faced Noah was the centre of both of their worlds.
The last time Brancalion spoke to her husband, Wojciech Kosalka, 43, was on the phone. He was at a skateboard park with Noah.
“Why don’t I ever get second chances?” he asked her before hanging up.
Brancalion texted him back: “I know you can’t see it right now because you’re hurt and angry, but you did get a second chance. Because if we wouldn’t have blown up, you wouldn’t have stopped drinking. You have your health, you have your son.”
The next day, Brancalion’s parents found the bodies. Brancalion, who was at a girlfriend’s cottage, got a call from a neighbour asking why there were ambulances at her house. “And I just died,” she says.
Kosalka, a chef, met Brancalion eight years ago at a Mississauga bar he would play pool at. Just a few months after getting together they moved in. A few months after that, Brancalion, a teacher, was pregnant with Noah.
“We were very happy, and then it was the drinking that really started to push me away,” she says. “He was an alcoholic and a workaholic ... He was very distant, very cold and not really there.”
About a year and a half ago, she gave him an ultimatum: Stop drinking or lose her. “And he did,” she says. “I was amazed.”
Kosalka didn’t touch another drink. Actually, “he was perfect.” He spent hours each day with Noah, never losing his patience. He did the laundry, made the lunches. Brancalion would wake up to a cup of coffee, ready.
She would think, “How could you not love this man, he does everything for you. Everything for Noah.”
But too much had already happened between them. It hadn’t been a marriage for a long time, and it didn’t feel right.
“And I told him, ‘I respect you, I love you, you’re the most incredible father and I will never keep Noah from you,” she says.
Three days before the conversation at the skateboard park, Brancalion told her husband they needed to sell the house. It didn’t mean a definite end to their marriage. They would live together in an apartment. “I told him, ‘We’ll deal with where we are after we sell the house,” she says.
Looking back now, she thinks it’s what pushed him over.
But what Brancalion and her entire close-knit Italian family can’t make sense of, is the idea that Kosalka would hurt his son.
“I do hate him, I do, because he took away my baby, but he was sick,” she says, wiping away tears.
“And the only thing that would have changed any of this is if he would have gotten help. That’s the only that would have changed this outcome.”
Kosalka, who came to Canada from Poland in his early 20s, never talked about his feelings. After he stopped drinking up to case of beer a day, he attended a few Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. The couple went to a marriage counsellor during the summer, but only at her urging.
“He never dealt with what made him start drinking in the first place,” she says of the demons, some she knew about and others, she never will.
“He suffered in silence until he went crazy.”
She hopes her story will serve as a cautionary tale for others who need help.
At the funeral last month , two flower-covered caskets sat at the front of the chapel — one for Noah and the other for his father. There was a moment, says Brancalion, when she saw Noah inside his casket and, filled with anger, didn’t want them to be together.
“And then I came home and I tried to talk to Noah. I didn’t want to disrespect his father,” she says.
“I didn’t want to make choices out of anger.”
In the days after Noah’s death, she wanted to burn the house to the ground. But it was the love, the dozens of children who dropped off stuffed animals, the neighbours who left flowers and candles, that brought her back.
A card attached to one stuffed animal is signed by a boy Noah went to school with — a boy who bullied her son last year, she says.
When Noah came home, upset, she told him that if he wanted the bullying to stop he should ask the child to play with him.
“I miss you Noah, you were my best friend,” is what the little boy wrote on the card.
Her son, an old soul, had taken her advice, she realized. And she cried for hours.
“This is his home. It’s the only place I find comfort,” she says. The living room couch is where Noah would fall asleep on her chest while watching a movie. Each night, they would share a story in his bedroom. “I can’t go anywhere.”
At the ceremony marking Noah’s birthday Tuesday, seven doves followed the butterflies.
Noah loved all animals, and they loved him, but the doves have a special significance because the boy and his mom shared a pair of turtle dove ornaments, replicas from the movie Home Alone 2. They represent everlasting friendship.
The butterflies have a special meaning because when Brancalion was in teaching school, she wrote a book about a little boy named Noah who found a caterpillar and brought it back to life. Kosalka drew the illustrations.
Noah was cremated with that story.

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