Liona Boyd 'devastated' by Trudeau's death
Classical guitarist Liona Boyd says she was "devastated" when her mother called her Thursday to say that her close friend former prime minister Pierre Trudeau had died.
Boyd, speaking with CBC Online from her home in Los Angeles, said she knew Trudeau had Parkinson's disease, but she was shocked to know he had also been suffering from prostate cancer.
In a wide-ranging interview with CBC Online's Bob Sudeyko, Boyd said she last spoke to Trudeau in April, when she returned from a concert in India. She had written him as recently as three weeks ago, when she was in Hawaii.
She met Trudeau in 1975 when she was asked to perform at Harrington Lake, the prime ministerial retreat near Ottawa. Trudeau was married to Margaret, who was pregnant with Michel.
"I never thought I'd see him again," Boyd said. After Trudeau was legally separated, he often invited Boyd to Ottawa. She says they began a "romantic friendship" that lasted eight years.
"I don't think he ever wanted to be married again," Boyd said. "He did want to have a child, and I'm delighted he has a daughter now (with constitutional expert Deborah Coyne). He wanted me to have that daughter and I was wanting a different sort of life."
She said she would love to attend the state funeral for Trudeau next Tuesday even perform but she won't because it would be "inappropriate."
Boyd deals at length with her relationship with Trudeau in her autobiography In My Own Key: My Life in Love and Music.
"I really loved him," she said Friday. "But I knew he wasn't my eventual soulmate."