L.M. Montgomery's death certificate said coronary thrombosis; her granddaughter wrote in 2008 that she took her own life

L.M. Montgomery died in Toronto on 24 April 1942. Her death certificate listed coronary thrombosis as the primary cause. She had married the Presbyterian minister Ewan Macdonald in 1911, and his mental illness and her own depression shaped her last years. In 2008, near the 100th anniversary of Anne of Green Gables, her granddaughter Kate Macdonald Butler wrote in the Globe and Mail that Montgomery had killed herself. Butler said a note existed that she had never seen. She said her father, Stuart Macdonald, a physician, took it from the bedside on the afternoon of 24 April 1942, and that she was told it asked forgiveness. One source described a drug overdose, but no second source confirmed that detail^†. A Montgomery scholar told the Globe she reads the death differently, though her view does not contradict Butler's. The note has not been published. Her Prince Edward Island home and the Green Gables farm are national historic sites.