A Little Help from our Friends In the fall of 1979, as the new school year was about to begin, I found myself in exile, shunted to a crowded, windowless office space in a remote corner of our tiny college, Champlain St. Lawrence CEGEP in Quebec City. As a young, part-time English instructor, I didn’t..
A Tale of Two Annes Back in high school about 250 years ago, we studied A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. I feel like I’m undergoing a novel experience of a much more intense and baffling sort in my personal life: A Tale of Two Annes. My wife Anne has been stricken..
On love and death Haiga is a style of Japanese art that combines a haiku poem with a painting or drawing, often using calligraphy to integrate the text with the visual art. It’s a visual form of poetry that seeks to capture the essence of the poem through both words and imagery. I use Haiga to frame poetic..
Unhappy Campers It was the summer of 1980. Anne and I were spending our holidays in Vancouver with her family. We were child free. When fall approached, we settled on a novel way to return to our home in Quebec City, opting for Canada DriveAway . Ever heard of that blue-ribbon organization?..
Ebb and Flow In the Briny Light of Sunset For Anne in the sunset of her life Here, where the salt river unspools its silver tongue and the tide, tireless, draws breath— I stand in the hush of dusk, the sky unfurling its fire, a blaze of glory on water’s restless skin. Majestic, the..
Lights out in 1979 “This level of exhaustion deserves its own genre of music.” Looking back on my 46-year relationship with my wife Anne, I can’t help but express certain profound regrets and proffer belated apologies. I’m so sorry that my nocturnal proclivities cost Anne so much sleep back in 1979… a situation..
How to say goodnight Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” is a call for a vigorous struggle against death and represents a passionate plea to resist it. The poem advocates for fighting against the inevitable coming of death (“that good night”) with “rage” and determination, rather than accepting it passively…
Colouring her world A victim of glioblastoma, a highly aggressive, incurable form of brain cancer, my beloved Anne has become obsessed with colouring, which propels her into a world of complex beauty and symmetry. Here we see Anne colouring with Latifa, her personal support worker (PSW). Colouring is a calming and therapeutic activity,..
Anne’s Celebration of Life The nature of Anne’s cancer and the stage that it has reached is such that she could pass away at any moment. Anne has fourth-stage brain cancer, glioblastoma, and we have entered the palliative phase. Yet in the last three or four weeks, since we have waived the white flag and..
Wrestling with being a caregiver My two sons are paragons of physical fitness, deservedly, if ordinately, proud of their rippling muscles, attained by countless hours of training and body building. I, on the other hand, have always been a flabby wimp. When I was a boy of about six, back in Georgetown in around 1958,..