We've been misled about how to grieve

By Nicholas Köhler - Monday, February 14, 2011 at 1:15 PM - 14 Comments

Corbis; Getty; Redux

Many years ago, Nancy Moules, a pediatric oncology nurse who specializes in grief, got a call from a family member of one of her clients, a woman in her late 20s whose six-year-old daughter had died of leukemia a month or so earlier. The relative told Moules the woman was carrying an urn full of her daughter’s ashes everywhere she went; that if you met her for lunch she’d get a table for three; that, in a nutshell, the family was concerned about how she was coping. Sure enough, when Moules later met the client for lunch, they ate with the ashes at the table. “So, are you wondering why I invited you out?” Moules asked. “Oh no, I know,” the woman said. “Somebody phoned you, they’re worried about me. They think I’m crazy.” Moules probed further: “Do you think it’s crazy?” she asked. “No,” said the woman. “F–k them.

This is the last human, physical connection that I have to her and I’ll put her down when I’m ready to put her down.”

For Moules, who now lectures on grief as a nursing prof at the University of Calgary, the young mother’s story helps illustrate the sometimes paradoxical relationship many of us have with the emotions accompanying a loved one’s death. “There’s all these cultural expectations of grief that are contradictory,” she says. “One is, ‘Get over it, you should be over it by now!’ And the other is, ‘What’s wrong with you that you aren’t continuing to feel it? Didn’t you love the person?’ And we turn all those judgments inward.”

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Elizabeth Edwards dies at 61

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, December 7, 2010 at 5:34 PM - 1 Comment

Elizabeth Edwards, wife of former U.S. Senator and presidential candidate John Edwards, has lost her battle with breast cancer and died at the age of 61. Edwards had suffered from breast cancer since 2004, when her husband first ran for president and became the Democrats’ vice-presidential nominee; the couple mutually decided not to reveal the cancer until after the election. Her cancer went into remission but resurfaced incurably in 2007. After her husband ended his second presidential campaign, he admitted that he had been having an affair with another woman, with whom he fathered a child; the Edwardses separated in 2009.

New York Times

An Act of Courage

By Ken MacQueen - Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 2 Comments

Photograph by Paul Chiasson/ Canadian Press

It was late; 11 p.m. had come and gone, and Joannie Rochette, the bronze medal around her neck, was still lingering at Vancouver’s Pacific Coliseum, talking about the sudden death of her mother Thérèse. “It feels good for me to talk about it,” she said. An empty arena can be a chill and spooky place, but for Rochette, any rink echoes with memories of home. The audience of almost 12,000, at turns boisterous and weepy, had long since filed out, doubly blessed by two moments of Olympic magic.

First, they had witnessed four minutes of near perfection in the gold-medal skate of Korea’s Yu-Na Kim, the 19-year-old prodigy coached by Brian Orser, one of the finest male skaters Canada has produced. It was fluid and strong and so self-assured that even those unschooled in the intricacies of the sport could see Kim operated at a different level. As the last strains of Gershwin’s Concerto in F faded, and the crowd roared, Kim surprised even herself: she started to cry.

Later, the 19-year-old Kim seemed almost embarrassed by this weakness. She never cries, she said. “Watching previous figure skaters, I always wondered why they cried after their performance,” she says. “I’m really happy. I don’t know why I cried.”

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Patrick Gordon Forbes Murdoch (1926-2010)

By Jenn Cutts - Thursday, February 25, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 2 Comments

Patrick Gordon Forbes Murdoch was born in Toronto on Dec. 26, 1926, to Arthur and Eleanor Murdoch. The youngest of five (after Jack, Betty, Bill and Jane), Pat was only five years old when Arthur was killed in a house fire. Eleanor, whose grandfather founded Toronto’s Cosgrave Brewery, moved the family to St. Clair Avenue, where Pat learned to skate and ski in nearby parks. Summers were spent at a cabin on the Moon River near Bala, Ont., where one of Pat’s first jobs was delivering blocks of ice. He was a bright boy, graduating early from De La Salle College, but also prone to mischief (harnessing himself on his skis to the backs of streetcars) and “breaking hearts earlier than the rest of us” with his “rugged good looks,” says cousin Burke Seitz.

By 1942, most of Pat’s friends were fighting in Europe, and Pat, at 16, was desperate to join them. After being turned away due to his age by the air force and the navy, he signed with the army and served as part of the liberating forces in Holland and Belgium (where brother Jack was killed in 1944). Returning to Canada, Pat worked as a ski instructor in Banff before he met a man who’d won a travelling carnival in a craps game. Pat signed on.

After months of travelling the U.S., Pat landed in California. He bought a cabin right on Malibu Beach, set up a furniture business, and learned to surf. He married Jackie Wetmore, and had two boys and a girl, Larry, Mike and Toni, adding to Jackie’s two, Christopher and Merrily. The large family of “tanned, tow-haired kids” and several dogs was well-known on the beach. Even Hollywood stars were charmed by Pat—Larry remembers Sammy Davis, Jr. taking the kids into town and joking that they should call him dad.
After six years on the beach, Pat heard about a ski area being built on Mammoth Mountain in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. There was the promise of plentiful work, but Pat’s third wife, Annie, thinks it was “the snow that was really calling him.” Pat moved the family into a cabin at the base of the mountain, and set about teaching his young children to ski. “We like to say we learned at the ski school of ‘You Better Keep Up,’ ” jokes Toni.

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Who’s to Blame?

By Nicholas Kohler with Aaron Wherry and Nancy Macdonald - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 3:55 PM - 7 Comments

Gregory Carigiet, a 22-year-old psychiatric nursing student from the Swiss canton of Grison, is an awfully good luger. Ranked 19th in the world this season, he was well ahead of 21-year-old Nodar Kumaritashvili, the Georgian ranked 44th whose gruesome death during an Olympic training run last Friday focused so much attention on a sport—luge—that remains relatively obscure in North America. Yet the fact that Kumaritashvili made it to the Olympics, where he would have raced on the fastest and therefore arguably the most dangerous track in the world, while Carigiet did not, worries many in the sport. It suggests a deadly flaw in the way athletes are selected to compete on high-performance tracks.

“Georgia was—the irony is—lucky to qualify for the Games,” Wolfgang Staudinger, Canada’s luge coach, told Maclean’s. Thanks to an esoteric wrinkle in Switzerland’s Olympic qualifying process, Carigiet did not make his country’s cut for the men’s event, meant to gather the top 40 international sliders for competition at the Whistler Sliding Centre, which hits racers hard with a vertical drop of 152 m and can catapult them to record speeds of 153 km/h. “They left him at home,” says Staudinger. “That opened a spot in the top-40 field, and whoever was next—41st, 42nd and so on—basically, they moved up.”

Kumaritashvili benefited from a number of such top-40 omissions, permitting him a place in an elite group many believe he had no business competing in. And so, two hours before he was scheduled to board the bus for the opening ceremonies in Vancouver, he was on a training run at speeds exceeding 140 km/h when he made an error exiting turn 15. Slammed by the curve’s massive G-force, he attempted to compensate but flipped over, ricocheted off the track wall, and flew headfirst into a support pillar. It was the first fatal crash in luge competition in 35 years and the first Olympic death since 1992, when Swiss skier Nicolas Bochatay died on a training run in Albertville, France.

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Other deaths on the track

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, February 12, 2010 at 6:13 PM - 6 Comments

The death of Nodar Kumaritashvili is a shocking moment, not just at this year’s Olympics, but in Olympic history. Death in competition (or, in this case, in training) has thankfully been rare, even though the athletes do a lot of things that would be dangerous for you or me.

There were only two Winter Olympics where this happened before. The first was the 1964 Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria. Both Kazimierz Kay-Skrzypecki, a luger (like Kumaritashvili) and Ross Milne, a skier, were both killed in training. Then as now, there were complaints that the runs were not safe: Kay-Skrzypecki, a Polish luger who became a British citizen, was killed when his toboggan “shot off the lipless chute,” according to the Associated Press report of January 27, 1964. A few days before that, the Australian Milne had gone flying off the downhill skiing track and crashed into a tree. The 1964 Olympics were already operating in the shadow of tragedy: the death of the entire U.S. figure skating team in a plane crash in 1961 had completely shaken up the world of winter sports. In response to the Innsbruck accidents,  the AP reported, new lips were “added to the dangerous curves of the toboggan run, two extra compulsory gates were installed along the men’s downhill, [and] the women’s downhill received three extra gates.” Most importantly, the Olympic committee responded to the Milne tragedy by covering all the nearby tree trunks with straw.

The only other death at the Winter Olympics before this one was the death of Swiss skier Nicholas Bochatay in 1992 in La Lechere, France. A day before the closing ceremonies, Bochatay was training when he crashed head-on into the machine that was smoothing out the snow.

There have only been two previous deaths that occured during actual competition, and in both cases, the athletes may have been done in by their attempts to enhance their performance. At the 1912 Summer Games in Stockholm, runner Francisco Lázaro covered himself with wax to ward off sunburns, which was supposed to improve his endurance in the grueling marathon. But the wax also blocked the pores in his skin and prevented him from perspiring, and he collapsed and died of dehydration. In 1960 in Rome, Danish cyclist Knut Jensen collapsed in the middle of a race and died soon after. The president of the Danish Road Racing Federation confirmed that Jensen had been given drugs by his trainer—which later turned out to include amphetamines—but insisted that this did not constitute “doping.”

William Wallace Robinson: 1948-2010

By Rachel Mendleson - Thursday, February 11, 2010 at 9:50 AM - 4 Comments

William Wallace Robinson was born on Oct. 10, 1948, in Cobourg, Ont., the youngest of three boys for William Wallace and Margaret Robinson. Raised on a farm just outside of nearby Colborne, Bill, who was a quiet yet strong-willed child, learned the value of hard work early on. As small boys, he and older brothers Craig and Vic were in the fields, picking cucumbers and beans. A quarter-acre of each, says Vic, “would buy us our school clothes and give us a trip to the [Toronto] exhibition.” By age 12, says Vic, “We were doing a man’s work.”

Growing up, money was tight, so he and his brothers entertained themselves, fishing for trout in the stream that ran through their property and playing in the cedar trees. Using twine from the bales of hay, Bill, who was always “a good climber,” says Vic, built hammocks high in the trees. In addition to enjoying the view from the top, Bill sought to understand the biology: as a boy, he once told Vic: “If you trim all the way around the bark, the tree will die, because that’s how it’s fed.”

When Bill was 16, his dad, who had been injured in the Second World War, passed away. Soon after, he quit school and began working full-time. After a stint at Winchester-Western, a rifle manufacturer in Cobourg, he worked as an arborist for tree-care companies. “That’s where he really learned to climb,” says Vic. Wearing a safety belt and spurs, it became like second nature to Bill, who was a wiry six foot two, to shimmy up the trunk, chainsaw in hand. He became skilled at cutting branches and felling entire trees.

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Charles Albert Hansman 1926-2009

By Rachel Mendleson - Wednesday, February 3, 2010 at 1:10 PM - 1 Comment

Charles Albert Hansman was born on June 30, 1926, in North Bay, Ont., to Albert “Ab” Hansman and his wife, Edith. The youngest of three children, and only boy, Charlie, or Chuck, as he was known, was soft-spoken and had a keen interest in “anything that moved, walked or flew,” says friend Bob Kennedy. Charlie’s father, who worked for the Ontario Northland Railway, was a founding member of the Laurentian Ski Club. Charlie “was absolutely fearless on a pair of skis,” says Bob, and often won local competitions.

In high school, Charlie focused on vocational classes. He began hanging around the Cottrill girls, six sisters who lived a few blocks away. Before long, he set his sights on Shirley, a tall, gregarious brunette with whom he shared piercing blue eyes and a love of skiing. Too shy to tell Shirley, three years his junior, how he felt, she heard from the other boys that she had, according to him, been spoken for. They started dating in 1947. He’d need another nudge to ask for her hand: when Shirley, who was working at ONR, found out that Charlie, then training to become a journeyman at North Bay Hydro, wanted a car and a boat first, she bought him a car. They married in 1950. (Charlie began building his boat in the basement.)
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Fleeing the capital

By Michael Petrou - Monday, February 1, 2010 at 11:40 AM - 1 Comment

The broken blocks of concrete that fell from his house during the earthquake killed Vladimir Desir’s wife and child, and split open the top of his head. Bleeding badly, he tried to find medical help in Port-au-Prince. There wasn’t any. Desir gambled that he’d have a better chance of receiving care in Jacmel, a city 60 km to the southwest. It took him 12 hours to get there. When a Maclean’s reporter spoke to him a week later, he lay on a cot in the yard of Saint Michel’s Hospital and was enthusiastically praising the work of Canadian military doctors who treated him. He doesn’t regret leaving.

Desir’s case is unique only because of how quickly he decided to get out of the capital. Tens of thousands of other Haitians are now making the same choice. Many have family in countryside towns and villages. Those who can afford it buy space on private buses that are brightly painted with images of leopards, pop icons, and all manners of slogans: Thank you Jesus; In God we trust; Jerusalem; Big Family; Baby I love you. Ticket prices have almost doubled since the quake. The owner of one bus blamed the price of gas.

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Cody Justin Peter Starr 1986-2010

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, January 28, 2010 at 10:20 AM - 9 Comments

Cody Justin Peter Starr was born on Aug. 20, 1986, in Winnipeg. He was the only child born to Jeffrey Smith, a labourer from Hollow Water First Nation, and Evelyn Ross, a chambermaid from Lac Sioux, Ont. Cody, a fearless boy who grew up in Winnipeg’s North End, was close to his five older half-brothers and half-sisters.

His love of drawing began at age three: armies, superheroes, monsters of his own creation (sometimes on his hands—no matter how often he was told not to). By eight, Cody, a leftie, was sketching complex battle scenes. In Grade 5, he won an award at Norquay School for his work: six weeks of paid lessons at the Winnipeg Art Gallery.

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Horror in Haiti

By Michael Petrou in Port-au-Prince with Charlie Gillis, Jonathon Gatehouse and Luiza Ch. Savage - Monday, January 25, 2010 at 9:54 AM - 12 Comments

The earthquake that broke the back of an already ailing nation struck just before 5 p.m., a time when many Haitians were still at work or school. The 7.0-magnitude tremor was centred near Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, and lasted a mere 45 seconds—a temporal eyeblink that will go down as the nadir of the Caribbean country’s long history of misery and chaos. Shantytowns that litter the island’s southwest peninsula went down domino-style. Larger buildings comprised of cinderblock and unreinforced concrete collapsed like wedding cakes, in many cases with a full complement of their day-to-day occupants inside. The ones left standing quickly emptied; survivors scrambled to help those still inside, tugging at the shards of cement with bare hands.

Fredson Demostherma, a resident of Léogâne, 30 km west of the capital, Port-au-Prince, jumped to safety from a second-floor window in his house when the ground started to rumble. He turned around and watched the building collapse, trapping seven members of his family inside, including an infant. He paid someone with a sledgehammer to help him dig his family, who survived, out. “Haiti’s future is in the hands of other nations, and God,” Demostherma told Maclean’s. Pierre Cherami, who ran an auto parts business in Gressier, just outside of Port-au-Prince, was in his house with his wife and daughter, who perished. “Their names are Denise and Myrline,” he said. “Myrline wasn’t feeling well and was sleeping. My wife was with her. When the quake hit, I saw the wall begin to topple. I tried to hold it up but couldn’t. I recovered both of their bodies. It will be difficult to rebuild my life. I’ve lost everything.”
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Dominick Dunne’s last big party

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, January 14, 2010 at 6:00 AM - 13 Comments

Dominick Dunne died last August and with uncharacteristically bad timing—a day after Ted Kennedy. According to the New York Times, the family wanted to delay announcing his death until the Teddy ululations blew over. But, with the media diving headlong into a vat of mawkish drivel about “The Last Lion” and “The End of Camelot” and showing no inclination to climb out this side of Thanksgiving, the Dunnes threw in the towel and, for the first time in a long time, the high-society crime chronicler found himself relegated to a table at the back of the room, metaphorically speaking. I wrote about him in this space a few days later, mainly because he was a better man than Ted and he didn’t deserve such a total eclipse.

The poor timing was especially poignant because Dunne had evidently given a lot of thought to his death. His last novel, Too Much Money, written when he knew he was dying, has just been published to faintly bewildered reviews. A strange, slight book, it seems to have befuddled the critics: even those who profess to like it can’t quite make the case for it, and give the vague feeling the two thumbs up are one for the road and old times’ sake. The book is suffused in mortality, to the point that one of its principals is a gay undertaker from a prominent Manhattan funeral home who got bitten by the bug when he was 13 years old and waited five hours in line to see Judy Garland in her casket. The moment he glimpsed her red shoes, he knew he wanted to be a mortician. Forty years on, he’s keeping busy, and not just with funerals. He’s taken to squiring Dodo Van Degan, a society widow who finds her gay undertaker escort surprisingly good company:

“She often sat with Xavior at night in the Grant P. Trumbull Funeral Home when he was embalming a body. Afterward they would fool around a little.”

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Russel John Karonia:re Curotte 1958-2009

By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 11:30 AM - 0 Comments

Russel John Karonia:re Curotte was born on June 21, 1958, in Kahnawake, a native reserve southwest of Montreal, to John “Baba” Curotte, a Kahnawake longhouse chief, and Grace Curotte, a homemaker. The fourth of five children brought up in the native tradition before doing so became common again, Russel often travelled with his parents to longhouses of the Six Nations Confederacy.

He played first base on the Kahnawake Little League team—he had a strong though often inaccurate swing. His friend Patrick Phillips, a lifeguard in his teenage years, remembers Russel as an avid swimmer who took to water “like a seal.” His brother Joe co-founded the Onake Canoe Club in 1972, and Russel loved paddling. He was a natural: at five foot eight, with big shoulders and lots of muscle, he easily cut through the rough currents of the St. Lawrence River, where the club practised. In 1975, just prior to the Montreal Olympics, he and his partner Ray McComber bought paddles from the Romanian paddling team, and became known as Kahnawake’s only Romanian paddlers. Continue…

Newsmaker of the Year '09: Lost boy, forever

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, December 8, 2009 at 3:19 PM - 0 Comments

Even more startling than the news of his death was its impact. Not since Diana has a celebrity’s sudden passing sent such a profound and lasting shock wave around the world. Michael Jackson’s career had been in the doldrums for over a decade, his reputation shattered by allegations of child molestation, his face ravaged by cosmetic surgery, his body wired on painkillers, his finances in shreds. Although his fans had remained fiercely loyal, snapping up tickets for a sold-out comeback tour that would never take place, for much of the world the King of Pop had become a sad freak—a literally pale shadow of the man-child who once moonwalked into our hearts. But after Jackson’s death on June 25, 2009, a miraculous resurrection began to take place.

As the media became consumed with conjuring his memory, parsing his significance and exploring the riddle of his death, it soon became clear that this celebrity death was shaping up to be an event on a par with the loss of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley. In death, the moral scales were instantly tipped. Jackson’s iconic stature would trump his human frailties. The man once accused of being a pedophile and a predator was now cast as victim, possibly a victim of murder by lethal injection, perhaps even the target of a conspiracy. The disturbing pathology of Jackson’s personality—the enigma of the lost boy trapped in a man’s body—only enriched the myth. As a showbiz prodigy forever trying to reclaim the Neverland of his stolen childhood, he acquired tragic nobility. Like Elvis, Marilyn and Diana, here was another martyr to celebrity. Jackson had always dressed as if auditioning for divinity. And in the months that followed, pieces of him would be auctioned off like religious relics, from his diamond-encrusted socks to the white glove he wore in the 1983 Motown TV special—which is considered the “holy grail” of MJ memorabilia.

As a black man who seemed bent on erasing his race and blurring his gender, Jackson’s shape-shifting was mocked when he was alive. In death it only magnified his cultural importance. Just as Elvis Presley and Mick Jagger had plundered the moves and music of black R & B to create their burlesque empires of rock ’n’ roll, Jackson merged black music with white pop, but from the other side. He seemed intent on transforming himself into an alien creature, as if the only ethnicity that really mattered to him was extraterrestrial. With Thriller, the monster video that broke racial barriers and virtually invented MTV, he tried on a ghoulish identity that would follow him to the grave.

Jackson always fancied himself a movie star, or rather a movie character. And he received some posthumous poetic justice with the release of This Is It, the movie stitched together from rehearsal footage of the concert that never was. The film, which has grossed more than US$200 million, puts a lie to all the media speculation that his heart wasn’t in the tour, or that he no longer had the chops to pull it off. His ethereal falsetto was still intact, and his quicksilver dance moves still dazzled, as if he had no choice: the music flowed through his body like an electric current, animating every move with semaphore precision.

Had he lived to perform the tour, no doubt there would have been a concert movie, but it would have shown a slicker performer. The rehearsal footage reveals a softer, more circumspect Michael Jackson. Though the film is more hagiography than documentary, it offers a glimmer of vulnerability, and of the creative soul behind the Oz-like armour of the persona. Jackson comes across as an adult, quietly focused and firmly in command. The movie lends credence to what Elizabeth Taylor once told Oprah Winfrey, that Jackson was “highly intelligent, shrewd, intuitive.” There’s a lovely scene in which Jackson is trying to hold himself back. “Don’t make me sing out,” he pleads. “I gotta save my voice.” It’s a moment freighted with sad irony in a movie that redeems a monstrous icon by reminding us that he was only an artist.

Joseph Pierre Adélard Lambert 1939-2009

By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 12:20 PM - 0 Comments

Joseph Pierre Adélard Lambert was born in Joliette, Que., on Nov. 21, 1939, to Antonio Lambert, a tailor, and Yvonne Poirier, a secretary. Known as Pierre, he worked throughout his high school years, at one point as the projectionist at Cinéma Venus, Joliette’s movie theatre. He liked movies but liked being busy even more. Struck by the young man’s work ethic, Roger Cloutier, who ran the local farmer’s co-op, taught him the rudiments of running a business. Soon, Pierre was the co-op’s accountant.

He met Lise Lasalle at a baseball game in 1961. Baseball enthralled Pierre, but he noticed Lise’s green eyes, brown hair and (soon enough) her remarkable calm in the face of his bluster; they married in September 1962 and had three children together: Martine, François and Bruno.

Pierre left the co-op in 1975 and opened his own accounting firm. He was also president of the local chapter of Quebec’s construction association. This, his children joke, was a matter of convenience; their father could hardly hammer a nail into the wall. (He also owned a gas station, yet could barely pump his own gas.) His obsession was politics, and Pierre was a partisan among partisans whose red glasses, ties and shirts advertised his allegiance to the Liberal brand. “If you dressed a pig in red my dad probably would have voted for him,” Martine says.

He became an organizer for both the provincial and federal Liberals. His leanings made him a rare bird in Joliette, long represented federally by the Conservatives and the Bloc Québécois afterwards. It was also the home riding of long-time Péquiste minister Guy Chevrette; Pierre spent years trying to find a Liberal who could unseat him,always in vain. During the 1980 referendum he worked for the No campaign, enlisting Martine to pass out buttons at her high school. He was so ecstatic at the victory that he let his daughter smoke in front of him at the after-party. (He came to regret this; Martine smokes to this day.) His own political ambitions were dampened by Lise, who was unwilling to lose her husband to Ottawa or Quebec City for a large part of the year. The stress, she said, would kill them both. Being a municipal councillor was an honourable compromise: Lise would keep her sanity, while Pierre could still keep the long-standing tradition of watching the Montreal Expos with his kids. He won a council seat in Notre-Dame-Des-Plaines, a neighbouring village to Joliette where the family lived, by acclamation in 1987. In 1992 he easily defeated his first opponent; he would only be challenged once more in his political career.

No one was ever indifferent to Pierre. Those who weren’t put off by his federalist sympathies (or his Fred Flintstone appearance and intensity) were often touched by his uncommon tenderness. He gave Alexandre Cantin, who lived in an apartment block Pierre owned and in whom Pierre saw a Lambert-like propensity to stay busy, his first job. He then helped him find work in Joliette once he graduated. “You are the most important person in my life,” Alexandre would later write.

Lise succumbed to breast cancer in 2004, and Pierre lost his life’s anchor and council. He stopped eating at home, often favouring caisses-croûte (snack bars)—or worse—for his meals. “My father was the only person I knew who could eat breakfast at a dépanneur,” says his son François. In Joliette, he often held court at La Belle Excuse, the local restaurant, whose owner would call him whenever chopped veal liver was on the menu. He guzzled Coke and drove around in his Cadillac with Shaggy, his 110-lb. Bouvier, happy but unhealthy. In 2007 he suffered an acute diabetic attack (a normal blood sugar level after a meal is between five and eight; when doctors tested Pierre’s it was at 57). He promised his kids he’d lay off the Jos. Louis cakes and try sugarless Coke.

Earlier this year, Pierre learned that Jean-Guy Forget, a former police officer, would run against him in the November elections. It was a tight race—voters were unhappy with the pace and quality of road work in town—and Pierre campaigned with even more intensity than usual. His knees hurt, he was tired all the time and, as he found out on the night of the election, the results were very close. At 10:25, François called Pierre and found him to be a nervous wreck. Minutes later, though, the good news: Pierre had won by 20 votes. Overjoyed, he drove to the community centre, where he thanked his well-wishers and volunteers. To the assembled journalists he acknowledged the close vote and said he would work for all constituents. He then suffered a heart attack and collapsed. No one could revive the freshly re-elected member for Notre-Dame-Des-Plaines. He was 69.

Justin Peter Ronald Bouvier 1993-2009

By Jen Cutts - Thursday, November 5, 2009 at 2:20 PM - 9 Comments

Justin Peter Ronald Bouvier was born on Nov. 3, 1993, in Timmins, Ont., to Peter, a city bus driver, and Lori-Anne, a homemaker. The youngest in a blended family of seven children, Justin was a happy arrival for brother Harvey, who had five older sisters. Harvey had to wait for his new playmate, though; Justin was born three weeks premature and had pneumonia, and was sent to the McMaster Children’s Hospital in Hamilton. Once Justin did come home, Harvey was disappointed that his baby brother didn’t already know how “to play cars like I wanted him to.”

Justin was playing soccer with his brother, though, “as soon as he could kick a ball,” says sister Tanya. He was small but energetic, always running around, she says. “I told him, ‘With those muscular calves, you’re gonna be a soccer star.’ ” Harvey and Justin also joined karate, and, with their friend Josh, liked to pretend to be the crime-fighting brothers from the 3 Ninjas movies. Justin also loved to draw, and once made a guitar out of “whatever he could find, paper plates, straws, dental floss for the strings,” says Tanya. Continue…

Jean Guy Potvin 1967-2009

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, October 29, 2009 at 1:40 PM - 5 Comments

Jean Guy Potvin was born on Nov. 20, 1967, in the northern Quebec pulp-and-paper town of Alma. He was the youngest of 12 children born to shoemakers Marcelle Michaud and Joseph-Alfred Potvin, and grew up in the family home, adjacent to the business. After an early childhood that featured pranks such as flushing hockey pucks down the toilet, Jean found a more productive pastime: fixing old toasters and electrical equipment. By the time he was in high school, he was fixing cars. He studied mechanics at college in Rimouski, but hated the program—he had to spend more time with books than engines—and after a year moved to Chicoutimi, enrolling in an auto mechanics course.

When he was 23, he began dating Mélanie Néron, a Charlevoix native who’d fallen hard for his sense of fun and energy. Within two years they’d decided to marry and move to B.C., to find work and learn to speak English. Mélanie, a daycare worker, flew out first. Jean followed in the car, towing a trailer full of mechanic’s tools. Vancouver was too big and too busy, so they settled in the bedroom community of Abbotsford, where each had landed jobs. Soon, they had a house, and three girls: Noémie, Mélina and Rébecca. By then, Jean, an extremely hard worker (“the stubborn Frenchman,” his best friend Jon Merrick affectionately dubbed him), had become a heavy-duty mechanic for Fraser Valley Septic Tank Services. He was a workaholic, often spending his days off working on friends’ cars. Continue…

Alexander 'Sandy' Collie Shaw 1944-2009

By Rachel Mendleson - Thursday, October 22, 2009 at 3:00 PM - 0 Comments

Alexander “Sandy” Collie Shaw was born on April 30, 1944, on Rothiemurchus Estate in the Scottish Highlands, overlooking the Cairngorm mountains. In accordance with family tradition, Sandy came into the world in an upstairs bedroom of his grandfather’s farmhouse, and was placed in the bottom drawer of an old dresser. His parents, Andrew and Isabel Shaw, named him after his uncle, a member of Scotland’s Lovat Scouts, who died earlier that year in an avalanche near Jasper, Alta., during wartime training. Sandy’s father, a heavy-duty mechanic, was often on the road, so Sandy spent his early years at the farmhouse with his mother and older sister before moving to nearby Aviemore.

Growing up, Sandy and his friends occupied themselves on the wooded hillside trails, gathering berries and exploring. Before there was a ski resort in the area, they would carry their skis up the slope on foot. An athletic boy, he played soccer, and joined the Cairngorm Mountain Rescue Team. His sense of compassion was ingrained early on: sister Anne was severely disabled, and brother John, 15 years his junior, had Down’s syndrome. Continue…

Michael Mariak Jok 1992-2009

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 1:40 PM - 10 Comments

Michael Mariak Jok was born Feb. 12, 1992, in Kapoeta, in southern Sudan. He was the third child of Elizabeth Mach and Jok Tuil, both rebel soldiers who met in Ethiopia, where they trained with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. Mariak is the Dinka word for “disaster”; Michael, as he was later known, was born amidst the country’s recent civil war, which pitted the northern Muslim government against the mostly Christian south, and ultimately claimed two million lives, one of the last century’s most brutal wars.

Kapoeta, the crowded, de facto capital of the rebel-controlled south, was a shell of a town. The hospital, school and many buildings had been flattened by bombs. Food was scarce: most people survived on three kilograms of corn per week. Disease and malnourishment were rampant. Queuing for water could take six hours. Elizabeth and Jok, who stood seven feet tall, lived in a mud-walled hut (according to custom, Jok’s children took his first name as their surname). Continue…

Kenneth John Shane 1959-2009

By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, October 8, 2009 at 2:00 PM - 21 Comments

Kenneth John Shane was born on Feb. 5, 1959, in Rouyn-Noranda, Que., to Lorraine Théberge, a homemaker, and Norbert Shane, an engineer at the local copper smelter. Even among the five Shane children, known for their strong wills, Kenny stuck out: he was stubborn, determined and focused on whatever was at hand—hockey, school, the bicycle his father bought him, complete with wooden blocks on the pedals.

He attended Séminaire St-Michel and left for Brazil shortly after graduation on a year-long exchange, an experience his siblings believe changed the course of his life. Upon his return he took a three-year biochemistry course at the Northern College of Applied Arts and Technology and in 1980 went to work at the smelter, alongside his father. He lasted eight months before buying a one-way ticket from New York City to Brussels for $169. The resulting voyage would last 28 years and take him well over 120,000 km across all seven continents. Continue…

Norma Ann Wright 1941-2009

By Rachel Mendleson - Thursday, October 1, 2009 at 3:00 PM - 3 Comments

Norma Ann Wright was born on March 11, 1941, to Niel “Mac” and Helena “Pat” McCuish, in Sudbury, Ont., and grew up in nearby Burwash. The village, where Mac worked as postmaster, was built around the Burwash Industrial Farm, a correctional facility that offered early lessons in compassion: the inmates coexisted with residents, fulfilling their manual labour needs. An outgoing girl with glacier-blue eyes, Norma, an only child, was happiest with other kids, playing outdoors until the coyotes began to howl.

“Nonnie,” as she was often called, inherited her dad’s warmth but was often at odds with her mom, who had been hardened by a difficult upbringing. After Grade 10, she spent summers waitressing in Wasaga Beach, and used her earnings to pay for boarding school. When she graduated, nursing was a natural choice, and she trained in Sudbury. Norma loved the contact with patients, and “the challenges of getting someone well again,” says daughter Rachel. Continue…

No wonder the Kennedys hated him

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, September 10, 2009 at 5:20 PM - 35 Comments

Dominick Dunne died the day after Ted Kennedy, and so his passing went all but unnoticed, coming as it did just as the American media’s week-long orgasmic frenzy of Camelotian prostrations and ululations was getting into gear. Dunne would have accepted the black jest of bad timing, albeit with regret. The Kennedy family blames him for the present woes of their cousin, Michael Skakel, currently banged up in the big house for a long-ago murder of a 15-year-old girl who had the misfortune to live next door. “Dominick Dunne,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told New York magazine, “is a pathetic creature.”

“I don’t give a f–k about what that little s–t has to say,” Dunne responded. “That f–king asshole.” Continue…

Ryan Bartt Chute 1980-2009

By Rachel Mendleson - Thursday, September 10, 2009 at 1:40 PM - 5 Comments

R yan Bartt Chute was born on Sept. 13, 1980, in Moose Jaw, Sask., the second of four children to Bartt and Marla Chute. His parents were grain farmers whose sprawling fields, located about 25 km north of town, had been in the family since the 1920s. A “fun-loving” child, Ryan “loved to tuck his head in the crook of your neck and cuddle,” says Marla. He was drawn to the outdoors—particularly whatever his dad was doing. As a toddler, he had his own corner in the tractor cab, complete with a pillow and blanket. “When he got tired, he’d lay down and have a sleep,” says Bartt. The harvest was an early source of fascination. In late August, he would spend hours in the fields with his dad, watching him combine the lentils, peas and wheat.

A curious boy, Ryan trailed Bartt in the workshop, tinkering with the machinery. Like his father, he was eager to try new things, and fuelled his bent for adventure with dirt bikes, jet skis and snowmobiles, later learning to drive a motorcycle and a big rig. In school, Ryan’s ability to elicit laughter made him a favourite among his classmates, if not always his teachers. “He spent a fair bit of time in the hallway,” says friend Jason Doney. He extended his good-natured teasing to sisters Andrea and Alana, but was also protective—his brother Reid, born in 1985, died in infancy, and Ryan kept a close eye on them. Continue…

In the thrall of American nobility

By Robert Fulford - Thursday, September 10, 2009 at 11:40 AM - 0 Comments

The world saw the Kennedys as a dazzling emblem of the United States, the uniquely American fusion of politics, money, glamour, reckless sexual appetite­—and tragedy.

But their unprecedented family pride and solidarity placed them far outside what most Americans, rich or poor, consider the American style. They resembled European nobility more than any other U.S. family. They were like English dukes in the casual acceptance of their inherent superiority. Some might be disliked for this audacious self-assertion, but glamour made the Kennedys loved. Continue…