Primo Levi (2012)

In which the author becomes a griefwalker

Over the Christmas-New Year's period of 2011-12, one of my uncles, one of my father's brothers, had a stroke, was hospitalized, and passed away. After the funeral, I asked my cousins how they were doing. They had a problem. They didn't know their father's passwords. They were trying to guess them, using old addresses, anything they could think of. I knew what I had to do. I would have to ask my wife to write down her passwords. She had terminal cancer. Her death was not imminent, not in the sense of it being days or weeks away. She hoped to have a year or two or a miracle, but the specialist would soon tell us to take it three months at a time. Four months after he said that she was dead.

I’ve written about some of these events previously, using my wife’s name, but here I will not use her name. This piece isn’t about her; it’s about me. There’s so much I would love to say about her – my hero – but here the focus is different.

I've been thinking about Primo Levi. Though, first, yes, I did collect my wife's passwords, and I made a list of mine for her, too. Later, I made a list of "important" phone numbers that I asked her to augment and correct. I still carry that around in my "to the office" bag. Though I haven't used it in years, it remains a staple. I almost wrote "a stable." It is a stabilizing thing. It connects me to her, to that era, to 2012, when everything was falling apart, when I had to think about how to survive, and she was thinking about how to approach the end.

Later that year, I read three Primo Levi titles: The Periodic Table (1975), The Drowned and the Saved (1986), and Survival in Auschwitz (1947). Probably my first contact with Levi was via Philip Roth's Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work (2001). Roth and Levi in conversation begins that collection. Roth begins with a recollection:

On the Friday in September 1986 that I arrived in Turin to renew a conversation with Primo Levi that we had begun one afternoon in London the spring before, I asked to be shown around the paint factory where he'd been employed as a research chemist and, afterward, until retirement, as manager.

Roth begins by connecting Levi to his profession: chemist, paint factory manager. He's curious about the concrete, how the factor works, where did Levi spend his time. Of course, later in conversation they talk about another place Levi spent his time, Auschwitz, where his skills as a chemist were also put to use. How do you get from one of these places to the other? Is there a part of you that remains consistent, no matter where you are, no matter how extreme your experiences?

Questions along these lines resonated with me, after the cancer period ended. After I buried my wife and people would encourage me with words like, "She would want you to move on and live your best life." This was surely true, but how? How did Levi go back to the paint factory? How did he turn his time in Auschwitz into literature.

I'm not sure why I turned to Levi the fall of 2012, except his were books I hadn't read yet and it seemed like now was the time. I felt like crap, for sure. I thought maybe Levi's writing about the path through profound darkness would show me something I needed to know, and I think it did. I started with The Periodic Table, and then I read the two other titles in short succession. The books include Levi's responses to letters from Germans. Holy shit, right? I'm not going to spoil any of them by summarizing any of it. Read them. Do not delay.

Upon reflection, now, years later, what Levi showed me was you can just say what happened. I remember his prose as being clear and direct. The horror of the extermination camps is in the concept of extermination camps. The day-to-day life is, strangely or not, day-to-day life, however narrow, however outrageously unjust. I took some inspiration, too, from his "return to work," his ability to reengage with "normal," while, of course, never forgetting. Normal is never quite normal.

If there is any parallel to life-with-cancer-in-the-house, it is this. Day-to-day life is day-to-day life. You cling to "the normal," whatever remains of it. The kids need to be fed. The laundry needs to be done. The groceries need to be bought. I needed to go to the office, when I wasn't sitting with her in hospital waiting rooms, and I went to nearly every single one of her clinic visits. It was madness, for sure, especially as her daily pain got worse, the cancer spread, and the kids still needed to be fed and the laundry still needed to be done, etc. And we were laughing with each other, right to the end. Cracking jokes and "living in the moment." And the moment is always the moment, before, during, and after the catastrophe.

Madness is a word folks try to avoid now, I know, but I do mean it was a time of mental illness. Also, of course, it was a time of trauma – and in that sense, it has never ended. I carry it around with me. I can access it any time.

What I am not saying, though, is this life-with-cancer experience was like living in an extermination camp. No. Systematic murder of millions is its own thing; people making evil choices. Cancer is a disease, and medicine is trying to fight it, not accelerate the end. All I can say is, Levi's writing about the day-to-day in the camp spoke to me in a way I needed to be spoken to. It helped to calm and make sense of my anxiety, fear, and grief. It was not all chaos. Even amid madness, there is meaning, consistency, hope. And absurdity. That's the only Art/Life thing I'm saying. His ability to carry on, post-catastrophe, as I've noted, is relevant, too.

As for this piece, I wrote a first draft of the cancer/death period and discarded it. I thought I could write it clear and direct, like Levi did, but I could not. The tension is this. On the one hand, my wife, I'm sure, would want the truth to be told about what cancer did to her body. On the other hand, she would want to be known by her life, not her death, by her vibrancy, not her suffering. Here, for example, is a statement she made on her blog shortly before her death:

We need to leave something to blind faith, in this overly driven and 100% planned out world...Here is where it matters to believe. Have faith, not in miracles, but in life itself as a series of beautiful things, and moments, and each other, and yourself. Trust that whatever comes will come and you will face it with grace, and love, and be true to yourself. You will find a path. Be at peace with your life. Show the world the outward love you feel inside. Kiss, hug, cuddle. Tell your truths. Love your people. Repeat.

That was her last post, two weeks before she died. It started like this:

Happy Wednesday. Today we see the doctor about further disease or not. I am deeply overwhelmed. I am sad. But I am also digging sooooo deep. It will be ok. We will overcome this too. We have to.

I don't want to reinvent the wheel, so this is recycled from some other posts, written around Christmas.

What followed is the quotation I posted above. As you might have guessed, that visit to the doctor confirmed further disease. It was, truly, the beginning of the end.

She had asked me, "What are we going to do if the test result is bad?"

I replied, "We will do what we always do: make a plan and implement it."

This is what we did at every step, sometimes the plan would work out, often it would need to be adjusted. After May 2012, I was making plans on my own.

In January 2012, my wife was nearing completion of her second 18-week cycle of chemotherapy. She would say around this time, "I can't wait for the chemo to stop," and I said to her, "I want it to go on forever."

"Why?"

"It's what's keeping the disease away."

In January 2012, we bought a cemetery plot. We contacted a lawyer and wrote wills. We booked a week-long trip to Mexico, which would include a trip by taxi off the resort to a Walmart to buy a travel pillow, so my wife's back could be better supported on the way home than it had on the in-bound flight.

Sometimes I ask people, "Do you know breast cancer can put you in a wheelchair?"

By late-March, my wife's T1 vertebrae became a major concern, and in early April she spent a week in hospital trying to come up with a plan. The doctors kept saying their plan was to stabilize the disease, but by this point it was obvious the disease was not stabilizing. We were having cryptic conversations with palliative care doctors, who were saying, repeatedly, "There's no reason to be in pain," and which we started to interpret as, "We can drug you into a coma."

Around this time, we were looking at hospice options, and we asked for advice from one of the palliative care doctors, who told us, "There's no way you are in the final three months of life."

Even at the time, this seemed wrong to me, which it was: she had about six weeks left. 

Unhappy with Sunnybrook's palliative care team, my wife switched to the team at Mount Sinai Hospital, who would come visit you at home. Unfortunately, this meant another kind of re-staging, as the Mount Sinai team had to bone up on my wife's file. She was also connected to community care nurses, who visited her daily. By then, she was hooked up to a pump that fed hydromorphone into her abdomen through a needle at regular intervals. The wheelchair was in regular use.

Moments from this era recur for me. Some scenes. First, a note: There is much I have left out of this piece, including many people who were supportive and other incidents that were simply incredibly hard. I haven't forgotten them. Maybe I'll write about them sometime, maybe not. I appreciate everyone. I do believe in forgiveness, love, and grace. I don't believe in forgetting, though. So it goes.

Scene One

Our final visit to the hospital, five days before her death. We were self-conscious that this cancer journey was coming to an end. We had, at every step, pushed back against the chaos, tried hard to make meaning, with great success, in general, supported by many often heroic people inside and outside the medical system. The suffering was often intense, but if it could be contextualized it could be, let's say, sensible. The final visit to the hospital was a 12-hour day for us, starting when the medical transport we ordered picked us up. My wife had an early morning CT scan of her brain. Was cancer there? In short, yes. Then bloodwork in advance of a shot of chemotherapy. So much nonsense wrapped up in this. Chemotherapy is considered life-saving treatment. If you are getting life-saving treatment, then the palliative care doctors step back, but this was not life-saving treatment. It had been offered as something that may or may not extend her life, even by a matter of days. And that's what she wanted, but she had to have bloodwork first. We sat around the hospital all day, her in a wheelchair. Eventually, my wife logged into her own hospital account and saw the blood results. They were terrible. "I guess this is it," she said. I asked if she wanted to go through with the treatment. "Might as well." Finally, she was taken in to receive a small dose of chemicals. She was deeply uncomfortable and sweating. The chemotherapy nurse was young, spritely. She noted my wife's distress and said, helpfully, she thought, "Chemotherapy can jump start menopause." I tried to interject. My wife had already had 36 weeks of chemotherapy, and menopause had started months earlier. But my wife waved me off. "It's okay," she said. And to the nurse, "Thank you." Later, we sat by the curb, waiting for the medical transport to pick us up. It would be three hours late, and it was a brilliant blue sky sunny day, and I said it would great if this moment would just last forever. I sort of knew we would never be alone again, and we weren't. Her family had moved into our house, and doctors and nurses were coming and going. So I said to my wife, "I should probably say some things to you, but first I'm not going to say goodbye." We said things you say when the end has come.

Scene Two

Two days earlier, as we were getting ready for bed, my wife was brushing her teeth, and urgent words came to my mind: "I believe I'm going to see you again." She turned, mouth full of toothpaste, and just said: "That's why we're married." She went back to brushing her teeth. The profound and mundane, these moments filled our days.

Scene Three

Eventually, the medical transport arrived and took us home. They took one look at her and thought she was pregnant. No. She was full of cancer. Moments earlier, I had laughed to myself. My wife asked me what was so funny. I said, "When we get home your mother is going to ask us what our plans for supper are." Which she did. And my wife yelled at her, "If we are gone for 12 hours, you can come up with your own plans!"

Scene Four

The kids' school was across the street from our house, and the kids would come home for lunch, and I would meet them after school. They slept at their father's house full-time for the last week or so. We'd told them their mother was approaching death, and what they wanted to know was, "When?" So, on the Tuesday, 24 hours before the end, I knew I had to tell them it was going to be very soon. I remember walking towards the school, thinking I can't believe I'm about to do this. The next day, I asked their father to pack them lunches, because it seemed better to keep them away at that point, but they came home anyway. "No one came to pick us up!" And that's when death came. Minutes later. We were all around her. She was 44.

Scene Five

In late 2011, my wife had arranged for me to speak to someone at the palliative care centre at Princess Margaret Hospital, a psychiatrist. She wanted me to have my own helper, and he was a good helper. We had one meeting, my wife and I, with this doctor, and he asked my wife what she was most worried about, and she said, "The children," then seven and eleven. The doctor said, "Current research suggests 90% of the influence of a parents happens in the first seven years of life. That may or may not be comforting, but I hope it is." I'm not sure if it was, but I've never forgotten it. For myself, later I would tell the doctor I was obsessing over what I would say at my wife's funeral. "It just goes around and around in my mind." I was trying to suppress those thoughts, but he suggested to try and write it out. "The thoughts keep coming back because they're incomplete," he said, and his strategy worked. Later, I wouldn't say anything at her funeral. No words came at all. Similarly, this doctor gave me advice for my anxiety about how I should plan for the moment of her death. I wanted to be ready. What could I do? "Trust yourself," he said. "You have done so well already. You need to trust your ability to improvise." And I clung to that verb: improvise. How to respond to crisis: just do your best in the moment. Good advice.

Scene Six

A week before my wife's death, the Mount Sinai palliative people along with the community care coordinator were in our house, meeting with my wife and I. I had told my wife I was going to press them on what they were going to do to support her. The end was coming. No, it wasn't, they said. There are limit hours of nursing available. You don't want to use them all up, and then having nothing left for later. Let's get through the long weekend, and then we can re-assess. Once again, we were let down by the palliative professionals. "Is this not their specialty?" I asked many people. "Is this not their moment to step forward and take charge?" One palliative doctor, the day before my wife died, gave me some paperwork on "What do watch for when someone is dying." The body changes, you can track the progress. My wife had passed most of the markers already. "I should probably have given this to you sooner," he said. He also told me, “The kids will come back to this moment in 20 years.” At this point, we’re more than halfway there, though I know even now it’s not far from their minds.

Scene Seven

I was also, at that time, attending monthly caregiver support meetings, led by the woman who set up the Mount Sinai palliative program. The week before my wife died, I had one of these meetings, which I decided I needed to go to, because I needed to speak to her. This was the same day the Mount Sinai team had suggested we wait until after the weekend to re-assess things. After the caregiver meeting, I pressed the leader. "Is this the way things are supposed to work?" No, she said. They are supposed to be looking after her, so you can focus on being her husband. That is not what happened. I felt like I was the only one who knew what was going on. I was project managing her death.

Scene Eight

It turned out the Mount Sinai team didn't think my wife's death could be imminent, because she was still getting chemotherapy, and chemotherapy is considered a life saving treatment. I told the Mount Sinai team the Sunnybrook specialist had given my wife this option, without expectations. "Have you spoken to the Sunnybrook specialist?" I asked the Mount Sinai team. No, I was told. They found it better to get the information from the family. It seems the two hospitals don't share information. I was their only conduit, and they weren't listening to me, and they had one chance to get it right, and they failed.

Scene Nine

The day before my wife died, I went with my brother to a local funeral home, signed a contract, shaking with fear that my wife would die while I was out of the house. I asked my brother, twice, to call home to make sure she was still alive. All I could do for her was to be close to her, and I had to be out of the house. Some things went very poorly with the funeral home, but even as direct as a I want to be I don’t want to go into any of that.

Scene Ten

Two of my literary friends stayed over at my house the day of the funeral, and we sat out late in the backyard drinking. One of them said, "It's like a Pinter play!" I knew exactly what he meant, and I said, "If I didn't have literature, I don't know how I would survive! None of this makes any sense, unless you have read Kafka!"

Scene Eleven

The day before my wife died, her GP phoned the house. My mother-in-law yelled at her that her daughter was dying. The GP's last report from the hospital was weeks old. She asked to speak to me. She'd received some health insurance paperwork related to my wife. I confirmed my mother-in-law was correct. The doctor asked if I wanted to deal with the administrative issue. I said, yes, let's get it over with. She said she'd been asked for information she thought she'd already provided. What was it about? I said, "How am I supposed to know? If you are asked for information, then I would advise you to provide that information."

Scene Twelve

A week after the funeral, the kids came back to my house, and it was just the three of us now. I made something special for supper, and said, "Let's watch TV, order a movie or something. What do you want to watch?" They had a definite idea. "Daddy Daycare!" They were eight and 12.

Scene Thirteen

One thing I got wrong during that period, is I thought things had been so hard that they could only get lighter. This was not the case. About three weeks after my wife's death, I felt new, deep waves of grief and disbelief. I knew my wife was dead, I had seen her die, but I could not process that she was gone. I was exhausted. My brain was fogged up, a state it remained in for months, even years.

Scene Fourteen

In January 2012, seeking help to organize my thoughts, I bought three books: one on grief, one on parenting after the death of a parent, and one on what to expect when someone is dying. I thought these prudent purchases. My wife was angry. Was I giving up? She wasn’t, though that same month we’d bought a burial plot and done our wills. “We’ve gone through everything together,” I said, “but what is to come will take us on separate paths. I need to prepare for my path, as you prepare for your path.” The book on grief was helpful to me: Five Ways We Grieve by Susan A. Berger (2009).

***

How did the rest of the year go?

I had re-started The Danforth Review (TDR) literary magazine as a blog in 2011, after putting it on pause in 2009. When I re-started it, we were one year into the cancer period, which I sometimes said had made our lives specifically better while making them generally worse. What I meant was, cancer can clarify your priorities, and one of my priorities was to be "engaged with literature." I told my wife I wanted to re-start TDR, in a limited way. I published one issue of new fiction every month, right through the entire cancer-and-death period. In retrospect, it's shocking even to me, but I was brutally efficient about it, and it was a useful distraction and a meaningful activity.

At the same time, I was writing book reviews for my blog, The Underground Book Club. I remember, for example, sitting in hospital waiting rooms reading Ralph Ellison's essay collection, Going to the Territory (1986), and also Brian Fawcett's memoir, Human Happiness (2011). I thought the Fawcett book would be useful, reflective, meaningful to me at that time, but I hated it. It recounts his parents long hard marriage. His mother eventually dies, and his ancient father immediately starts searching for a new wife, someone who will look after him. I was disgusted, sitting where I did, dedicating myself to the caregiver role. Ellison, however, was magnificent.

Right at that time, also, The New Quarterly published my story "Twenty-Seven Days" and Found Press published my short "Survival" as an e-publication. (In 2021, I couldn’t find a copy of this story, so I ponied up $1.99 to download it to my Kindle. LOL. It made me laugh out loud.) So lit stuff continued, though almost immediately my ability to write fiction dried up. More on that another time.

I wanted to keep integrating Art/Life, but how?

I decided to be self-conscious about which books I would turn to first after my wife's death. I would read: my wife's favorite book, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1952). My wife and I had spent so much time in waiting rooms. We'd talked so much about the in-between space, whatever you call it, the bardo, the liminal, purgatory. My wife had written in her blog about reading Susan Sontag's book, Illness as Metaphor (1978), about her own cancer, specifically about entering the land of the sick. Later, she'd written about living in a space that wasn't quite life and wasn't quite death. She resisted thinking about death for a long time, but as it became inevitable, she was clear she thought there was something else, and she had to think about it with some optimism. Do I want to say she was optimistic about death? No. She wanted to stay as long as possible, but she also didn't think she was going into a void. Waiting and what's next, planning parties, important themes.

I read the two books and wrote about it for Numero Cinq.

In life, I would go back to work. The kids would come to my house two days a week.

In August, I went with the kids to family camp at YMCA Wanakita. This was the last event my wife had written on our calendar. Wanakita would become an annual retreat with me and the kids, the longest period we would spend together all year. We made amazing memories. When I think of that first visit to Wanakita, I remember being bathed in white light. The whole world seemed on pause. How to re-start it? I’d been living day-to-day during the cancer period, now I was living minute-to-minute.

I was drinking daily, too much, and using a sleeping pill. Stress kills, and two years later I had open heart surgery, at Sunnybrook, and got a bed in the same wing where my wife had been housed in April 2012. I think she was on the sixth floor, and the cardiac floor was the fifth.

As summer moved into fall, I signed up for a spousal grief support group, run by the same woman who ran the caregiver group. It was useful, but I found I mostly wanted to talk about my fear of losing the kids. I'd said to my wife, "I need to accept I'm going to lose you, but I can't lose you and them at the same time." Ultimately, that worked out, but I had many dark nights of the soul. I wanted more, but I am grateful to my late-wife’s ex-husband for being accommodating.

Around that time, I got a notebook and started writing letters to my wife. She was the only one I wanted to talk to. I felt she was the only one who could understand all of the different pressures in my life. I didn't expect her to answer, but I needed someplace to direct the torrent of words that was spinning about inside me. Life had not become simpler with her death, it had become more complicated. I felt trapped in scenarios not of my own choosing. Where I had once felt confident enough to tell my wife, "We will make a plan and implement it," now I felt powerless to make a plan, let alone implement one.

Any lasting insights from that era?

Life, for sure, is absurd.

I think about how the cancer journey started, when my wife found a lump in her left armpit in late-August 2010. She called her GP's office, and the receptionist told her they couldn't fit her in. So, she went to Emergency at a downtown hospital, and the doctor there said, yes, you have reason to be worried, go back to your GP's office and tell them they need to see you and send in a requisition for a biopsy ASAP. That was how it started. Negotiating with a receptionist. The biopsy showed breast cancer. Above, I told the story of the last day at the hospital, with the sweet, well-meaning nurse advising about menopause, missing that my wife was in her final days. How can this be happening? I thought. So bizarre. From start to finish, we confronted nonsense amid the profound.

The palliative care experience sucked.

I told some stories above. There was also this one. That spring I researched grief care for children. Mount Sinai had a program. I read online they recommended getting in touch with the kids before the death happened. I called, but they wouldn't speak to me. The kids are my step-kids. My wife had to call. She was very sick and very tired, but she made the call. A plan was made to connect the kids to the service. Then there were delays. And more delays. I called and said the end was very close. An appointment was made for, it turned out, the day my wife died. She died at home. I called the counsellor to tell her my wife had died. "We find it's not useful to speak to the kids on the day of death," I was told. I said, "Come directly. Come now." The counsellor did and told the kids about a grief camp the service runs. I asked when it was. Well, this year's had just happened, and it wouldn't happen again for 12 months.

Here's an insight. Somehow, my wife came across Stephen Jenkinson, author of Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul (2015). I think maybe she heard him on CBC Radio or someone sent her a link to the 2008 NFB documentary, Griefwalker. (I watched the documentary after writing an initial draft of this piece. Did I remember it? Not at all. It’s remarkable, though. Strangely familiar.) What I remember is hearing a story Jenkinson told about how approaching death is like falling in love. Many people don't get to the core of the experience because they are too afraid. Fear is a barrier to the real thing. If you can let go of the fear, then you will have the authentic experience. You will also see that death itself is nothing to fear, just as love is nothing to fear, but it requires being open to the experience. Be vulnerable and get past the barrier.

I believe both my wife and I were able to do this. Personally, I had a lot of anxiety and fear about the end, months before it happened, but by the time it happened I felt almost serene. Every moment felt like eternity. Days after my wife’s death, I spoke to one of her friends on the phone, and I said, “It’s okay, it really is,” and she admonished me that it wasn’t okay, but I said it really was. She was done; she had come to the end. (Later, of course, I felt it really wasn’t okay, but in that moment, I was at peace with death.)

So that's the biggest insight.

The second insight was the one about life afterwards not getting easier. It turned out living with cancer in the house wasn't the hardest thing. The hardest thing was co-parenting. Not something me or my parenting partner ever chose, but we did our best. What were my options? Fight or flight, right? But they both led to catastrophe. Flight would lead to Heartbreak Hotel. Fight would lead to Crazytown. I needed another option. You might have heard this before. "Love your enemies." Or if you are of a more Eastern persuasion: achieve Enlightenment.

I had to learn to be Zen.

After the end, of course, there is dealing with the end: the administration went on for months. Receiving junk mail with her name on it went on for years. Plus, I had a house full of her stuff, which we had never discussed. What to do with it? (I have kept most of it, especially anything that might have meaning for the kids, though I’ve also had to be hard-headed and dispose of things.) Then there was the Rogers bill, which was in her name. I’d asked her to phone them and ensure that my name, at least, was attached to the account. She did, and it was, but months, and yes even years later, I was told only my late wife had the power to make the change I was attempting to make on the account (“we need to speak to her,” me: “please let me know how she is doing”), even after I sent them her death certificate. Did I say life was absurd? That’s probably not even the right word. Right?

Right?

Any final words?

We had bought our house less than 5 years earlier, based on the assumption of two salaries. Now there would be one. I wanted to stay in the house and give the kids as much stability as possible. Changes would have to be made. I made them.

Later, I watched Sarah Polley's movie, Stories We Tell (2012), about her two fathers and her late-mother, who died of breast cancer. At one point her at-home father recalls his wife painting a table days before she died. She couldn't have possibly imagined she was going to die, he says. Oh, yes, I thought. She could. My wife insisted, while lying on her death bed, she would be going to a YoYo Ma concert in a week's time. She asked my mother to arrange for a wheelchair. Days later, she died.

The part of the Polley movie that struck closest to the bone, however, was when she recounted her at-home father was devasted for months, doing barely anything, sitting stunned on the couch, doing crosswords. The scene was recreated with actors. I recognized it too well. For me, it was Candy Crush or Monopoly on the iPad. What else mattered, really? She was gone. I was perpetually exhausted. The kids came and went. When they were there, I made sure they were fed and watered, got them into bed and told them stories. Made them school lunches. When they weren't there, I barely functioned.

Except TDR kept going. I kept going to work. Routine ticked along. The paint factory kept making paint.

Recently, I saw a re-broadcast of a Nature of Things documentary on CBC: Love Hurts, The Science of Heartbreak (2024).

In the documentary, Morgan meets a team researching Takotsubo syndrome, where the stress of heartbreak or loss can actually change the shape of your heart and mimic the symptoms of a heart attack. The film also features a Montreal researcher who is experimenting with using a pill and a brief period of psychotherapy to erase the difficult emotions associated with bad memories. 

Fascinating. The documentary is available to watch online on CBC GEM.

Final word from the one who knows:

Have faith, not in miracles, but in life itself as a series of beautiful things, and moments, and each other, and yourself. Trust that whatever comes will come and you will face it with grace, and love, and be true to yourself. You will find a path. Be at peace with your life. Show the world the outward love you feel inside. Kiss, hug, cuddle. Tell your truths. Love your people. Repeat.

Note: This version of 2012 events is just one version of those events. Much as been left out. Many people have been left out. I am grateful for all the assistance people provided. Other people have their own perspective about what happened. That’s okay. To others struggling with grief, or cancer, it’s okay to be not okay. Tell your truths. Love your people. Repeat.