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A year or so later, a girl awaiting a lung transplant asked to meet me. I spent a couple of hours with her and found myself forgetting the strange premise of why I was there. I liked her. A lot. She was funny and kind and she had a wry sense of humour about her own terrifying predicament. I would h…

I felt deeply ashamed and told him so. He said, “If this film is everything we want it to be, maybe, if we are very lucky, it will affect two or three people for a little while. The only thing that is certain is that the experience of making it will be with all of us, it will become a part of us, f…

She was adored. As an adult, I am still sometimes stopped on the street by people in their seventies or eighties who tell me how much they loved my mother, how much she made them laugh, how much she helped them and believed in them. One of her former colleagues told one of my siblings that they rem…

Why do we write things about ourselves? To absolve ourselves of guilt? To confess? To right a wrong? To be heard? To apologize? To clarify things for ourselves or others? I’ve wondered all these things as I sit down to write this.

I’ve been writing and unwriting this essay for years now. It’s di…

The plan was to go back to school when I got better. The plan was to try to get into Oxford. The plan was derailed by the Conservatives in Ontario winning the provincial election in 1995. When I could finally walk and resume a life, the one I walked into looked nothing like the one I had been headi…