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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…

In my stocking was a mechanical claw, placed there by Mark, so I could reach things from my lying-down position on the couch, which I remained in for most of the holiday. At the bottom of my stocking I found, wrapped in tissue paper, three miniature figures of Alice, the White Knight, and Humpty Du…

Recently, when I described this moment in the play to my therapist and the scenes of Dodgson’s rejection by Alice in Dreamchild, I tried hard to talk about my anger at being made to feel sad for the grown man instead of for the child, but all that came out of me was the sadness itself, a sadness so…

On a visit home one weekend shortly after I had moved out, I found a half-written letter to his sister Janet in England. He wrote that a mammal’s purpose in life was to bear and raise their young. Now that I was gone, his life had no purpose. He’d thought he would have a few more years left of purp…

Now, when I said goodbye to the White Knight in that penultimate scene, I could not stop the tears from flooding down my face as I said “I hope it encouraged him.” I watched him, losing his things out of the hole in his sack, as he trotted on alone, unawares. I wished there was something I could do…