Thoughts on friends I lost this week |
2014-09-24 By Bill Fox/Columnist Oshawa Express Death is such a difficult subject, don't you agree? Years ago, I heard Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross speak at Massey Hall and she included a small mention of death. I will never forget her words that night, because they have given me consolation this week, with the death of two friends; Art Chai, a co-worker from my past, and a dear friend, Bob Carty. Art had been ill for some time, though I only heard about it a few weeks ago. Bob, on the other hand, was told only two weeks ago that he had four months left, 12 months if he had chemotherapy. He had his first chemo this week and unexpectedly passed away a few days later. As Kubler-Ross shared, the caterpillar holds a great lesson in our quest to understand death. In a sense we are all like caterpillars on this earth. We are bound by gravity with our feet stuck on the ground. When we die, it is like we are in a cocoon. I'm sure as children we all inspected cocoons and found them to be 'lifeless'. Yet, from that lifelessness arises a wonderful butterfly able to fly to great heights and look down on us all. I admit here that I have a difficult time at wakes and funerals. I don't know why but emotionally I find them difficult. When I was at Art's memorial mass this week, I was in awe of Art's wife, Gloria and their four great sons. They seemed to understand that death was simply opening another door. From the eulogy for Art: “(The) only son of migrant parents who were Chinese shopkeepers and entrepreneurs in the inner city of Kingston and rural area of Jamaica, and the last child to follow six sisters, Art learned some wonderful lessons about survival and negotiating the vagaries of life. He was no stranger to the underbelly of poverty and life in general. At an early age, he learned the value of hard work and how to get along with people of diverse cultures, means, faith persuasions; in short, how to receive life as it presented itself, molding it into something good, true and productive. Art never forgot his roots and humble beginnings, his Chinese and Jamaican heritage, and he integrated these deep cultural roots with a profound appreciation for Canada, his adopted country. His ambition was not to grow rich but to create abundance by sharing, giving time and talent, care and attention to whomever and whatever that was at hand.” And now for a little but about Bob: Bob Carty was an Ottawa-based documentary radio producer for The Sunday Edition and The Current on CBC Radio One. Prior to entering journalism, Bob spent a decade working on human rights and international development in Latin America. In 1981 he joined CBC Radio as a producer (later foreign editor and senior producer) for Sunday Morning. In the late 1980s, Bob and his family spent five years in Central America. His wife, Frances Arbour, worked with internally displaced people in Guatemala and Guatemalan refugees in Mexico while Bob covered military conflicts, human rights, development and ecological issues throughout Latin America for CBC, The Globe & Mail and National Public Radio. Returning to Canada in 1993, Bob resumed work for the CBC on feature documentaries. Bob’s work has won numerous awards including a Peabody and a Gabriel, several New York International Radio Festival Awards, and multiple investigative journalism prizes. More than this, Bob was a good friend for over 40 years. He played at our wedding and he and his son played at our oldest son's wedding. For most of those years, Bob was also my fishing buddy. I always looked forward to a week of fishing, sharing insights and laughs at my wife's family cottage every summer. St. Augustine is noted to have said: “Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.” This was the hope Art and Bob understood. Fiercely passionate about justice among people and making right what they deemed to be wrong. |
