His Keithness tells the story

                  Some men were born to tell stories.

Lisa Laflamme: wrinkle cream trumps news every time!

DID YOU KNOW? The clickbait title of this article said Lisa LaFlamme, "Canada's legendary newscaster", had been "escorted out of the studio", implying she'd been fired. There was no working link to the article (hmmmm), so I had to copy and paste the text. It said nothing about firing, but claimed Laflamme had announced she was leaving the news industry to sell skin gunk. I have seen numerous other articles claiming prominent women in broadcasting were dumping it all to sell their incredibly successful line of miracle skin care products!

Of course this is ludicrous, but many people are still of the "I saw it on the internet, therefore it must be true" persuasion. I have seen no evidence anywhere that Lisa Laflamme is quitting broadcasting, for ANY reason. I also wonder how these idiots get away with using her name, but maybe the folks at CTV consider it's small potatoes and not worth a lawsuit. Still seems immoral to me.

Lisa LaFlamme Announces She Is Leaving CTV

(ET, Thursday, December 6, 2018) - Lisa says she is retiring to spend more time with her family, but it turns out she has other plans in mind!

Lisa LaFlamme, Canada’s legendary newscaster, announced that she will soon be retiring. After spending more than twenty years as a news anchor, Lisa felt a need to make a change in her life. Namely, she decided to leave newscasting and fully focus on her skincare line called Nova Essence Cream.

Four years ago when Lisa turned fifty, she decided to get involved with the skincare industry. Her aim was to realize her lifelong dream of owning her own skincare line. Even though she described the process of discovering the perfect anti-aging formula as a demanding one, her company eventually managed to find it.

Precisely because of that discovery and the ever-increasing success of her company, Lisa though that now is the right time to completely devote herself to Nova Essence Cream. To say that she made the right decision would be an understatement.

Lisa with friends and colleagues celebrating the launch of her Nova Essence Cream

When asked about why she decided to invest in anti-aging products, Lisa said that she had enough of watching women get tricked into buying fake anti-aging creams. She also stated that it is sad that most of the products on the market today do not work at all. That is why she felt a need to create a product that will genuinely rejuvenate the skin.

When her Nova Essence Cream was launched, it only took 30 minutes for her online beauty store to completely sell out. Lisa even admitted that the level of support she is receiving from her loving Canadians has brought tears to her eyes.

"What can I say? I am truly lost for words. I decided to follow my dreams and look where I am at now. It is hard to wrap my head around it. I am so incredibly grateful for the support." - Lisa LaFlamme

However, it is the community of plastic surgeons that took the biggest blow by Lisa’s new anti-aging product. Demand for their services started rapidly decreasing. Here is what she had to say about that:
"Of course, they are all mad. I don’t blame them, but I also don’t feel sorry for them. They have tricked too many women into believing that plastic surgery is the only solution for them. Getting a Botox injection or a facelift is not exactly cheap. I will tell you right now, that’s why they are mad. Nova Essence Cream is far more affordable and a less aggressive method. Women started canceling their appointments and wanting their money back."

How does it work?

LaFlamme says that the ingredients used in Nova Essence Cream all serve a specific purpose. Vitamin C, for example, works wonders for wrinkles and can be found in most products aimed towards eliminating them. Argireline is a peptide used to relax facial muscles and prevent fine lines from emerging. Also, there is Retinol. Studies from recent years show that Retinol truly does an amazing job of minimizing fine lines and pores.

Lisa also points out that not a single ingredient used in her anti-aging cream harms the skin in any way. Her aim was to create a product based only on natural ingredients which have proven to work wonders for skin rejuvenation.

Countless aging celebs admit they avoided surgery and look 10 years younger using Nova Essence Cream.

"The advances LaFlamme has made in the anti-aging skincare industry are remarkable. I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t had the chance to try it out for myself. I knew LaFlamme Denis was aging well but thought it was her genetics. After using Nova Essence Cream for two weeks I was already looking years younger." - Jennifer Valentyne, 50

"I refuse to wear a lot of makeup and thanks to Nova Essence Cream I don’t need to. My skin has never looked better and it looks younger than it did 10 years ago. I love waking up knowing I don’t need to bother trying to cover up my skin." - Jeanne Beker, 66

"I noticed that my skin was looking tired. It was dull and starting to lose its elasticity. LaFlamme gave me a sample of Nova Essence Cream and the product is a miracle worker. It only took a few days for my skin to be taut, smooth and glowing again just like it was in my 20’s." - Liza Fromer, 48

"I thought there was no way to hide my age until LaFlamme let me try Nova Essence Cream. I had resigned myself to the fact that it was only downhill from here, but with Nova Essence Cream that isn’t the way. Every night that I use Nova Essence Cream I wake up looking younger and more radiant. I can’t believe it." - Tracy Moore, 43

"It’s hard to believe but all my wrinkles have vanished! They have completely disappeared. I used to have lines around my mouth, eyes and forehead. But after a month of using Nova Essence Cream my skin is completely smooth without a wrinkle in sight." - Dina Pugliese, 43

TRY IT FOR YOURSELF

While Nova Essence Cream is selling out around the world, LaFlamme didn’t want our readers to miss out on experiencing the benefits of Nova Essence Cream for themselves.

LaFlamme is offering our lucky readers the chance to try Nova Essence Cream for FREE!

There’s no need to rush out to the shops or wait in line. You can order your free sample of the serum right now from the comfort of your own home. The only thing you’ll need to pay for is the discounted shipping rate, which is less than $6!

If you want to remove your wrinkles and get that youthful glow back into your complexion, make sure you use Nova Essence Cream every day.

Hey Caitlin!

No sooner did she turn 14 than Caitlin suddenly turned radio host! Mom (my illustrious daughter Shannon) took her to work today, and I must say she looks good with those headphones on. Hosting can't be far away.

In other news, Caitlin looks happy with her hand-knitted birthday present from Grandma, who never thought she'd still be knitting blankies at this stage. Sixteen balls of wool, a few weeks with the needles and a few dollars spent at Michaels, but I must say it all turned out well.

NEWS FLASH! 

More of Caitlin the journalist, learning camera techniques from a CTV technician. She also appeared for a nanosecond in a story her mother did, but I can't post that one unless it pops up on YouTube. Stay tuned!

                 And here she is in her Halloween costume.

Lone Outrider: Glen Allen's private battle

Glen Allen remembered in his own words

Blogger's note. Tomorrow, September 10, is World Suicide Prevention Day, though it seems that almost nobody knows about it or pays it much mind. Certainly the internet has been virtually silent about it, while posting millions of responses to a video by an obnoxious blonde screaming about "fat shaming". Mental health shaming is an invisible, silent thing, though it registers on sufferers like an ice pick to the solar plexus. The reason no one mentions it is that it is considered unremarkable and even normal. It just does not register anywhere.

When I woke up today I remembered this piece. It was something I had seen before, reproduced on someone else's blog. I knew Glen Allen. We never met face-to-face, but we wrote to each other regularly for ten years while he went through storms that I can only imagine. How he functioned as well as he did, for as long as he did, is remarkable, a fact that is almost never taken into account with (and how I hate the term) the "mentally ill". 

After being out of touch for years, I learned Glen's fate in 2005, when I was at the apogee of my own storm: I opened my daily paper and saw his picture under the obituaries. Having just taken a massive overdose, he had wandered out of a psychiatric ward in Toronto and passed out beside the railroad tracks in sub-zero December. How people die says something about the way they lived, and it struck me as oddly apropos that he died like some of the street people he understood and loved so well. 

What I didn't know, because he never told me, is that he wasn't just a newspaper reporter but an award-winning print journalist for Maclean's Magazine, war correspondent, English teacher in China, volunteer in mental health services, producer for CBC's national radio show Morningside, and no doubt many other things he didn't think significant enough to mention. 

This piece is very long, but I run it here without edits. Without a doubt, it is the best piece on depression, bipolar disorder and mental illness in general that I have ever read, and it is typical of Glen that he generously shared it even while struggling with his own recovery. Even in the throes of a consuming illness, Glen Allen had a certain unmistakeable quality of grace.

(The following story appeared in the New Brunswick Reader on June 19.
1999, under the headline Angels of Madness. Glen Allen was found frozen
to death last week in Toronto.)

By Glen Allen

The anesthetist, head swathed in a surgeon's fez, plunges the needle in
a ready vein and leans over and says, "You'll smell the smell of garlic
and then you'll be out."

And out I am in this fourth of a series of eight shock treatments on
the psychiatric wing of the Saint John Regional Hospital. While I'm
unconscious, a nurse places two electrodes on my skull and the attending
psychiatrist flips a switch, sending a powerful current of electricity
into the addled spheres of my brain.

Odd as it may seem - odd because no one really knows why it works - I
awake feeling refreshed in the recovery room where I am asked my name,
the date, where I am. I not only answer the questions in rapid order but
I note the clarity of the vivid colours all around, the pleasant
ticking of a clock hung on the wall, the murmur of friendly voices. I am
climbing out of the pit of suicidal despair that sent me to the hospital -
the fifth stay in hospital in three provinces in two years - in the
first place. And for the first time in a long time, I feel healthy and I
tell myself that this is how other people, untroubled by the mania or
depression that has come out of the dark closet of my mind every decade
for the last 40 years, must feel most of the time.

Electro-convulsive therapy (ECT), as it is properly known, is the
treatment of last resort for some psychiatric afflictions, notably
depression, and I haven't experienced it for 44 years. A frightened and deeply
depressed boy of 15 - by far the worst time in my life - I was given a
series of treatments without the benefit of anesthesia and while I don't
remember much beyond that first rude shock I felt well for 10 years, I
left home and enjoyed a successful career in the construction industry
from the far North to California until this strange and cruel malady
caught up with me once again.

Manic depression, or bipolar disorder as it is now called in these days
of political correctness, touches the lives of one of every 100 New
Brunswickers. It is an often devastating malaise that can strike without
warning, rendering its victims subject, initially, to inexplicable
"highs" that can spin out of control. First comes "hypomania" - a time of
great busyness and well-being and then follows full-blown mania when the
afflicted persons will make great plans, sleep not at all, feel a sense
of grandiosity, spend wildly and travel widely.

It can also be a time of delusion or even hallucination (hearing,
seeing or smelling things that aren't there) marked by extreme irritation
with family or friends who cannot share this experience. This condition
leads the manic persons to believe that what they are doing is
absolutely correct. They may, as I have done in the past, write floridly mad
letters to everyone but the Queen simply because it seems necessary to
alert the world to some clear and present danger, again the right thing to
do.

But mania can go well beyond this epistolary extravagance. Earlier this
year, in the grip of mania and hospitalized in Montreal, I saw my
father - dead, lo these 35 years - in elevators and there was a constant
jabber of voices in my ear, one of them a basso profundo saying over and
over again with astonishing clarity in Chilean Spanish, "Los pobres son
dijes" (The poor are good). Prior to this, I nurtured the idea - the
same fevered idea I had had the year before - that I had to travel to
Northern Alberta's Peace River country to complete a novel my father had
written decades ago - one in which the heroine and her children seek to
make a new home there but never actually arrive. I had hitched a ride
with a trucker headed for Calgary. He insisted I leave his company
somewhere south of North Bay, Ont., and get psychiatric help. ("You're out
of it, man," I recall him saying as he reached over and opened the
passenger door.)

I made my way to Montreal where I ended up in St. Luc Hospital and
later a halfway house where a barrage of drugs including lithium
established a calmer state of mind. After two months of recuperation, I returned
to Saint John where my truly enlightened employer gave me yet another
chance to ply my trade as a reporter. But within weeks, mania had come
full circle: its sinister cousin, clinical depression had set in. I felt
a blackness of mood, a sense of dread and despair and a longing to end
my hopeless life I hadn't felt since an earlier suicide attempt and
once more entered the hospital where, this time, ECT was the indicated
treatment.

Looking back on it all now, I might have known something was amiss when
I was yet a small child. My father was off at war and my saintly
mother, I was convinced in my five-year-old mind, was a German spy. When that
war ended and the Cold War began, I was sure that the Soviet Union, our
latest enemy, would invade the leafy precincts of my Toronto
neighbourhood. I remember staring at the Disney decals on my bedroom wall and
believing that taken together they were a bizarre scroll of destiny: the
world would end in fire.

Shortly after that, my parents split up and I was seized with a sense
of power - perhaps my first "manic" episode - when I became their
go-between. Each would have me memorize messages for the other and when my
father - a man deeply hurt by the war - came to pick me up for Sunday
outings in his 1947 navy Pontiac, I would do my best to heal the breach,
subtly altering their second-hand messages so as to ensure that each
knew the other was loved and deeply missed. In hindsight, it was the wrong
course to take. They lived together in a stormy alcoholic marriage
until both died of cancer in their mid-fifties.

But once this feat of wishful thinking was accomplished, I fell into
the deepest of depressions, a malaise that was to last for years. Alone
in my room for days at a time, I wept incessantly and wished for
release. One desperate day, I cut across a wrist with a broken bottle and an
alert doctor in a hospital emergency ward recognized the act for what it
was, a cry for help, and recommended to my bewildered mother that my
mental state be assessed. My parents shared society's distaste for
anything that smacked of mental illness and had a deeply felt distrust of
mental-health practitioners. They had already taken me out of school, read
the angry and despairing poems I had fixed to my wall; they had watched
as I refused food and the attentions of my friends, but they were

reluctant to place me in the hands of the shrinks as if once there, there

would be no turning back. But there was no alternative: I was taken to

see the good Dr. Grant who clapped me in hospital and after rest and
conventional therapies of the day failed, suggested ECT.

And so it went. I would have eight or nine trouble-free years until the
monster reappeared and I would be swept up in the rising and falling
tide of mood. Indeed, in the sixties I spent time in a hospital in
Chicago and 10 years later in Montreal, I jumped in front of a moving bus. In
the mid-eighties, a full two years were blighted by bipolar illness.
That was a time of sheer terror and misadventure. Among other things, I
had concluded that the big banks were to blame for all of society's
ills. I hired a video camera crew and forayed into one of the major bank's
headquarters in downtown Montreal, shooting footage of executives at
their desks. I was also convinced at one point that the Mafia was after
me.

Then came last year and this - two botched trips out West, time in a
hospital in Thunder Bay, then Montreal and three stays in the facility in
Saint John, one of them in a coma following a suicide attempt.

All this time, all through these years I had been told by professionals
that I had to take medication - namely, lithium - to ward off the
depredations of an illness that is of the brain, not of the mind, an illness
that is largely due to faulty genes and biochemistry being grievously
out of whack.

But for years, especially when I felt well, I denied to myself and to
the world at large that I had bipolar disorder. I wanted badly to be
like other people, even given the fact that members of my immediate family
had been stricken in the same way resulting in hospitalizations and
suicide.

Instead of taking my pills, I would attempt to cope in other ways.
Sadly, until the bottom fell out of my world in 1984, I drank heavily, just
as my father had done before me. I also moved constantly. I always felt
better for a time when I changed location. I have lived and worked in
England, Italy, Algeria, three American states and seven Canadian
provinces. After I married, I trucked my little family around, bag and
baggage, as far afield as Chile and China.

.

But there were no cures, only palliatives. One of them - alcohol - was
ruinous. As for travel...well, as someone wiser once said, when you get
off the bus you're always there waiting for yourself. Depression, my
lone outrider, would inevitably close in just as a ship spotted as a tiny
smudge on the horizon inevitably comes to shore, looming larger than
life itself.

Manic depression is a mood disorder as opposed to schizophrenia, which
is a disorder of the thought process itself. In it, there is a
disruption of a person's normal emotional states, such as happiness or sadness.
The moods of manic depression include at one end, utter melancholy,
passivity and fatigue and thoughts of suicide and at the other, elation,
grandiosity, agitation and, when extreme, delusions and hallucinations.
Delusions can include grandiose beliefs: a person may think she or he
has special talents or is related to a special person. A manic might
also believe that he or she is the subject of whispers of friends and
strangers alike, or that Lloyd Robertson is sending special messages during
his newscast. Hallucinations are usually imagined sights or sounds.
Auditory hallucinations are more common (although all senses may be
affected) and may have a religious overtone, such as the voice of God or
angels and may sound like commands.

Most people go through many more bouts of depression than mania, though
to be considered "bipolar" a person must have gone through at least one
manic episode. For some, it is a chronic illness that becomes more
pronounced with age but a manic depressive typically goes through long
periods of remission in his or her life. A person may be relatively
symptom-free with only mild mood swings for years, then for any number of
reasons (the primary one being discontinuing prescribed medication) the
cycle returns.

There are manic depressives who experience only one cycle in their
lives and others in whom the illness disappears at an early age. But
complicating things is the fact that depression and mania can exist at the
same time. As writers Diane and Lisa Berger state in their excellent
primer on manic depression called We Heard the Angels of Madness, the term
"bipolar disorder" deceives because the mania and depression "do not
occur in even opposition. It is not like the North Pole and the South
Pole; instead, it more closely resembles two points on the equator.
They're side by side, sharing a border and overlapping.

Researchers don't yet have a definitive cause of manic depression but
they do know that it runs in families and that defective genes must, in
part, be at fault.

But all that said, why tell this tawdry story at all? I have lost all
appetite for the confessional and take no pleasure in this exercise. But
there are two points I would like to make in passing. One relates to
stigma. The mentally ill, however much society has changed in recent
years, are prey to an abundance of myth and misinformation that is, quite
simply, astonishing.

Victims of major mental illness - schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and
clinical depression - are still often shunned and tucked away, even
though their maladies, most experts would now agree, are physical in
nature, just like diabetes or heart disease. And the most serious of these
diseases, schizophrenia, has disabled many of the 300,000 Canadians
affected by it, many of them young people in their prime. They are our sons
and daughters, wives and husbands, our neighbours and we have all too
often tended to see them as a tribe apart, spoken of in whispers. They
are no more "violent" than the population at large and their illnesses
are, for the most part, episodic in nature. Most enjoy great islands -
even archipelagos - of calm and productivity between short-lived bouts
of illness. And they are much with us: one of five New Brunswickers, at
some point in their lives will, like me, go beyond the brink and need
the attentions of the mental-health-care system.

The other point worth making is that there is help out there. Each of
13 regions in the province has a community mental-health-care centre
staffed by a psychiatrist or two, nurses, social workers and
psychologists. There are problems: there is a dire shortage of child and adolescent
psychiatrists and public money is short indeed for the chronically ill.
But for the most part, the work of this corps of professionals is
largely unsung. While they may be too few for the demands placed upon them,
in my experience - a view confirmed recently by an Ontario study - New
Brunswick has one of the best mental health-care systems in the nation.

Meanwhile I have come through once again feel eminently sane. If the
demons come calling again it won't be for many years hence. I have hope,
I have met some interesting people along the way and am very glad to be
alive.

For these blessings I thank the God of my understanding. Without Him by
my side would I have been here to tell this sometimes sorry tale?

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

The way we die is the way we live: a case study

The way we die is the way we live

Or have lived.

I have seen it over and over. A man I knew who lived fast, sucked down alcohol and smoked like a ruin died hard. At least he died quickly, opening the door of his truck by the side of the road and collapsing. He was dead by the time he hit the ground.

Others, unable to let go, trying desperately to stay in control, waste away horribly for years, and years, and years.

I’ve seen near-miracles, like the woman I knew through my former church who was terminally ill and determined to die at home. This was not a cheery or positive woman, though her saracastic digs were often howlingly funny (so long as they weren’t aimed at you).

But something happened here, something strange and quite wonderful. This woman’s friends knew that her sarcastic quips were just a cover for a fragile and loving heart. There ws a sweetness in her that contrasted beautifully with the sour.

Without even sitting down to work it out, shifts of people  began to look after her so she could stay in her home as long as it was practical.  Towards the end, this involved bathing and feeding and taking care of her most basic needs.

At the very end, when she lay dying in hospital, her two sons, estranged from her and from each other for a dozen years, stood on either side of her bed. There’s just something so powerful about standing by someone, about being there. Attending.

It’s not a fancy and certainly not a squishy-squashy word, but at the end, it means everything.

A lot of people I know, if they are courageous enough to name their ultimate fear, will say “Dying alone.” There is something so hollow about it, indicative of an empty life with no significant attachments.

How you die almost always reflects how you have lived.

A couple of years ago I saw something in the paper and, before I could stop myself, exclaimed, “Holy.” It’s a silly expression – don’t even know where it came from - that just pops out of me when I am truly surprised.

It was an obituary in the Vancouver Sun. I won’t say the man’s name because I don’t wish to be barbecued all over again, but suffice it to say he was a local Vancouver not-quite-celebrity, a newspaper writer for the Sun who pretty much worked in one place all his life.

He was almost always described as “acerbic”, meaning he could be acid, even caustic, but his remarks caused gales of laughter among those who were NOT his target.  He was the master of schadenfreude and could summon it with a snap of his fingers. There is no way you can convince me he didn’t get pleasure out of it.

I knew him as a theatre critic at first, and I noticed right away the carbolic quality which could be quite funny in a mean Dorothy Parker-esque way. Then he was assigned the classical music beat, and was away to the races.

People pretended to be OK with his excoriating remarks, even tried to see them as an honour, though I don’t know what they thought in private.  He did like certain artists, though he was extremely picky and seemed to have supernaturally-sensitive hearing. If a violinist lost a single horsehair from his bow, he noticed, and he wasn’t charitable about it.

His weekly column on the bizarre phenomena of urban life ran for a few years and could be immensely entertaining. But that’s not the thing I want to write about today.

At some point in the early ‘90s I must have sent him something. I do remember a bizarre visitation by Liz Taylor at the local Eatons store to promote some new fragrance, Black Molluscs or something. I sent him my newspaper column about it, and he actually responded: “Ol’ Violet Eyes! I might just steal that one. I only steal from the best.”

This didn’t seem like a mean or acerbic man. Over the years I sent him sporadic bits and pieces, and to my astonishiment, one year he sent me a Christmas card. I couldn’t quite call him a friend, but he did respond to most of the bits I sent, mainly clippings from my column.

Once in typical acerbic fashion, he sent me a couple of CDs - one was of a Russian baritone whose name escapes me - with a note saying, "This is not a gift. It's just some stuff I had lying around." He never wanted anyone to see him as nice.

Then he sort of went underground: wrote a few pieces for the Georgia Straight and disappeared, apparently into retirement.

So that was that, until one day I encountered a very weird sight.

That Grand Master of the poison zinger, that excoriating critic of technology and all things progressive, had a Facebook page!

I couldn’t quite believe it, but there it was. It had all sorts of comments from people, photos, stuff he’d done, etc. It certainly looked real.

It had been, oh, five or six years since I’d heard anything from him. I knew I couldn’t “friend” him, that he'd never respond to it even if he was there, but tried to send a message anyway. It went something like:

Good to see you again! Have you interviewed the countertenor Michael Maniaci?
I have his new CD and it knocks me over.  Interested to hear your view. Hope this gets to you.”

Boy, did it.

Though I wasn’t his Facebook “friend”, he wasted no time in answering me.

“This was a mistake. I am not on Facefuck. I have no interest in joining a herd of vacuous idiots. Hope this gets to you.”

Uh. If you’re not on Facefuck, how can you answer a Facefuck message?

It was all very upsetting.

I did find a few things out. I mentioned his name to someone I knew, one of those I-know-everybody types who was as gay as the day is long (an expression he particularly favors). “Oh, THAT guy. He has a reputation, you know. They tell me he’s the most arrogant, cruel, narcissistic, heartless, ruthless bastard they have ever met.”

Oh my (again)!

So that was that, until my “Holy!” day: I saw  a full-page spread in the obituary section, which is certainly more attention than he had ever received before. You have to die to get that.

He was dead, so they ran a large full-color photo of him and remarks by (all retired) Sun employees about how “acerbic” his writing was, and how wonderful, and how he was wasted in Vancouver and should have been writing for the New Yorker. And about how he preferred to keep his private life private.

Colleagues mentioned his kindness, but there was a hedge-y quality to some of it. There were also stories of him hiding behind a post at concerts when he saw a friend or colleague coming his way.

But apparently, this was OK because he was dead now and already being elevated to sainthood in that strange, strange way the dead are always elevated. I have often wondered if this is nothing more than a superstitious fear that the bastards will come back and haunt us.

I did not react well. I was furious at all the statements about his kindness, how in spite of his poison darts he was a truly gentle soul, etc. The man was an asshole and I wanted the world to know it.

I didn’t think hard about it and I did use his real name, a bad idea. I posted my feelings on my blog, and they were not charitable (though I assumed no one would read it). But I had tagged it with his name (duh: the part of me that DID want people to see it). It wasn’t long until I received feedback, not the kind of feedback you ever want to see.

“You mean you are going to rip into this man and destroy his family before the body even hits the ground?”

“I have never in my life seen anything so merciless. You are a sick, sick woman.”

Message boards said things like “it sounds like she was totally obsessed, maybe stalking him", and "he had probably been trying to scrape her off his shoe for years.”

Someone began to swing the word "lawsuit" around like a great medieval axe blade, a particularly nasty form of verbal bullying I hadn't seen in quite some time.

It’s funny how in moments like this, dynamics are neatly reversed. It drives me completely crazy. Like a bizarre weather vane, there is a complete 180-degree turn, and ALL the nasty things a person has done are heaped on to the person who has been hurt by them.

It’s insanity, and it happens all the time. It's one of the darker, wormier, more cowardly aspects of people, a way to scrape off blame for their sins so they never have to face them or take responsibility.

But there was more going on than that. I think I hit a nerve here, because it was obvious to me that this was a lonely, bitter old man (not THAT old – only in his 60s, but the lonely die young) who died without inspiring much real grief.  A blog post I read later, written by a friend, was much more honest than the verbal Cool Whip posted in the Sun. She spoke of his kindness, but then said he frequently isolated himself and could suddenly and inexplicably cut off friends in the manner of Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

Oh my, again.

Then came the truly heartbreaking part: as he lay dying in hospital, a few colleagues from his Vancouver Sun days were having trouble piecing together any facts about his life. Where was he born ? Was it Saskatchewan? Didn’t he have a brother? Where did he go to school? Nobody knew.

As far as I know, there was no one from his family there, no one to stand by him as his life ebbed away.

I will never know why he attacked me that way when I was simply trying to renew a connection, not a close one, but one that had occasionally been fun. I don’t know why there was a Facebook page set up in the first place when he said he wasn’t on “Facefuck” and probably despised such things. (Another colleague described his work habits as being out of the 1950s, along with his attitudes and TV preferences: all he watched was Turner Classic Movies.)

Somebody mentioned a wake, and even said, “Will you be there, Margaret Gunning?” I really needed more acid thrown in my face. Still later I read a post on someone else's blog which nearly peeled my skin off in a single piece. I was described as a deranged crank and even a “stinky old biddy” (a masterpiece of description!). The post was accompanied by a goofy picture of me posing with my bird on my shoulder, a clear attempt to paint me as a lunatic. It sure must have taken her a lot of time to track that one down, as I posted it back in 2008.

I guess I should’ve known better than to speak ill of the dead. I broke some sort of primal rule, but I was just pissed off at all this glowing praise of a man who had a few other traits besides kindness and gentleness. Try vitriol and nastiness.

I did take my post down and posted a brief apology on the Straight message board. My timing had been bad. Fury has abated, to be replaced mostly with pity. I wonder about that wake now, whether it ever happened with so few people.  And I wonder if any of his mysterious, even chimeric family members would have attended, because it seems to me that attending was not their strong suit. 


http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm