My guest blogger this month is Ed Griffin, who teaches creative writing at Matsqui Prison, a medium-security prison in Canada. (Wealth is good, but health is even better.) The best of everything to you all for the New Year. Although given only five years to live, Ron lived to see his son all grown up with a kid of his own who promises to be every bit as much a tiger as he was. (I left that behind with my youth.) The great part about the story is the real-life ending.
Remember, though, I’m a fiction writer: I was never a widow, nor am I contemplating suicide.
#DIGIPOD SELF PUBLISHING FREE#
If you haven’t already done so, you can read Ron’s story FREE at I wouldn’t get out and walk if it wasn’t for her.” He used to say, “She’s been so good for me. He had a miniature fox terrier named Bella, and even when things became difficult for him and he was on heavy doses of morphine, we would still see him walking Bella, growing thinner and thinner every week. As his illness progressed, I saw a bit more of him, making him a baked dinner on Sundays when I made my own, but leaving him in peace to eat it in his own time. He was one of those unsung heroes who live and die unnoticed by the world, known only to a few friends and family. Ron was stoked to see his story in print. The story ended up being short-listed in the Cancer Council of Victoria’s short story competition and included in an exhibition of art, poetry and stories, fiction and non-fiction, that toured country Victoria in (I think) 2009. Later, when I wanted to enter the story in a fiction competition based around the subject of cancer, I added an extra frisson by having the narrator say she’d been on her way to commit suicide and the story of Ron’s courage had stopped her. I’ve never done that before or since I’m not that kind of writer. The whole story rolled off his tongue and when I came home I simply wrote it down, just the way he’d told it to me. When he first moved in, he had a boy who’d just started high school - a wild boy.Ī number of years ago, when Ron was still well and I didn’t even know he had cancer, I went over to his place one day for coffee, and he told me his story, how he’d been given less than five years to live and how he’d decided he couldn’t die because no one else would be able to raise his son, whom he called ‘the kid’. We lived across from one another for over 13 years and, although we were never in and out of one another’s places (we would’ve hated that), we were there for one another. As 2013 draws to a close I find myself thinking more and more about my neighbour Ron, who passed away in October of this year after a long battle with cancer.
0 kommentar(er)
