4 - Friday, February 14, 1992 - North Shore News In death, as in life, he did it his way§ 1 HAD a different topic un- til five minutes ago. I changed my mind. I'm writing about my brother’s death. That’s hard. But it’s harder not to. | haven't thought much about anything else since Gary died the Saturday before tast, on Feb. 1. I pride myself on my control over my material — and my emo- tions. But this one insisted. It wrote itself. Gary would have written it better. But I’m convinc- ed: Gary would have written it. More than that. He'd get some fun into it. Yes, into his own death. Gary was a columnist for the Toronto Star. Maybe Canada’s best, probably the best-paid, cer- tainly the most emotive — able to lift hearts, move them, break them. The Star ran a raft of letters — from people who had wept, wept because they said it was like the loss of a family member — even before the first mail delivery after he died. They’d come down to the Star building, stuffed those grief-stricken letters through the front-door mail slot. Senator Keith Davey, the ‘*Rainmaker’’ who engineered Pierre Elliott“Frudeau’s great elec- tion victories and one of Gary’s closest friends, dropped important business in New York, came home, spoke at the private family service — his voice breaking, the voice of this sophisticated and powerful man_used to handling difficult public situations, apolo- gizing but steadying himself, tell- ing the mourners determinedly “Pll get through this’? — and ‘reading a letter from Trudeau himself, a neighbor of Gary’s at his cottage at St-Sauveur in the . Laurentians. The starting point was last year when a neighbor contacted Gary. He was a doctor. On the’side he ran an up-market fitness clinic, complete with testing apparatus to measure its clients’ fitness. - The recession was hammering the business. Could Gary run through the exercises and maybe - write a column about it? Gary took the tests. You ~hould know that for years Gary was a YMCA regular. A non-smoker. _Non-drinker. Non-womanizer and Trevor Lautens + i GARDEN OF BIASES non-cusser, for that matter. And, at 62, thin — he’d dicted maybe 25 years ago and remained at around 180 pounds. The doctor called back a day or two later. Uncomfortably. He said, carefully, that the tests sug- geste that Gary should see a heart specialist. Gary hated doctors. Hospitals. He loved entertainment, humor, happy scngs, joy — the themes of most of his columns. His wife Jackie, known in those columns as the Resident Love Goddess, had to drag him to the specialist. The specialist said he had a leaky heart valve. Sometime in the next year or two, he said, Gary would have to have a bypass operation. Gary told no one except his wife and three children. He swore them to secrecy. Last summer he was feeling tired. He saw friends less. One, after Gary begged off a yearly ritual shared with two other cou- ples — dinner and a play at the Stratford Festival — wondered if he'd said or done something to cool off the friendship. Gary took him aside. He told him. He swore him to secrecy, too. Usually the most open of men — Gary wrote 8,000 columns, many of them about his family, and two collections about family life, one of them a Book-of- the-Month Club selection for many, many months — he withheld from his readers and his truly amazing circle of acquain- Highway 99 lifeblood of communities - Mitchell From page 2 tinue to upgrade the highway. We’re not going to put a time limit on anything, but we are go- ing to be making a strong repre- sentation in Victoria,’’ he added. If the upgrade to four lanes does not go ahead, Mitchell said the result would be ‘‘disastrous.”’ Said Mitchell, ‘‘Highway 99 is the lifeblood of all of those com- munities. We've looked at the possibility of alternative routes, and for the foreseeable future they are not viable options. As desirable as they may be in the long term, short term we have to deal with the highway we have and continue the process of upgrading.”’ Meanwhile, Wendy Magee, Squamish and Howe Sound Chamber of Commerce manager, said no movement on the highway upgrade would limit growth par- gee nee G Cee reevocerscvcceceseone ticularly in Squamish. The com- munity plans to expand its deep- sea port. Said Magee, ‘‘What the fear is (is) that unless we present a unified voice, that the people in this corridor want this upgrade and support it wholeheartedly, they (Victoria) will look at it and say, ‘Well, they don't know what they’re doing. They’re divided, Jet’s go do something else.’ ’’ According Magee, the Sea-to- Sky Highway carries more than four million cars a year. “Interestingly enough, the ma- jority of the traffic comes to Squamish, it’s not going to Whistler. Whistler only had 550,000 visits last ski season. So out of those 12,000 cars a day travelling that highway, 10,000 cars a day come to Squamish. So that’s why it’s so important to upgrade it to four-lane,’* she said. A New Spirit of Giving A rational program to encourage giveng and volunteering tanceships the truth about his own health. He got more tired. Sometimes he paused on the daily walk to the Star from his home on the edge of Rosedale. He didn't tell the doctor that sometimes his hands and feet felt cold. On Wednesday, Jan. 29, he had lunch — as he did every Wednes- day — with his son Stephen, who is 32. That Friday he had lunch, as he also did every Friday, with his daughter Jane. (He saw his youngest, Richard, a Star photographer, regularly at work.) In between, on the Thursday, he lunched with Senator Davey. On Saturday, he contemplated going to St. Lawrence Market, a frequent diversion. At some point he went upstairs to the bathroom. Jackie read the paper. After a while she wondered why he was taking so long. She found BC RAI him on the bed. He said he wasn’t feeling well. She lay beside him. She felt his heart pounding. She was frighten- ed. He said it was nothing. It had happened before and he’d just lay down for a while and it stopped. She called the doctor over Gary’s protests. The doctor hap- pened to be at the hospital. He heard the details. He insisted Gary come right away. Gary wouldn't. The doctor said he wouldn’t leave until Gary came. Gary tried to strike a deal: he’d come the following Saturday. At some point Gary sat up and began putting on his shoes. Jackie left the room. She heard a thump. She returned. Gary had fallen back on the bed. She phoned the ambulance for this most reluctant patient in the world. LIS The ambulance attendants worked over him for some minutes. Then they said they’d have to take him to hospital. Jackie said she'd get his coat. One casually said, in a way that retrospectively was ominous: “Oh, I don’t think he’ll need that.”” They took him to hospital. He was dead. The whole episode had lasted perhaps 45 minutes. I don’t know if there is a public service message here. Like: Men, see your doctor regularly. I don’t know if it’s a parable about Gary’s firm belief that he applied both to his columns and to parties: Leave early — and leave them laughing. tdo know that my brother, who conveyed so much joy about life to so many readers and lived his own to the full, left it like the song says. He did it his way. eB IAVING A WHITE SALE. @ ow ‘til March 31st, @ BC Rail and Farwest i Adventure's super saver packages can trans- port you to a winter wonderland. Not only will you enjoy spectacular scenery and some of the best winter recreation B.C.'s Cariboo has to offer, but you'll also enjoy not having to drive to get there. 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