Tell The Truth

I hadn’t seen her for about ten days. We had gone put for fish and chips at the Dover Arms on Denman. You introduced me to the curry sauce. Where have you been all my life? We ate in my car in the park. Then I drove you back to that hospital room in St. Paul’s, looking out on a view of sunny Vancouver.

The walls in your room were covered with the art of bill bissett. Was it a collection of colour xeroxes that bill had sent you? You showed me how to look at them, how to see more deeply inside each one. To discover the truth within the art.

You and bill went back many years. There used to be a video on Myspace, but it has not been accessible for years now, th quiet releef uv bones. It says it all, but is gone, lost to the passage of time. Your account was not maintained, the platform itself is moribund. Time is the Great Destroyer of Words and Worlds,

We watched Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde, the 1931 black and white version.

There was something spiritual about his strange transformation, from the Doctor to the Patient. The sane rendered unto the insane. The film resonated with the transformation going on in your own body.

You had been complaining of pains in your stomach in August. I had gone to a tradeshow and came back to find you in the hospital. After months of self-medication with marijuana and a hot water bottle, you finally relented to your inner voice, and went to Emergency. It was there that they finally told you the truth— you had stage 4 pancreatic cancer. You asked them what was the plan was now for treatments.

They told you to consider your spiritual options.

Consider Your Spiritual Options. I love and revile that phrase. So blunt. So brutal, and yet, it spoke the truth. You wouldn’t have it any other way.

Here we were, a mere month later, enjoying fish and chips, bill bissett, great views of Vancouver on a sunny autumn day, and watching Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Time had stopped. Everything was in slow motion. Everything, but the cancer, which knew only one motion, to grow.

To consume you. To carry from this world to the next.

It was about ten days after that afternoon, when your daughter, and two other friends, Maria and Danice, and I came to see you at the hospice. You were dying—your skin taught against your bones. You had gone blind. You were transformed from the land of living to a place of near death, only ten days previous, from a nervously laughing friend who took the time to show me how to see within bill bissett’s art to this barely breathing almost corpse.

We talked quietly and reminisced, when suddenly you sat up and pointed at Danice.

“TELL THE TRUTH DANICE. TELL THE TRUTH!!!

Then, having given us your last gift of wisdom, you collapsed back into the bed, once again barely breathing.

Poor Danice. Who knew what your words meant? Was it a message for her alone?

I think not.

It was an order from beyond, from the land where time no longer exists. Where all that exists is time.

I tried to find your video, once posted on the dormant MySpace, th quiet releef uv bones- a video poem of bill’s with his art and put together by you.

Earthearthearth. Ear The Art. Eart Heart Hearth. We would do that. Play with words.

You were one of a kind, then they broke the mold. Thankfully.

I am reminded of your brutal honesty on this day, the day before the day of Truth and Reconciliation. This day is a uniquely Canadian day. A national “holiday”, which is really a Holy Day. A Very holy day. As a settler, I see and hear. I feel the pain, I am a witness to the horrors that we, my ancestors, committed on a deeply spiritual people. It is a scar, and deep wound, that our country may never heal.

But we must honour the pain and the healing. The hell and the chance to say we are deeply sorry. How do we repair the damage?

We only know we must try.

TELL THE TRUTH.

Any healing or reconciliation that may come, will only come from the truth.

Much love and respect to my dear friend Lenore Herb, for your truth and guidance. You are deeply missed.