When you approach from the back you will see workmen and scaffolding. You will see concrete, lines of vehicles and pylons. You will see obstacles. You will see a place you do not want to be. And at the top of the driveway leading to the entrance, there is a small bench beneath an overhang. It’s utilitarian, a place for patients to sit as they wait for transport. There is no view to be had, just cars and cement and shadow, and sitting there you feel like you’re in a parking garage. On the ground beside the bench, sesame seeds are scattered. A patient almost certainly makes a slow procession to this place each day. Feeling fragile and less than he remembered, his bare legs exposed beneath his hospital gown, he would cast seeds to the tiny birds who would come to feed. Amidst all this mess, this construction and revision, this tangle of concrete and flesh, he would sustain them. This mercy, his daily gift. And he would watch the birds hop and cheep, marvelling at their perfect eyes and darting movements, their little, old man legs and mysterious feathers, and how with one small breath they were up and away, lifting into the blue skies just beyond.

They didn’t talk much, although the one with the small, white hospital towel draped over his knees, offered that, “heart disease might be involved, too.” He took a drag from his cigarette as he waited for a response. You could see the tattoos covering his hand, the IV piercing the skin just above the word HATE spelled out on his knuckles, the smoke being exhaled. The other guy nodded. He had nothing to say. And with that the conversation disintegrated. Just space between them now. An unbroachable distance. Grief-struck and lost, a million miles apart, they looked through all the people passing by on the sidewalk in front of them, and stared off into other worlds.

As I was waiting in the elevator, a woman suddenly angled through the closing doors and appeared amongst us. Slightly startled and self-conscious, she looked about at the motley crew surrounding her. A handsome man, with whom she had just made eye contact, asked her what floor she wanted.

“Seven,” she said, and then as if it was a word she thought she was saying in her head rather than out loud, softly added, “oncology.”

Nobody said anything, and she looked down. Her blond hair was still shiny and immaculately maintained, and she had one of those artificial tans that stood out, somehow suggesting she had always aspired to be a trophy to someone.

She smiled weakly at me, “ To look at me you wouldn’t even know, “ she began, but then as if seized by a kind of shame, she stopped. None of us felt like we belonged, it wasn’t just her. And then we all rode the elevator up in awkward silence, each one of us getting off at our own particular floor, each one stepping into a world we never dreamed we might belong.

returning to the hospital always feels like stepping into a church, into the holy. Everybody there, whether they know it or not, are in a state of pilgrimage, of prayer.

In the atrium a motley assembly of musicians formed. They were a group of people recovering from mental health and addiction issues, with a few ringers tossed in to add some structure to their compositions. The conductor, an energetic and wiry tangle of holistic cliches, worked hard to inspire her students but most of them remained tense, staring flatly at the floor rather than the crowd that had gathered across from them. Their voices were thin and straining, but still, the congregation rose with the music, an original composition called, “Coming Through Darkness.”

And how did they do that?

How did each one of them push trauma to the side to stand where they were that day?

Oh Lord, let their music, that glowing idea, comfort us all.

And then down the hallway there was a display of art created by patients as part of their therapy. Out of all the generic scenes of landscapes and flowers and pets, there was one work that stood out to me.

Mary of the Roses.

As if floating above the others, as if shining.

And I imagined the woman painting it, how with each brush stroke another layer of her anxiety fell away until this new, beatified horizon emerged.

As I left the hospital, a First Nation’s man beating a drum stood outside on the sidewalk, the flames painted on a food truck rising behind him.

We nodded at each other and I remained, watching and listening, as steams of indifferent people passed by.

A tall, homeless man shuffled down the sidewalk and when he walked into the music, without a word he started to dance. First with his fingers. Slow pointing. Cool pointing. And then his body began to move.

His shoulders, his legs, his fingers, his head, all in surprising and beautiful concert with this simple drumming. Suddenly, he was the revelation of hidden genius–he was a burning bush in our midst. He danced for perhaps a minute and then he stopped, and falling back into the broad, rigid silence from which he came, he continued silently through the day.

There was something that seemed miraculous about this, and the drummer and I– the only people who had seen it– grinned at one another.

“It’s part of the magic of the flow, “ the drummer said. “I like to do this in front of the hospital. People are scared and preoccupied, and then they hear the drum calling to their spirit and it lifts them. Spirit takes them places, it unhooks them from their mortal self and for a moment they are free.  We are signposts in this world, here to help people find their way.”

Miracles, right that moment, unfolding all across the city.

Sitting on the sidewalk between the mailbox and garbage can was a man selling pens. He wore a red ‘Fly Emirates’ hat, had a distended tongue that protruded through his mouth, a tracheotomy tube sticking out of his throat and loosely bandaged hands. He was so low to the ground and positioned in such a way that it was difficult to tell if he had legs or not, and he gave the appearance of some wax creation melting into the grey concrete.

A chopper sounded unseen in the sky above, likely landing on the roof of the Children’s Hospital right around the corner. Somebody, all sorts of people even, were in the midst of the worst, most unimaginable day of their lives.

A handsome business man with an immaculately trimmed beard strode by as if on a catwalk. Standing about 6’3, he was resplendent in a perfectly fitted suit that he’d accented with a pair of beautiful Italian shoes and a pocket square. He spoke calmly into his phone as if he was in control and absolutely  everything  was  going  exactly  as  planned.

Walking toward him was a blonde woman who was just as thin as a blade. She was concentrating so hard on looking unattainable she seemed angry, like she was off to eliminate an enemy. Dressed expensively, she was so deeply articulated by fashion that it was hard to imagine anything existing beyond exterior.  Behind sunglasses and confident on high heels, as inky as a shadow she smoked–an image to be captured rather than a person to be spoken to.

It seemed that these two people, these two vectors of power and beauty, had been moving their entire lives toward this moment of collision, but they passed without incident or plot, and the man selling pens on the street beneath their indifferent gazes cast such a stark contrast as to feel like a biblical thunderbolt. 

Moving his mouth to no effect, he held out a pen to everybody who passed, but nobody stopped or even noticed him. Not a single person. He was beneath their sight line, both figuratively and literally, and may as well have been living in a completely different world.

A woman on crutches was standing near him. You could tell that she wasn’t sick– that she’d just had a minor accident and was still living in one world and not the other. But still, she was angry. She might have been angry about a lot of things. She was limping about very dramatically, exaggerating, exasperated that that the cab stand was 20 meters away. The beggar, wordless and unseen, waved a car over for her, and as one materialized, she limped furiously past, never noticing the blessings of the saint kneeling before her.

Well, the time has come!

Having experienced many medical crises in my lifetime, I know a thing or two about the chattering beast that is anxiety. However, my story is one of hope, as I was able to conquer my anxiety using a variety of techniques that I hope to share with the public.

This is a partial transcript of Anxiety Nation, my first podcast:

(Introductory music of Under Pressure by Queen and David Bowie plays)

“Hi, I’m Michael Murray, host of Anxiety Nation!

It’s on this podcast where I hope to create a safe space for you, a place where we can openly share our experiences with anxiety and strategies to overcome it. Although I’ll be our guide on this journey, I want you to know that we’re all equal partners in this voyage, and that it will be always be a collaborative, team effort.

I just want to take a moment to identify our introductory music, the classic Under Pressure by Queen and David Bowie. It’s just an amazing piece of music. Although its true the artists who brought us this great song both died before their time, and that we’ll all die much sooner than we expect, you shouldn’t let that cold, barren fact alter your mood! No, that would be NEGATIVE thinking, and we’re about positivity here!

“Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see a shadow.”

Helen Keller said that.

She was deafblind.

Imagine that.

She couldn’t see or hear her enemies approaching.

Anyway, if Helen Keller could manage her anxiety, then so can we!

Okay, how’s everybody feeling? Good, I hope! Before we proceed with today’s lesson, I just want to remind you that you shouldn’t still be thinking or obsessing about how Freddie Mercury and David Bowie died.

It was from AIDS and cancer for those of you who might have forgotten, and it’s true, these diseases kill without prejudice– they just take you. Anyway, that should be out of your heads! DON’T FOCUS ON THE NEGATIVE, because by doing that you can start a cycle that’s nearly impossible to break.

Okay, let’s clear our heads of death and disease.

Let’s all close our eyes, take a deep breath and think about all the beauty that Freddie Mercury and David Bowie brought into our lives. Breathe in the good, exhale the bad, breathe in the good, exhale the bad.

Good. Feel better?

Yes, yes.

Okay, I’ve created a 21 day program that I’d like to share with you that should help alleviate any anxiety you might be suffering and put a little spring in your step.

Day 1

Drink eight glasses of FILTERED water each day. It’s very important to stay hydrated. Your mental health is directly tied to your physical health. They say Freddie Mercury weighed less than 100 pounds at his death. David Bowie probably did, too. People associate weight loss with health, but really, when most people die they’re at their thinnest. Just something to think about.

No tap water, by the way. Chemicals in there. Heavy metals and God knows what else. Tap water is VERY dangerous. Just look at Flint, Michigan.

You must drink FILTERED water. Eight glasses. Nine is too many, something could happen. Just drink eight.

(Beeping sound from a phone goes off)

Jesus! What the hell is that??!!

Does anyone else hear it?

(Something falls and a dog begins to bark hysterically, podcast ends.)

After I got the phone call informing me that I had advanced cancer, I went to the New Edinburgh Pub. I sat at the end of the bar,  so thin and pale and hunched as to be little more than a shadow on the periphery, and ordered a half liter of red wine and a large soda water, and then quietly flipped through a newspaper for the rest of the night. That was over 20 years ago, but I remember it like it was yesterday.

The New Edinburgh Pub, located on Beechwood in Ottawa, wasn’t too far from where my parents lived.

It’s a generic place, a standard Ottawa pub that looks like it was made from a Build-Your-Own-Bar kit. It wasn’t ugly, but there was just no mind paid to the character or aesthetics of the place, and it reflected nothing back to you. It was nobody’s first choice, just a space in which you could drink.

The reason that I went to this particular pub on that night is that I didn’t think that I would know anybody there. I wanted to be invisible and uncalled to. I wanted to separate from the herd,  step outside of my life and dissolve into the space around me. I didn’t want to see anybody who might call me back to my life or the one that had been expected of me. I could not bear my own sadness, let alone theirs.

My recovery from the treatments and surgeries for Hodgkin’s Disease took a long time, years, actually, and each night, I went to this pub. It became the bell I had to ring each day, the one that confirmed my survival. And in spite of my desire to be anonymous, to have nobody care about me and vice versa, I became friends with all the staff and regulars.

I went there late, in the drinking hours, and all of us there carried our weights. But the pub served as a place where these weights were lifted, and suspended from our lives we could just sit amongst other people, unjudged and unmeasured.

We all need rest stops like this. And when I think of this place I think of it as being as essential to my recovery as the hospital. I sought to abandon the world, but it was here that I found the world, and that world restored me.

Just the other day, about half and hour before I turned the astonishing and impossible age of 50, I was told that after decades, the New Edinburgh Pub will be closing. This is what the world does. It reinvents itself. And that the landscape of my past is vanishing is nothing new–it happens to everybody, on every single block of this world, but still, it’s a blow, a real loss. And I just want to thank the New Edinburgh Pub– Paul, the truly decent owner, and everyone who worked and spent time there, I want to thank them for being present and sharing that space with me.

We weren’t best pals, but we spent an awful lot of time at the campus pub—The Slick Rooster—cutting classes and drinking, and I suppose we formed a bond, a bond that has surprisingly remained intact over the years. Recently, I got an email from Rob after he heard about my heart surgery:

*********************************

Little Buddy:

Holy shit storm!!

I had no idea your ticker was F’ed! You were always so skinny, you’d think it would have hit a bigger, heavier, more powerful guy like me, but hell, it just goes to show that you never know what’s going  to happen in this crazy world. Who knows, eh? I might still end up with Jennifer Aniston!

If I did, I tell you, we would become a political force that could never be stopped.

Robiffer: A fucking juggernaut.

Who was it you were nuts for? Oh yeah, Demi Moore! You wanted her so bad!! You saw that movie Ghost 8 times!

Remember that pottery scene? That was boner city, man!  Demi Moore reminds me of a lady soccer player. It’s the short hair, like she’s a boy only with really hot boobs and a fine, fine ass.

Have you been watching the lady soccer? No, me neither! LOL!!

Hey, gotta change the tone here for a sec, get heavy.

As you know, I spent some time incarcerated in the hospital, too. Unbelievable that a guy as vital and straight-shooting as myself would get the Big C, but I did. Not stopping me, though. Gotta have a positive attitude, little buddy. Just charge through it like you were a big lineman ploughing through a bunch of nerds, or in your case, a nerd beating on smaller, weaker nerds. What’s beneath a nerd on the totem pole of cool anyway? I mean, who do nerds bully? Do you just throw rocks at animals, or are there actually people you can push around? Interested to know as I always try to relate to my constituents. Wanna speak their language, even if it is Nerdlish.

How were your nurses?

Hot or Not?

That was a game I played to pass the time. I would look at each nurse and ask myself, “Would you do her?” I’m not sure what the percentage was, but it was pretty high. There was one little sex bomb name Sylvie.

( .Y .)

 Jesus. They couldn’t let her work on the cardiac floor because she’d send all her patient’s blood pressure through the roof!  LOL!! Shit brick house, that one, and an accent that was better than any porn film I’ve ever seen. Always asked her for a sponge bath– once, I even offered her three hundred bucks for one, but I don’t think her english was too good because she never responded. The city of Toronto has to legislate that everybody fucking speaks and understands ENGLISH and that it is their ONLY language.  Those that don’t comply? Fucking deported.

Loved the drugs in hospital. Hydromorphone.

They’ll tell you to only take one, but screw that, take two, maybe three, for a good high. You will float right to the fucking ceiling and then have the best sex of your life with that goddamn ceiling. It is that good.

It will bung you up eventually, but it’s still worth it.

Get well soon, Little Buddy!

Big Rob

She was young and pretty, a student studying to become a dietician, and her youth, cast amidst the somewhat resigned and much older counterculture of porters, seemed to make everybody a little giddy. Her innocence and simple optimism was a narcotic, and all the men stood a little straighter and attempted to make charming remarks around her. She cheerfully pushed me about in my wheelchair as if it was some high school game and not life on the slippery slope, and it made me want to be outside, in the sun of some past, leaning back and resting my head against her and the limitless smell of her hair… but no, no– there is much work to do.

We pass so many people in the hospital corridors. The always smiling Happy Cancer Ladies, who’ve either discovered their bliss through illness or are frozen in panic, unable to move their focus from the positive for one second lest they shatter into a million pieces. Gratitude radiates from them, and they smile at me as if I’m a precocious child, making gentle, almost holy room for my slender passage. And then suddenly, I was part of a long procession of wheelchairs passing by—bald and pale cancer patients, a girl burned with acid from an honour attack and an elderly man with skin so thin you could almost see into his past. The Happy Cancer Ladies stand aside and beam, practically applauding, they’re so sincerely proud of us.

Men who wear brown coveralls run the elevators. All day they live in these boxes, these boxes that open and close like respiration. They sit there, flipping through the Toronto Sun and wondering what else the world might have to offer them, and when the new porter wheels me in, something happens. It’s like everybody has had three drinks and is now wearing their favourite shirt. Conversation pipes up, and everybody is talking and laughing and flirting, dispensing wisdom and jokes about the myriad complications of negotiating the underground tunnels.

“I was her mission, “ I say, “I am the treasure she has returned with.”

The young girl laughed because that is what she does, but the elevator man seemed intrigued, “You are a treasure?” “Yes,” I said mystically, “I can grant you a wish. You tell me what you want and I will make sure you get it.” I expected a joke, but I could see in his face that he would not let this happen. He looked at me, stating plainly, “I want my mother to be here with me.”

I put my hand on his forearm, ” You have to close your eyes and imagine her, thinking of the best, safest times you spent together, and through this you will summon her, and you will feel her touch upon your skin, her scent returning…”

It cast a little spell, this, and the girl made the sound of a small animal that wanted to be hugged, while the man stared off at a distant horizon. As I was being wheeled out, the elevator man wanted to tell me something, a message from a song by King Crimson that his language inhibited him from pronouncing, and as he leaned toward me trying to spell the title out, the doors closed, the potential of this information lingering between us for a moment, and then falling away.

Recently, as I was cycling down the street on my way there, I passed a young woman walking down the sidewalk. There was a unique tenderness written into her face that had an almost holy aspect, and she seemed preoccupied, as if all of her emotions were living right there on the surface, and I immediately wanted to know what she was thinking. But as quickly as I glimpsed her, she was gone, receding into the city as I coasted by.

After stopping to do a little banking, I walked into Wellspring about 15 minutes later and saw this woman inside the building waiting for the elevator. I was startled by this coincidence and started up a conversation, one that saw me telling her that my allergies were driving me crazy. Waves of benevolence seemed to pour from her when I said this, and with a humbling compassion and sincerity, she reached out and touched my arm in sympathy. I immediately felt horrible, like some fraud whom she believed was bravely battling through cancer and all the small, secondary miseries that are so often attendant, when the truth was that I was probably the luckiest person in the building. I felt ashamed and grew mumbly, bidding her a goodbye as she stepped out of the elevator and walked into a room where a grief support group was meeting, and I realized then that what I had seen in her face earlier, was the remembering, the cherishing of love, something that still encircled her like light.