There is no doubt that we will all be pulled into the shadows of this life at one time or another, and the path out will almost certainly be unclear.<\/p>\n
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, \u00a0so 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.<\/p>\n
The New Edinburgh Pub, located on Beechwood in Ottawa, wasn’t too far from where my parents lived.<\/p>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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, \u00a0step 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n