Finding the origins of Ray's spiritual growth

Ray Fraser 1941 — 2018: writer and poet, story teller and singer

A few days before he died — he was in palliative care at the Everett Chalmers Hospital just before a move to hospice care in downtown Fredericton — Ray told me that the doctor had been in and offered him the option of an assisted death. He asked me what I thought of that.

I told him it didn't matter what I thought. What mattered is what he thought.

"I don't think the Catholic Church thinks much of it," he said, with a wry smile.

I said it was a very complex issue and it often took the Catholic Church a couple of centuries to reach a fixed conclusion on this kind of thing. That amused him.

He dozed off then and it didn't come up again. I didn't want to bring it up because I didn't want to sound as if I were trying to influence his thinking or to push him into a decision he didn't want to make. Or an opinion he didn't want to have. I did, however, make a point of telling him that if he wanted to talk about it again, I didn't mind but I'd wait for him to bring it up. It never came up again. After his move to the hospice, it was no longer an option and that was okay because I think everything had been said that was going to be said.

After Ray's death, when I was back home at my own computer, I was going through past emails, looking for addresses, people to be contacted, dates of certain events. I came across an email from myself, written on March 2, 2016:

Did you read this? It’s quite an astonishing story and much of it is about Al Purdy. I’m still trying to get my head around it.

The article I linked to was from Toronto Life and was written by John Hofsess. John was a right-to-life activist and before his own death (by assisted suicide), he had facilitated the deaths of eight people, including the poet Al Purdy.

I thought the story would interest Ray because we knew Al Purdy a bit back in the Montreal days and also because he liked Al Purdy's poetry. Ray had started a literary magazine (the infamously-named Intercourse) and he had well-known, high profile contributors — among them, Leonard Cohen, Elizabeth Brewster, Alden Nowlan, Irving Layton and yes, Al Purdy. Ray not only liked Al's poetry but he liked the tough-guy persona that Al affected.

We met him a couple of times at parties where he would usually be the centre of attention — except for the time when he and Margaret Atwood showed up at the same party. She had just won the Governor-General's Award for poetry and Al appeared to happily relinquish the centre-of-attention position to her — for that one time anyway.

Ray's response to my email and to the Hofsess article about assisted death held much more significance for me when I read it last week — a month after we'd talked about it in the hospital — than when I read it two years ago. He wrote:

Interesting. I think a body should do his time and leave when he's meant to, speaking for myself. Although if you turn into one of those brain dead vegetables in old folks homes it might be nice if someone shot you.

All the pain I've known so far has had a lesson in it. As the saying goes, "Pain is the touchstone of spiritual growth". You find things out that way you wouldn't any other. And none of it is needless. That's so far, and so far has gone on for quite a while.

"So far" for Ray amounted to 77½ years.

In a subsequent note, perhaps having re-read the article, he said it struck him that "Hofsess is more an egoist than an altruist." And concluded, "Anyway, I think if you live right you'll probably die right."

I'm thankful that it ended easily for him but I know that "living right" doesn't always guarantee an easy death. Far from it.

The only guarantee is that there are no guarantees.

Even still, I find something comforting in his words that turned out to be prophetic — for him — and displayed a profound belief in some of the origins of his spiritual growth.