A posthumous award for Ray's book, 2019

Ray's last book before his death, Through Sunlight and Shadows, won the 2019 New Brunswick Book Awards prize for fiction. It was presented at a New Brunswick Writers' Federation gala at the Moncton Press Club May 25.

I was very grateful to be there and to have the privilege of accepting the award as Ray's former spouse and as his literary executor. I spoke from notes and this is approximately what I said:

One of the great moments in Ray's life happened when he was a very young man living in Chatham, New Brunswick. He saw a poem by Alden Nowlan and it was the first time he realized that you didn't have to be British, or American, or dead, to be a writer. If he were here tonight, he would see so much more evidence of that early realization.

I know he would want to thank his publisher, Lesley Choyce at Pottersfield Press for making such a beautiful book. And he would thank his many friends who so willingly proof-read and critiqued and edited to make sure it was the best book it could be. He had become a lot mellower as he got older and actually allowed people to make suggestions and possible changes.

My husband, Dan, is here tonight. Dan and I were with Ray during his final hours and in the days leading up to his death, while he was still able to communicate, we could see that one of the things he was most concerned about was his literary legacy.

Because of that, I want to thank the archives at the UNB library and the archivists who worked with us for their careful and loving collection of his works.

The archivist who helped us clear out Ray's apartment was amazing. It was like watching someone panning for gold and pouncing regularly on what was obviously a nugget for her. Pure gold. Ray wrote always and everywhere. He left behind countless notebooks packed with writing that was almost illegible to anyone but him. A scrap of paper on his kitchen table might have been a grocery list or it might have been a list of synonyms — a search for the perfect word. Notes scribbled in the margin of a sports magazine left in his bathroom might be the perfect scrap of dialogue he was looking for.

Christine gathered and filed every one of them and when I was able to tell Ray about the process — he was already in palliative care — it seemed to bring him to a place of peace.

Ray's funeral was held in the church of his childhood and he's buried just a stone's throw from the house where he was born — the house and the church that figure so largely in this very book.

It seems a fitting ending — full circle, in fact, and I think he would see this as a perfect conclusion to this part of his story.

He left some unpublished work so there will be a sequel — I'm his literary executor so I can say that — but talk of that is best left for another day.

Thank you all, so much, for this wonderful honour.

Dan didn't want to be obtrusive while I was speaking — which I think was very considerate — so he shot the pictures from his only possible angle.

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.