I should have written this yesterday, but I just couldn’t. It was too hard. Jack Layton’s untimely death was hard for a number of reasons. First and foremost, I greatly admired him as both a man and a great politician. To quote a commenter on the CBC Tributes page, “Canada has lost the best Prime Minister it never had”.
Jack Layton was passionate, caring and incredibly dedicated. He truly loved our great country and devoted his life, right up to his last days, to making it even greater: not just for the privileged, wealthy and powerful, but for all of us.
He worked tirelessly to help make Canada a better and fairer place. He was famous for his work to eradicate homelessness and violence against women. He fought tirelessly to save the health care system we are so proud of, he was a supporter of public transit and a champion of the environment. But no matter what your political stripe, Jack Layton was also a consensus-builder. Everybody just liked the man. Even my then seven year-old daughter said to me, when I took her with me to the polling station on election day, “Mommy, can you vote for the orange guy? I like him the best.” He had that natural charisma that has been so sadly lacking in Canadian federal politics of late.
And his message…his message was uplifting.
In his own words:
My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.
Wow. Just…wow. Reading that, and the rest of his last letter to Canadians, actually brought me to tears. It is just so sad, so wrong, to lose someone like Jack Layton at age 61, when he had so much left to give. But there’s more to this story. There is the C-word. Cancer.
People dying before their time of cancer has been a theme in my life of late. My cousin Madeleine, who died of cancer at only 31. My friend Laura’s Dad, who passed away at 57. My own mother, young at 67. A dear friend’s husband, who left behind two young children at only 57. Recently another dear friend and an acquaintance heard the dreaded C-word themselves. Young women in their 40s with children and plenty of life to live yet. They’re not Jack Laytons, not movers and shakers on the national stage, but the world only needs a few of those kind of people. It needs a lot of people who live their own lives well every day, like the people I’ve mentioned above who were all taken too soon. They were people who lived by Jack Layton’s words. People who were loving and optimistic. People who, even in the face of illness or certain death, were hopeful.
And hope was one of the things Jack Layton also wrote about in his last letter:
To other Canadians who are on journeys to defeat cancer and to live their lives, I say this: please don’t be discouraged that my own journey hasn’t gone as well as I had hoped. You must not lose your own hope. Treatments and therapies have never been better in the face of this disease. You have every reason to be optimistic, determined, and focused on the future.
Love. Hope. Optimism. Jack, you will be missed.
I think Alice summed it up so well. The thing that struck me is the unfairness of him starting this wave and not being able to ride it.
Keep crying, half in anger at the raw unfairness of his not being able to see through the amazing things he had started. He was truly in his prime in so many ways, and had so much more to give and accomplish, and everyone is the poorer for him not having that chance.
I hate it too. We must keep his legacy going. Starting with the environment, which may help reduce some cancers. Our first item on the agenda can be to stop exporting asbestos.
Beautiful post Kath. Jack will be missed. As will all the others who lose their battle with cancer.
I hate it. Cancer. It took my best friend and left her 3 little ones motherless. A husband without a wife. Parents without a daughter A brother without a sister.
And unfortunately it is not a rare circumstance. It happens far more than it should.
I can’t shake Jack Layton’s passing. I feel like he had so much more to give. His life’s work was for Canada and he was not done. I guess it’s up to us now.
i think we can “poster” that quote of his. god speed, jack
Kath, this post is lovely.
I couldn’t believe it, yesterday. I checked three news sources until finally it was real and I sat down and cried. I hate cancer. HATE IT. I wish that fighting with all this fury could kill it. But, it can’t. And Layton’s message resonates so deeply with us who have lost so many this way….
He taught Canada how to be a democracy, after decades of resentful apathy. We are so very grateful.
I hate cancer so hard. *sob*
Great post, Kath. Thanks.