TRIO #27

Sunday May 10 2026

For this edition of the newsletter, I’m ditching the nine-sentence constraint that usually guides me. I need some more room to breathe, to let my thoughts unspool. Rules are meant to be broken, an axiom championed by my mother.

My mother was sui generis, an artist in the broadest sense, a real “free spirit,” although she’d roll her eyes at the term. When she was a teenager, a hippie in the Niagara Region, a psychic told her that she would have three children, suffer from hip problems, and die at 72. She didn’t buy it—she couldn’t imagine herself as an old lady, let alone a mother—but slowly, over the course of her life, each prediction came true. (Take me, for example: her third child, a surprise pregnancy she affectionately referred to as her “last hurrah.”) I was aware of the psychic’s prediction on my mother’s 72nd birthday last June, mom in relative health, and I was aware of it a month ago, when my sister messaged the group chat to let us know that mom was in the ER, what we thought might be COVID transformed into pneumonia before finally settling as cancer. She died 10 days later, just after sunset. Her last words, still ringing in my ears: “I knew this would happen.” I was the only other person in the room.

Bisecting the grief is a recognition of my own intuition, a sense that in retrospect, I knew this would happen too. How else to explain my sudden interest in writing about children grieving their mothers, a topic that never compelled me before? It started last fall, when I wrote the first of two essays about the untimely death of actress and director Adrienne Shelly for my column in In the Mood. The second essay, published earlier this year, considers Shelly’s cultural legacy alongside the grief of her husband and daughter, now a teenager, who was only a baby when her mother died. In conducting research for the piece, I became fixated by the image of a father telling a child about the death of a mother, which became the seed for a story recently published in the newly launched Toronto Review. Told from the perspective of a man waiting for news from the doctors after his father lands in ER, the story is about, among other things, the experience of feeling belated grief for one parent and anticipatory grief for another. The story went into copyedits shortly after my mother was admitted to the hospital, 12 days after the 12th anniversary of my father’s death. By the time the story was published, she had passed.

Maybe this is just a series of coincidences arranged into a narrative, an attempt to make sense where there isn’t any. Maybe that psychic was just a phoney with a lucky guess. Who knows what the future holds? But right now it brings me comfort to believe in the power of the unconscious, in intuition and fate and fortune telling. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything, but isn’t it strange that both of my parents died in the spring? I’ve started to think of this season as their gift to me, an inheritance of buds and blossoms and the smell of wet dirt. Lately, if I listen well enough, I can hear their voices in the rain.

Til next time,

Cason

Ps. Thank you for all the kind words/hugs/messages/cards/flowers/baked goods/chocolate/cheese/candy/Uber gift cards/homemade meals/takeout/tea/ginger ale/juice boxes/movie dates/songs/podcasts/memories/stories/reflections, it’s made this period of grief much more bearable. What a gift to feel so loved.