Category: Luctor et Emergo

The idea that I needed to find another job, and to make a break from practising law in private practice in a small firm has been growing for a while – perhaps for well over a decade. The job market in Winnipeg was not great for an experienced, mature lawyer, and Iast spring and summer…

One of the stories Fr. Britz mentioned during the 2005 St. Ignatius Parish Mission – the story about John XXIII and wine and company at meals – resonated with me. Fr. Britz said he was a young seminarian at the time.

My illness and surgery came at a time when Jan and her family had already decided that I had a problem.

Reuben Warner was my roommate in the St. Boniface Hospital during my first hospital stay in January 2001. He had arrived a day and half before me. He had been blocked for a few weeks, he was bloated, he was diagnosed with a circumferential tumour high on his descending colon. If memory serves, he had…

This is the second entry on the period in early 2001 when I had surgery for a bowel obstruction. I spent a few weeks at home after my colostomy. Before I went home, the teaching nurses from the Enterostomal Therapy Program made sure I knew how to empty and rinse the bag, and to how…

This is autobiographical, referring to my life in the time starting a couple of weeks before Christmas 2000, until April or May 2001. I had three operations. For 7 or 8 weeks in January and February 2001, I believed that I had cancer.

My wife first asked me for a divorce on April 29, 2003. She changed her mind and stayed for a near year before she told me, in March 2004, that she had decided to leave. Through that year, I faced the question of what was wrong with me, to make my wife, Jan, want to…

My parents were immigrants to Canada from rural Zeeland, the province of Holland nearest the Belgian border. They were Catholics and saw to it, with some personal sacrifice, that my siblings and I attended a Catholic parochial school. I remember getting up to go to Mass and serving Mass in Latin, before the liturgical reforms…