Being faced with terminal illness can be equal parts awkward and tragic, as much for friends and loved ones as it is for the person who's sick. Whether rightly or wrongly, widely-accepted convention dictates that we maintain a brave face and not confront the finality of the situation until the death bed goodbyes.
Pat Burns turned convention on its head Friday when he spoke openly of the inevitability of his own passing during a ceremony to announce that an arena will be built in his name in Stanstead in the Eastern Townships. The three-time NHL coach of the year, who's in the latter stages of a lengthy battle against cancer, said he doesn't expect to be alive for the opening of the arena next year, but that he'll be watching from above in hopes of seeing the next Wayne Gretzky or Mario Lemieux. His brutal and moving honesty and candor didn't stop there:
"As your life gets closer to the end, you realize your body gets weaker, your mind gets stronger but your heart gets softer," Burns said at Friday's press conference.
Burns' open acknowledgement of what lies ahead allowed family and friends at Friday's ceremony to hold what was tantamount to a living wake. Nobody pretended that the story was going to end any other way, but neither was there anything maudlin about his frank acceptance of mortality. On the contrary, it made for a demonstrative and spiritually uplifting exchange of love and respect. People with stronger spiritual convictions than mine say God visits the worst hardships on those of us best equipped to handle it. Pat Burns is handling the most difficult hardship of them all with poise, dignity and honesty that not only serves him well, but provides the rest of us with a powerful example of grace in adversity.
