My father’s core quality was stoicism. Not the grim, showy, self-righteous kind but the cheerful, quiet, inward-oriented one that is its own reward. You could amputate his legs with a chainsaw without anaesthesia but if you asked him how he was doing in the process, he’d say, “Amazing! Excellent. So good!” This made it hard to get him medical care because doctors would ask what ailed him, and he’d say, “oh, absolutely nothing! In fact, I’m doing fantastic!” He once had a stroke and at the emergency room still tried to reassure the medical personnel that he was feeling amazing. It didn’t work but only because by that time he was slurring his speech quite badly.

I’m not rending my garments and tearing my hair out because that would be a betrayal of my father. He really really didn’t like people who were victims. I’ve never seen him feel sorry for himself. His whole life, for example, he suffered from scleroderma, which limited his range of movements and made many basic physical operations impossible. But this was never a topic of conversation or a pretext for a pity party.

In Canada, if people have a joint bank account and one of them dies, the bank account gets frozen for months. You need to get mountains of paperwork to get it unfrozen. In the meantime, you don’t have access to your own money.

Why? Because imagine how convenient it is for the banks to have control over a multitude of accounts where they can invest the money unmolested and know that the owners won’t try to withdraw anything for up to 6 months.

People who say that there’s socialism in Canada are either clueless or use the word socialism to mean “something icky.”