June Callwood dies at 82
Callwood blazed trails for women's rights, gay rights and the rights of the underprivileged in a history of activism dating back to the 1960s.
Although the cancer was progressing, she seemed serene as her life ebbed. She felt no fear about her impending death and said she had very few regrets. “I'm a very healthy woman except for a lot of cancer tumours. They aren't scaring me, although I wish I could breathe better because it is hard to go up stairs and I can't walk very far,” she said in November 2006. She remained irredeemably cheerful, partly because every time she looked up her disease on Google, “I read my life expectancy and give myself a six month extension.”
Four months after that interview, on March 21, she moved into the palliative care wing of Princess Margaret Hospital, where she said farewell to friends and family, nibbled on chocolate, sipped ice water and the occasional sherry, and exuded a calm acceptance — a model, as always, for those around her.
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We have lost a great Canadian, an inspiring woman, and a friend. But we are indelibly marked by June Callwood's imprint on this nation. She will be remembered and her impact will be a sustaining one. Kudos to George and The Hour for that memorable final interview.
Words were her work, her weapon and her delight.
"Dear David Crowe," June Callwood wrote back to the president of the Alberta Reappraising AIDS Society in 2001 when he tried to prove to her that the disease is a conspiracy of the pharmaceutical industry. "I have read your letter very carefully and examined the material you sent me at Casey House Hospice," she informed him, referring to the world’s first AIDS hospice, founded by her in 1988. "Thank you for bringing your views to my attention. After careful consideration, I have come to the view that you are a fruitcake."
Ottawa Citizen
At a 1992 Vancouver conference for women in the media, Ms. Callwood told delegates that journalistic objectivity was not only impossible but undesirable. You have to be fair, she said, but you can only be effective if you’re moved. Ten years later, she elaborated on this in the first Dalton Camp Lecture in Journalism, delivered in Fredericton.
"A part of the journalist’s mandate, as I see it," she told her audience, "is to rock the boat. This is done by seeing what is in the spaces between received wisdom and reality, and by putting into public view hard-won information that authorities would prefer to hide. If journalists don’t do that, who will? In the absence of accountability, it is natural for people in power to behave badly."
And so, over more than six decades, she pulled no punches.
Ottawa Citizen
Her life was not all sunshine and roses. She suffered depression as a younger woman, was crippled by grief after Casey’s death and had to deal with all the customary put-downs that came, regular as clockwork, from right-wing naysayers across the country. But she never considered stopping.
Her husband liked to kid around about her going off each day to save the world, and, she said, it became the family joke. "Casey, our youngest son, answered the phone one time -- a friend of mine reported this to me -- ‘She’s out saving the world, and I don’t take messages.’"
Ottawa Citizen
I woke to the news this morning that June Callwood is gone.
If you are Canadian, and of ‘un certain age’, then you’ll know June’s work. She was the original new radical. A journalist and author, June spent her life helping people in need. She believed in action — pitching in and getting things done. She believed in speaking out — saying things that weren’t popular because, golly, someone’s got to. And she believed in kindness — because treating one another well might just save the world.
After a good cry, I played Beethoven’s ‘Clair de Lune’ for her on my piano. There will be lots of tributes to June in the days to come. Catch them if you can. We have lost a huge human being, but her spirit will live forever. My heart is with her family on this grey spring day.
New Radical Blog
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