"It was clear to me that people were there," Wayson Choy explains in a quiet, meditative way. "I glimpsed them. I heard their tears. There was great comfort in that."
The celebrated Canadian author smiles weakly, his full hair combed back off his pale, long face. "But then I realized they could only come with me so far," he continues after a pause. "I had a momentary fear of that ultimate loneliness. You are the one who is dying. No one else is. But I was so comforted by the fact that there were people with me. It freed me to understand that the next step is my own. I knew how I was loved. What more did I want?"
The question slips out like a knife he didn't know he was carrying. His gentle expression changes to one of startled discovery, as he expresses, as if for the first time, what he was thinking. "I could let go," Mr. Choy says, his voice catching in his throat.
"Sorry," he murmurs, wiping a tear away from his face with one of his small, delicate hands.
The insights he gained, while lying in a Toronto hospital bed in the late summer of 2001 after an acute asthma attack, have not faded, even after having processed the experience by writing a new book about it, Not Yet: A Memoir of Living and Almost Dying. Doctors put him in a medically induced coma, after inserting a ventilator to save his life. A series of three or four heart attacks followed in the next week.
"You have to remember that it didn't take courage," he points out of his ability to accept death. "I was comfortable. The drugs were just wonderful," he says impishly, smiling broadly now. "And also, I thought, 'I have paid my taxes!' and I didn't have to worry about what this [medical care] costs me or other people. Once I knew I was not alone, once I knew I was not going broke, I suddenly just thought to myself that dying is not that difficult ... I think it's the ultimate mercy."
That Mr. Choy should find the perspective with which to view his own near-death is not surprising. He has always been an outside observer, even if that means he watches himself, a human being in a struggle for life, with a detached and benevolent curiosity.
His ethnicity was what first developed his skills of observation. Born in Vancouver's Chinatown almost 70 years ago, he watched a world in which he felt he did not belong. "People marginalize you and you marginalize yourself. It is a way of keeping your place," he explains. His sexual orientation as a gay man further distanced him from how he saw the majority living. Then, after a brief career in advertising and full-time teaching, he settled into the writing world, where humanity, including one's own, becomes a movie that never ceases to confound, intrigue and delight.
A creative-writing class in 1977 with the late Carol Shields yielded a short story that later became his first novel, the award-winning Jade Peony. Mr. Choy was 56 when the book was published in 1995. Since then, he has not stopped writing. Paper Shadows, A Chinatown Memoir, in which he described how he had been adopted but did not find out until he was in his 50s, appeared in 1999. All That Matters, a companion novel to Jade Peony, was published in 2004.
If his poor health gave him a valuable human lesson about the mercy of death, it also taught him about love. As he writes at the start of Not Yet, he was worried about being alone when he became frail and ill. He had no children to love him. He had no romantic partner. But the people he calls his family - including the couple Karl and Marie Schweishelm, who bought a house with him in Toronto - never left his side.
