When Margaret McNair Peake really wanted a job, she invented it.
"John Candy didn't really know he needed a personal assistant until she convinced him that he needed her," says Michael Peake, Ms. McNair Peake's husband.
She ran into the Canadian funnyman at a TV function and, like everyone else who crossed her path, he fell for her exuberant charm and agreed to create a position just for her. But she refused to "fit neatly into the template of a normal job," her husband says.
Ms. McNair Peake, Maggie to her friends, thought life was too short to stick to one career. She also worked as a journalist, publicist, childcare worker and production assistant.
One of her dreams was to become The Globe's society writer, but when that didn't happen she created a similar position at The Toronto Sun, where her husband works. She would be pleased, her husband said, that her name finally appeared in The Globe.
It was 10 years ago last month that Mr. Peake, a photographer, first clicked with the woman who lit up his photos with charisma and a saucy smile.
She was diagnosed with breast cancer just before Christmas of 2002, and two weeks before her mastectomy she asked her husband to take photos of her body the way she would want to remember it. She poured bubble bath into a large tub, climbed in, and enveloped herself in a cloud of frothy foam. "I caught her smile at that moment," he said. "That was the picture we carried with us through the coming months."
Mr. Peake's fondest memory of his wife comes after she endured six months of chemotherapy. They were at a cottage on Georgian Bay when last summer's massive power failure blacked out much of the continent. It struck Mr. Peake that "everything was in turmoil except where we were. We had solar power and propane. We were completely untouched and she was safe there," he said. "These outside forces couldn't reach her. It was a hopeful metaphor for the future."
But the cancer returned a month ago. Her first week back at the hospital, she wrote a note to their eight-year-old son, Thomas, congratulating him for finishing Grade 2 and telling him that "she will always love him forever and ever."
It became her farewell letter as she died in hospital last Sunday. She would have been 47 on Monday. After her death, her husband found several notebooks filled with her thoughts, pressed flowers and tickets from cherished events. "It was like she was collecting them for us."