how to write your way through grief

and grieve your way through writing

On a sweltering afternoon last Tuesday, after dropping off my elder son at camp, I opened an email informing me Clayton Ruby had died.

I was winded. Clay was one of my dearest people. An eminent lawyer, activist, father, friend, advocate and mentor to countless people. As his daughter-in-law later put it: The man was a heart on two legs.

Within an hour I was commissioned to write a piece for the Toronto Star. Not an obituary but a kind of open-ended personal tribute. At first I was psyched. The Calvinist Scot in me jumped at the idea of a practical task. (Work is the answer to everything!) I was also flattered and humbled.

But within a couple of hours of taking the assignment I became deeply apprehensive. The whole thing felt wrong for the obvious reason I hadn’t begun the process the fact Clay was gone — nor, I realised, did I want to, at least not in a way that demanded I churn out a couple of thousand words in the form of coherent sentences. I turn around assignments on short notice all time but this piece was different. I knew that it would be read by his bereaved family, who are also dear to me, as well as everyone else who knew or knew of him. Clay had many admirers but he also had detractors and opponents (his work was adversarial — it wasn’t a short list). Clay was not a celebrity but he was a public figure. Where I’m from, people know his name — and not just because it sounds like something out of Dickens.

Having committed myself to write about my dear old friend, I understood I deeply did not want to. Not right then anyway. What I wanted to do was walk down to the beach in the town where I’d grown up (where I’m currently on holiday with my family). I wanted to go for a long cold swim in Lake Ontario then drink a thermos of Canadian Club and ginger ale while watching the sunset and listening to Jimmy Cliff’s Many Rivers to Cross on repeat.

So I texted Clay’s daughter Emma to ask what she thought. I felt badly doing so — she’d just watched her father die, why should she be bothered about a newspaper piece? She responded immediately and said she’d ask her mother and sister. I was half hoping they’d politely discourage the idea because some retired Supreme Court Justice or lauded social justice crusader had been been given the official nod. But instead they immediately gave their blessing. So that was that.

I got home and put Frankie to bed. I did not go to the beach. I did, however, pour myself a large rye and ginger. Then for two nights and two days I wrestled with the draft. I wrote thousands and thousands of words and discarded them. I ate far too little and Frankie watched watched too much TV.

My deadline loomed but I had a problem. The problem was that I knew what Clay would have wanted to read about himself but I could not bring myself to write it.

He was a serious person and he took his achievements seriously, but all I could think of were the little things, the small kindnesses and quirks, the shared jokes, the cottage lunches and family dinners. The more I wrote about case law and the Charter, his impact on assisted suicide, how he’d fought to overturn of Canada’s abortion act, and many wrongful convictions, the rights of gays in the military, of women and minorities, of pit bulls and the poor —the list went on and on and on —the more my memories of Clay crowded in. They were darling things, these recollections. They had big wet eyes and sticky hands, they whinged and pulled at my sleeves like toddlers, persistent in their desire for attention. They would not leave me alone.

I wanted to write them I knew I couldn’t because I also knew Clay wouldn’t have considered them important. Not relative to his legal work. I’d type a few sentences and stop. I could hear him scoffing, “Sentimental nonsense!” and “Irrelevant!” The table vibrated like he’d slapped it.

I was stuck.

Finally, just a few hours before deadline, Clay paid me a pointed visit. It was just after dawn last Thursday, two days after his death. He stomped down the carpeted stairs in my father’s basement in Cobourg, carrying his briefcase which he set down on the floor before taking a seat at the table across from where I was working. He did not say hello. In spite of the heat he was wearing a violet cashmere sweater and pressed corduroy trousers. He opened a can of caffeine-free Diet Pepsi, took a sip, then put it down. As ever, he neglected to use a coaster. Under the table I hear him tapping the wooden pedestal with the soft leather sole of his shoe. Clay looked at me closely and clasped his hands on the table, arms outstretched, fingers interlaced. His manner was resigned and impatient.

“I’m dead,” he said.

“I know,” I said, then started to cry.

“It’s alright, dear.” He patted my hand. “It’s fine. I just thought you needed to hear it from me.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s a fact. And I was concerned it hadn’t quite registered.”

I shook my head, then nodded.

“It’s normal, dear. Everyone feels this way. But you have a piece to write and that’s a problem because you’re thinking about it in entirely the wrong way.”

“I am?”

“Yes!” He banged the table. “Leah, I’m dead. So it doesn’t matter what I think or thought or might have thought. It’s irrelevant. The dead have no wishes or desires. The idea that we do is sentimental nonsense. You know how I feel about magical thinking.”

I opened my mouth to argue, then closed it. The words he said next he spoke slowly and emphatically.

“You need to write it for them.”

We stared at each other. I could see he was waiting to make sure I understood. After a moment I nodded. Clay gave a little grimace. Patted my hand once and rose. Then he picked up his briefcase and, looking like Willy Loman in a cashmere sweater and a pair of Gucci brogues, he trudged up the stairs and left.

The piece appeared in the Insight Section of the Sunday Star. The response has been overwhelming. Startling in fact. So I’m reposting it for free below because the Star is paywalled and after 24 hours the copyright reverts to the writer.

(But look, it you read it and like it — or anything you read here — I hope you’ll consider buying a subscription. It costs $5000 an hour. Kidding! Lawyer joke. It’s only $5 [£4] a month or $50 a year. Writers, like lawyers, shouldn’t have to work for free and when we do, it’s for the greater good. So when you subscribe you not only support my work you make it possible for others who can’t afford to. Clay would have wanted me say that. He believed in fair compensation for workers. Not that his wishes are strictly relevant, but you get the point. )

Here’s the piece.

My Friend Clay

By Leah McLaren

Well into the 21st century, long after the world had gone mobile, the criminal lawyer Clayton Ruby refused to delist his home phone number from the Toronto white pages. Ostensibly it was because he wanted to be available to clients or potential clients who occasionally called his home at odd hours in distress, having run into trouble with the law. The obvious downside was that it led to regular crank calls.

“Daddy, it’s for you,” one of his daughters, Emma or Kate, would say, having fled the table to pick up the landline during dinner.

“Who is it?” he’d mutter, one eye fixed on a half-eaten chop. (Like most inveterate carnivores, Clay did not like to be interrupted during dinner.)

“The Nazi.”

“Just hang up,” his spouse Harriet, a judge, would advise. 

But Clay would shake his head, wipe his mouth, then hold out his hand and wiggle his fingers for the phone. 

He heard out the cranks with patience. I watched him do it on more than one occasion. He listened calmly, absorbing the incoming bile with patience. He wasn’t laughing; it wasn’t a joke. Clay was an expert at winning arguments, a fighter and defender, but he didn’t punch down. He had enormous empathy for misfits and broken people. He recognized the cranks as what they were: Angry, misunderstood people who had slipped through the cracks of our social care system – a system he spent his entire life fighting to protect and uphold.

He was an astonishing person, a study in contradiction: a sybaritic socialist, an epicurean crusader for the poor. Clay wasn’t perfect (he certainly had his detractors), but he aspired to something higher. Instead of trying to improve himself, he strove to improve the world. He did not signal virtue, he embodied it. He wasn’t flawless, he was too joyous and expansive for that. Instead, he was good. 

There are so few truly good people in the world. In a lifetime, if you are very lucky, you might rub up against one or two. To love and be loved by a good person is an honour and gift. The good few make the craven, cracked majority of us better. 

Clay would have taken enormous pleasure at the outpouring in the Canadian media days since his death – the many lengthy tributes detailing the towering list of landmark cases he fought and won in half a century of practising law. He revelled in his accomplishments not because he needed validation but because he believed so fervently in the importance of his work. He systematically altered the fabric of Canadian law, helping to safeguard justice for all citizens under the Charter of Rights. 

His accolades — he was awarded the Order of Canada, most deservedly, in 2006 — were more than laurels to him. Instead they were material proof that progress was possible, that worthy battles could be fought and won in arenas of human civility through the power of ideas and words. So, yes, Clayton was a living legend long before he was enshrined as a dead one. But 

Truly good people operate on multiple planes. Clayton’s  achievements in law are obvious but he also demonstrated his goodness in more subtle and instinctive ways. Whether he was advancing an argument before a High Court, roaring at a friend’s joke or hearing out a deranged crank caller, he was always on the case. He did not simply have friends or clients, he did not merely practise law, or delight in his daughters or adore his great lifelong love, Harriet. Apart from meal-planning, Clay did one thing and he did it with unwavering constancy and force. He loved people. I was lucky enough to be one of them. His friendship altered the course of my life in more ways than I can count. It is unfathomable to me that he’s gone.

I met Clay and Harriet in 2000, through a boyfriend who was also a lawyer, but it was only about two years into my friendship with the Ruby-Sachs family – a friendship based on animated restaurant dinners out and a couple of long weekend cottage visits – that I truly understood what it meant to be a part of Clay’s world. He called me up one Saturday morning, shortly after my boyfriend and I had broken up. 

“Harriet and I heard the news,” he said, dispensing with small talk. “What are you doing today?”

Nothing, as it turned out.

Twenty minutes later, Clay picked me up in one of his ludicrously oversized cars; I think it was a silver-blue Bentley. I asked him where we were going. 

“To pick up Kate from a sleepover, then get some smoked meat,” he said. 

We drove in silence up to Bathurst and Steeles listening to the opera, then we stopped at diner. Clay ordered for both of us, two enormous sandwiches and a plate of pickles. Over lunch he talked about the history of the diner and competing methods of smoking and shaving beef. Then we fetched Kate (then in her early teens) and inched back home along Bayview. As Kate and her girlfriend giggled in the back seat I finally worked up the courage to ask Clay what the point of the excursion had been.

“You’re sad,” he said, eyes fixed on the road. “So I thought I’d drive you around and feed you, and now we’re going home and in a couple of hours Harriet will come home from yoga and we’ll feed you again.”

I looked at him bewildered. “Why are you being so nice to me?” I remember asking.

He laughed, then patted my shoulder. “Because you’re sad, dear,” he said. “And we love you.”

Perhaps the most remarkable and unsung aspect of Clayton Ruby’s character is that he inherited wealth but did not mistake this happy accident of birth as a mark of importance or good character. Nor, by contrast, did he use his privilege as a stick to beat himself with, as so many agonised rich kids do. He acknowledged his privilege and improved on it, and what’s more, he openly enjoyed it. Clay did nothing without purpose and he saw no purpose denying himself or those he loved pleasure. Unlike many idealists he had no appetite for self-abnegation. He was a man of great appetites, with no use for self-pity or rumination. He was far too practical and engaged in the world. He made himself useful. 

He had the clarity to understand that human goodness and enjoyment of corporeal delights are not pursuits that exist in conflict. For him they were part of a joyous and meaningful whole. He eschewed leftovers and scoffed at recycling. He paid a chap on retainer to regularly check and change the lightbulbs in his Rosedale house because, frankly, he and Harriet had bigger fish to fry. He was a details man, but he understood that not all details mattered. He knew the difference between a big problem and a small one. 

He loved underdogs and real dogs – doting on a long succession of gorgeous pea-brained spaniels, so interchangeably bred his friends eventually gave up trying to remember their names. (As far as I could work out they were either called Joplin or Berkman, after the legendary singer and anarchist thinker, though some seemed to be called both.)

Clay was exceptionally brave and a total suck about being alone. He hated it. After bent cops, pompous rich conservatives and maple syrup – the only flavour he truly detested – the only thing Clay actively loathed was being alone. Two weeks before Harriet went away for a girls’ weekend, he’d start drawing up a detailed social schedule. 

“Harriet’s abandoning me to do something dreadful in the snow called ‘cross country-skiing’,” he’d shudder into the phone. “So I’ve made a reservation for us at an excellent Chinese place on Baldwin this Sunday at one o’clock.”

“But Clay,” I’d say, “I’m already meeting some friends for lunch.”

“Great,” he’d say, “Bring them. I’ve pre-ordered the soft shell crab.”

He hung up without saying goodbye, just like

a lawyer on TV. But he never forgot to say, “I love you.” Going back over my emails it’s how he signs off every single one. He expressed his love to his family and friends, to his colleagues, clients and pets more than any man of his age and accomplishment I’ve ever known. He was truly good and utterly original. 

His memorial announcement, sent out on Thursday, made me smile through my tears in its stubborn refusal to pander to convention or patronage-capitalism.

“In lieu of donations, go out and change the world.”

RIP Cumbrae’s Butcher’s on Bayview which will now go out of business.