When asked what Jack Tennant would’ve said about finally launching her mother’s book about her struggle with cancer, Nola Hume laughs.
“He would’ve said, ‘It’s about damn time!’”
There’s a smile in her eyes as she describes the relationship between the man who started The Eagle in Cochrane in 2001 and her mother Gaydon Willis.
She credits Tennant with convincing her mom to sit down at a keyboard to pour her heart out about how her battle with cancer not only shortened her life but changed it.
The lifelong newspaper entrepreneur and columnist, equal parts gruffness and kindness, saw the potential in Willis and encouraged her to keep writing her heartfelt story in a series of monthly columns for The Eagle.
The relationship between Willis and Tennant was such that when she was near the end, being moved to a hospice, she asked for Tennant to come so she could say goodbye.
She never quite got around to completing her dream, (which Tennant also was encouraging her to do), of compiling all the columns into book form.
Now, 10 years after her mom died, Hume has taken up the torch, and “The October Crocus,” by Gaydon Willis, has come to life, celebrating a life.
On Oct. 19, 2006 Willis was told she had four years to live.
A few days later she spotted Tennant in the foyer of the Jack Singer Concert Hall in Calgary and went to say hello (she was a massage therapist and he was a client). When she blurted out ‘what was new’ Tennant invited her to write him ‘something.’
She asked, ‘like a letter to the editor’?
He said ‘No, just something.’
She told him she would, then didn’t, and when he saw her in a Cochrane coffee shop a few weeks later he pushed, telling her ‘You know, Gay, you really need to do this. Women need to hear this.’
Shortly after her first article she got a note from Tennant welcoming her on board as The Eagle’s newest monthly columnist.
So once a month for the next seven years she poured her life out for all of Cochrane to see, hear and feel, and The Eagle became like a family to her.
At another coffee shop in Cochrane some 17 years later, Willis’s daughter recounts her mom’s story with brief pauses to gather herself, smile, and sometimes wipe away a tear.
She misses her every day.
“I’m going to sell the books now . . . for mom,” Hume said.
“The October Crocus” gets its name from the intrepid little flower that is the first to appear every spring in the hills of Alberta. It pushes through, determined to reach the light sometimes before the snow’s gone.
It was always Willis’s favourite, as she writes in the introduction to the book. She counted her days lying in the hills around town, gazing up at the clouds as her happiest childhood memory, and the arrival of the crocus in the spring was always a significant event.
Later in life she went back to school to become a massage therapist, and, surrounded by teenagers in class at the tender age of 58, she was having some misgivings about why she waited so long to go back. Walking through Nose Hill Park in Calgary on an October day thinking about it all, her eye was drawn to a blooming crocus.
The title of the book represents her realization that she was just like the crocus – blooming out of sync.
Hume had to finish the last book entry because her mother wasn’t able to. The daughter’s labour of love, compiling all the material into book form, is now available.
From the purchase price of $25, $15 goes to the cost of printing, and the remaining $10 goes to the Tom Baker Cancer Centre in Calgary in Willis’s name.
Anyone going through the cancer experience – as patient, family member or friend – will find something to cling to in this book. It has some funny, and some not-so-funny stories.
Hume has already given a couple of copies to families going through similar challenges.
“She wrote about the good, bad and the ugly. It’s pretty inspirational stuff,” she said.
“I think as many people as possible should have it.”
And so they can, by sending an email to [email protected].
