Journal: News & Comment

Losing it in the best way

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My wife and I took our Valentine's Day early this year, since we don't know exactly when I'll be going in for surgery in the next few weeks. Right now we're at the Sutton Place Hotel in downtown Vancouver, having just returned from the Raincity Grill for dinner. And I have a story to tell you.

We arrived at the hotel around 4 p.m. today, after dropping the daughters off with my parents. On the table was a spread of champagne, crackers, cheese, and dessert. "There's a note," I said.

It was a surprise from my coworkers at Navarik, to one or two of whom I'd mentioned our planned weekend getaway. At first I laughed, because the editor in me noticed that the note, on hotel stationery, was mistranscribed as "From all of us in Navarik"—like it was a country instead of a company:

And then I totally lost it, bursting out crying and running for a tissue in the bathroom. It took a minute or two for me to calm down before we could get ready for dinner.

Thank you, everyone at Navarik. The company and everybody there has been incredibly supportive, tangibly and emotionally, through good times and bad, and this too is a bad one. I could not imagine a better bunch to work with.

It's not usually very easy to make me cry. My tears were, in part, from happiness that my friends there were thinking fo me. But part of it was also knowing that what I'm about to go through is serious enough to warrant the gift.

Damn. This is a hell of a roller coaster.

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