June Callwood

"I’m all right with the doom questions," she said, adding that she was not afraid of death. "I don’t think there’s anything to fear. I do fear dependency, and I’ve talked to my doctor about that: ‘Don’t you leave me lying there in a diaper with tubes all over. No, no, no.’ Most of us, my generation, share the same feeling that we don’t want to be dependent and we don’t want to be undignified. You’re going to go, and if you can find a way to go quickly, that’s the best."

At the time, she also chuckled about her poor family who, she said, did not share her enthusiasm for dying. "They’re showing a little grumpiness about this, although they’re getting a lot of preparation. Every time they open the damn newspaper, I’m dying again." Then she laughed, that silvery sweet laugh her friends and family knew so intimately.

When she was still around nearly two years later, her tumours having stabilized, she joked about it. "I'm finding it rather embarrassing that I'm not dead," she told The Toronto Star in January 2006. I'm not the least afraid of dying, but I'm beginning to be concerned about not dying."

National Post: June Callwood, author and activist, dead at 82