As a journalist for four decades, I have written many challenging stories. The most difficult are those that follow a tragedy. The Humboldt Broncos crash will haunt me forever. So will the deaths of the Boys in Red, seven high school basketball players who perished 15 years ago in the crash of a school van near Bathurst, N.B.
Every one of these types of stories is jarring and unique. But one of the things I have discovered over the years is how the families, loved ones and friends of victims often show incredible grace in the aftermath.
In February, I travelled to Fredericton, N.B., to write about Jamie and Bob Brannen. Their story is different from others and in some ways more shocking in that the son and father did not die in an accident.
They were elite curlers and died from heart attacks, hours apart, on Sept. 23, 2022. Jamie was 47 and Bob was 73.
Jamie passed away in his sleep. After rushing to be at his son’s family’s side, Bob collapsed later in the day while walking his beloved Boston terrier.
Friends say he died of a broken heart.
Sometimes in the news business we rush to tell a story. Usually, though, we realize it is better to wait and to let families heal.
So that is how I ended up at the Capital Winter Club in Fredericton five months later. I was overwhelmed with what I found. Despite the grief that was still palpable, everyone welcomed me.
The curling community is close knit. For two icons to be lost in unrelated incidents on the same day is unthinkable. In six of the previous seven years, Jamie had been on teams that won provincial championship and represented New Brunswick at the Brier, Canada’s national men’s championship. He was the face of the Capital Winter Club. Bob was his biggest fan.
I spent three days at the club collecting anecdotes from the curlers’ closest friends. One night Jamie’s 21-year-old daughter, Julie, came and sat beside me as she listened. Then, very bravely, she joined in.
As she spoke, lines of people formed waiting to tell stories about the son and his dad. Curling is a winter sport. The Capital Winter Club is a place of remarkable warmth.
I also visited the home where Jamie Brannen lived with his wife, Lesley. Bob’s wife, Nancy, was there, too. The driveway around her house was rimmed with five feet of snow. A neighbour pitches in to plow it.
Jaime Watson, the club’s manager, said recently that members are still mourning. In October they staged an event in the Brannens’ memory. It sold out within an hour. Forty teams paid $160 each to participate. The proceeds were used to create a scholarship fund for a student at the University of New Brunswick.
“The hope is that we will run it as an annual event,” Watson said. “We hope to carry on their legacy.”
Kelsie and Chris
Calgary Flames assistant general manager Chris Snow with his wife Kelsie at their community arena in Calgary.Todd Korol/The Globe and Mail
I never met Chris or Kelsie Snow but like so many other people, I felt like I knew them very well. They shared intimate details with all of us about Chris’s diagnosis and four-year battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which ended with his death at age 42 on Sept. 30. In early 2021 I wrote a lengthy profile about them and how they had gone public to raise awareness about the fatal neurological disease with which he was afflicted.
Chris was the assistant general manager of the Calgary Flames and when diagnosed was told that he possibly had less than a year to live. Shortly after that his wife began to document their life with ALS on her blog, Kelsie Snow Writes. Then she started a podcast called Sorry, I’m Sad.
The initial article I did took extensive interviewing. I spoke with Chris multiple times by phone and on a video call that lasted more than an hour. I spoke with Kelsie and sent messages after that with further questions and she responded to each and every one.
Few times in 40-plus years as a journalist have I ever come across anyone as courageous and honest and graceful in the face of enormous vulnerability.
In September, Chris suffered a cardiac arrest and sustained a traumatic brain injury caused by a lack of oxygen. When doctors confirmed he would not wake up, his family decided to donate his organs.
Four individuals had their lives changed for the better in life-saving procedures in which they received his liver, lungs and kidneys.
Less than two weeks after his death, Kelsie and their children Cohen and Willa dropped the ceremonial first puck before the Flames’ first game of the season. Kelsie cried as the crowd rose to its feet and applauded them.
The club donated $20,000 to ALS research and last month the Colorado Avalanche did the same. The Snows were invited to drop the puck at Ball Arena.
By allowing others to tell their story, the Snows helped raise $575,000 for ALS research before he died. In December, Canada’s seven NHL teams united in an initiative to support the ALS Super Fund, a campaign to find better treatments and support for Canadians living with the disease.
On social media, Kelsie admits she is struggling.
On Dec. 15, the Snows would have celebrated their 16th wedding anniversary.
Saverina
Saverina Scozzari was born with her kidneys underdeveloped and knew all of her life that, at some point, she will need at least one, if not more, kidney transplants. Due to surgeries being scuttled because of COVID-19, three were scheduled and then cancelled at the last minute and with her dad as her living donor, she was slated to finally have it done on Jan. 5.Carlos Osorio/The Globe and Mail
Born with underdeveloped kidneys, Saverina Scozzari knew it was only a matter of time before she would require a transplant.
She finally had one on Jan. 5 at age 25 in her hometown of Hamilton. For her it was a gift of life but also a nightmare.
“It was pretty much a disaster from the beginning,” said Scozzari, who is an athlete-marketing and public- relations specialist with clients who play in the NHL. “When I woke up in the hospital everybody was panicking in the recovery room and they were talking about taking me back into surgery.”
She is 5 feet 2 and 110 pounds. Her father donated a kidney to her. It was the size of small basketball and it did not fit properly.
She was placed on surgery watch for three days and had round-the-clock care. Once cleared, she was unable to eat or drink anything or walk and subsisted on a spoonful of ice every hour.
From the day of her surgery until she went home on Jan. 13, a series of setbacks occurred.
Her blood count dropped rapidly and she had five transfusions, but ultrasounds didn’t detect anything unusual. Then a COVID outbreak was declared in her wing in the hospital and her parents couldn’t visit. Then she started to have mental-health issues.
At the time of her transplant, her kidney function was less than 10 per cent. Shortly after her surgery, the kidneys were operating at 112 per cent. But in early March her kidney function dropped significantly. She was given a high dosage of anti-rejection medicine and a steroid and her body reacted to it.
She had whole body spasms, could sit for only a very short time and was unable to sleep more than two hours a night.
“It broke me mentally,” she says.
At a low point in June she began to see a psychologist.
“I felt like I was on a roller coaster every week,” Scozzari said. “My symptoms were getting worse.”
In September she submitted to counselling and was diagnosed with PTSD. Later that month she was also diagnosed with a blood virus and has been taking anti-viral medication since. It should rid her of the infection by April.
“I felt like a lab rat until the end of September,” she said.
In October her kidney function, which had been stabilized, began to drop again. She underwent a biopsy to determine if her transplanted kidney was being rejected or if she had an infection.
Around that time she received an award as one of the top 40 business people under 40 in Hamilton. Since then, she has begun to make progress again. She has begun to work with St. Joseph’s Healthcare in Hamilton – that is where she had surgery – to help build resources for education and to support mental-health initiatives for transplant recipients.
“The narrative you hear about transplants is that you wake up in the hospital afterwards and live life happily ever after,” she said. “People don’t talk about the ups and downs that occur in the first year. I felt guilty and wondered if something was wrong with me.
“I just want to help people before they get to the point where I did and my mental-health issues were so severe.”
Catch a wave with Victoria
Victoria Feige in the barrel at the English Open of Adaptive Surfing in 2022 at the Bristol Wave Pool.Courtesy of Victoria Feige/Supplied
I grew up in Miami and was a bit of a beach boy. I fished all of the time, enjoyed snorkelling and would hitch a ride on a boat at every opportunity.
One thing I never did successfully was surf. Miami doesn’t have great waves, but I won’t use that as an excuse. My basic problem is being totally unco-ordinated.
So when I learned that a Canadian woman, Victoria Feige, was the world’s best paralympic surfer, it captured my imagination. My first question, of course, was how does a person who is partially paralyzed do it? That turned to admiration and inspiration when I learned she had won four consecutive world championships.
When she was 18, Victoria fractured vertebrae along her lower spine in a snowboarding accident. It left her with only a little bit of sensation below where the injury occurred.
In one of my favourite quotes of the year, she described her disability this way: “My feet are adorable but useless.”
She is 38 now and an elite athlete, funny and very smart. She is one of a very few – if that – physical therapists in Canada and the United States who works out of a wheelchair.
For her, it is more of a functional device that gets her around than it is an impediment. Her story was one of my favourite of the year.
So what has happened to her since we chatted in September?
Well, for one, she won her fifth successive world championship for adaptive surfers. She was first among nearly 200 contestants from 27 countries.
“It’s a dream come true,” she said by telephone from Hawaii where she trains. “But for me the coolest thing was to see the level of skill rise.”
She also suffered a gash above the eye while trying out a radical wave pool in Waco, Tex., and is in the midst of offering lessons to adaptive surfers through a school in Hawaii.
She has also begun to free dive, and is preparing for the 52nd Haleiwa International Open, a major professional competition that begins on Boxing Day. The event is open to men and women and includes a division for adaptive surfers.
“I’m excited,” she said. “It is so wonderful to be integrated into a competition like this.”
Within three months, she hopes to hear that surfing will be included in the 2028 Paralympic Games in Los Angeles.
“I dream of representing Canada,” she said.
The bass master
Jeff Gustafson from Kenora, Ont. became the first Canadian to capture the US$1-million Bassmaster Classic, pro bass fishing's premier event.The Canadian Press
I don’t mean to toot my own horn too much but I am a fairly good bass fisherman. I spent my youth fishing for them in the Everglades and in a canal behind our family home in South Florida. I once caught a 7½-pounder in my backyard. Alligator Alley, the roadway that cuts through the swamp from Fort Lauderdale to Naples, became like a second home.
My brother and I spent hours walking along its shorelines while casting lures and it was very rare for us to get skunked. There was an occasional standoff with an alligator that would interrupt the proceedings but the most terrifying encounter I ever had was with a rat. One time at dusk, while I was standing and casting, I heard rustling in the bushes beside me.
Being a smart aleck, I put the tip of my fishing rod down there to scare away whatever it was, and the rat ran up the pole and right at me. I could have won a gold medal in the fishing-rod-hurling competition if one existed. I retreated to my car and had to go back the following day to find my fishing rod in the brush.
So I am telling you now that, other than being dumb, I am proficient at catching a bass. I am good at it, but not Jeff Gustafson good. It is kind of like somebody who hit .300 in Little League comparing themselves to Ichiro Suzuki.
Earlier this year, the resident of Lake of the Woods in far northwestern Ontario won the Bassmaster Classic on the Tennessee River. It is the biggest tournament in the world for bass fishermen and in doing so he pocketed US$100,000.
He is known as “Gussy” on the tour and has a huge fan base. He is chatty and friendly as get-all, the type of guy you would love to cast a line with if you didn’t mind being humiliated by the comparative results.
“For what I do, to win the Bassmaster Classic was like winning the Stanley Cup,” he said recently. “It was life changing.
“When it comes to sponsorship opportunities it took the pressure off me for the next foreseeable few years. It is a pretty impressive title. I still think about it and can’t believe it happened.”
After he won the Bassmaster Classic, bass stopped biting for him. That is the bane of a fisherman, even one of the world’s best.
“I was fairly mediocre,” Gustafson said. “I had a few tournaments up north where I expected to do well and had three bad ones in a row.”
As a bass fisherman, I feel better now.