In the spring of 2020, an influx of Covid patients collapsed Ontario’s healthcare system, exposing glaring vulnerabilities in an essential yet fragile government institution. In response, many of us, rightly afraid of contagion, were told to avoid in-person and, possibly, essential healthcare services and treatment. Now, as restrictions ease and services slowly return to their former capacity, the implications of a failed system have come to light. End-of-life care discussions have become increasingly common but no less difficult for Canadian families. Patients in palliative care undergoing treatment for life-threatening illnesses are often hesitant to discuss the reality of death, let alone plan for it. As a result, an undue burden has been placed on health care professionals in charge of patients without end-of-life instructions. Increasingly, such discussions have transitioned from hospitals to home and community-based models, with many families taking matters into their own hands. In his work as a Toronto-based journalist, Mitchell Consky witnessed such discussions both professionally while reporting on the pandemic front lines, and at home while coping with his own father’s illness.
Consky received his undergraduate degree from Western University and his MFA in journalism from Toronto Metropolitan University. He is a journalist with CTV News, writing long-form articles on cancer research and precision medicine. His work, which concerns stories on health, grief, technology and in the sciences, has appeared in the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the Walrus, BNN Bloomberg, and CTV News.
Home Safe, Consky’s debut memoir, is a profoundly moving collection of essays that explores his father’s end-of-life care experience during the COVID-19 pandemic. In April 2020, his father was diagnosed with a rare and terminal cancer. At the same time, pandemic-related effects of confusion, isolation, and restrictions accentuated this family tragedy, requiring social distancing when they needed connection most. The family, many of whom are healthcare workers, dedicated their efforts to providing home hospice care amid the lockdown. In the role of the journalist, Consky interviewed his father daily, recording each vulnerable moment and final goodbye. In this detailed portrait of life and death, Consky creates an elegy to his father, a feat of journalism punctuated with longing, joy, and laughter. Between epic pyjama dance parties and episodes of Tiger King are profound ruminations on the realities of end-of-life care, the pandemic, storytelling, immortalization, connection, and family.
Matthew Hanick attended the Home Safe book launch at the Royal Theatre and later interviewed Mitch about his memoir to discuss immortality projects, writing about family, and the power of film. Proceeds from the book launch raised funds for Camp Erin, a bereavement camp for individuals who are grieving the death of a loved one. A portion of the author royalties from Home Safe will be donated to cancer research at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto.
White Wall Review: Can you tell us about your journey to becoming a writer?
Mitchell Consky: I knew I wanted to write a book since I was 16 years old. There was one literary agent that I’d been submitting to since then. I’d send her trash after trash. But she was the only literary agent who would send me personalized rejection letters. Everybody else would send me generic form letters: “Sorry, this isn’t what we’re looking for.” Eventually, I started honing my craft a little bit more. I started writing as an opinion columnist for the student newspaper at Wilfrid Laurier University called The Cord. I eventually became the opinion editor there. I was writing every week, and then I became the features editor.
At first, I was writing a lot of fiction, and it sort of–I don’t want to say evolved, because I think these are two different things, fiction and journalism–but I was able to see the benefits of journalistic storytelling and finding stories in truth. Not that fiction doesn’t have truth in it as well, it’s a reflection of truth, but I think that with journalism, it’s about looking for the pieces that are already there and figuring out the best way to put them together, as opposed to making up all the pieces. I think that was my entrance to journalism.
Working for a student newspaper, where passion is the currency behind it, there’s not a lot of ego behind it, which–later in journalism–gets in the way a little bit. It’s a bunch of people working together trying to produce something that not many people read, but that’s not the point. I got addicted to the collaboration and that creative storytelling aspect of journalism. From there, I applied to journalism school and kept writing over the years. I still kept submitting to that literary agent different projects that I was working on. I started publishing in newspapers and magazines. I had a long-form story published in the Walrus, an essay in the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star. Through the journalism school, there’s what used to be called the Ryerson Review of Journalism–I don’t know what that’s called anymore. I started really trying to get my bylines out there. That was the biggest step first.
WWR: How did the memoir come to fruition?
Mitchell Consky: When the pandemic struck, my father was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer, and I was just wrapping up my master’s in journalism at the time. We were trying to produce the Ryerson Review of Journalism, a 120 page magazine about the media industry. This was back when everybody thought that this was going to be a 2 week vacation and everybody was going to go back home. We were working remotely, and I wrote this essay, which was originally a text to my buddy Sam, one of my best friends. It was this essay about my father meeting me at the top of the stairs after a few rounds of his treatment where he wasn’t even previously able to leave his bed. It was just a really simple anecdote.
I’ve spoken to other journalists about this, and one of the biggest fears with journalists is that you try and encapsulate everything, or you’re afraid you’re going to miss something. So you’re overwhelmed by the totality of what you want to capture. I remember there was a journalism instructor who really nailed down the concept of having specific anecdotes and using specific anecdotes to tell a larger story, and not trying to capture everything but trying to capture a scene. And that’s what the value of that Globe and Mail essay was. It was a very specific scene about my father meeting me at the top of the stairs. But it also talked about the role reversal of what happens when a child has to take care of a sick parent.
So I wrote this essay in the Globe and Mail, and there was a massive response. I had thousands of people messaging me from all over Canada who related to the sentiment of having to take care of a sick parent. And so I reached out to that agent (with WestWood Creative Artists), and she read the essay, and I told her there’s something else that I’m working on. She asked if I could send her a little bit more, and then she asked me to write a book proposal. Through the proposal, I sort of just wrote the book. There were journal entries that I was able to draw from, and jammed it all together.
She got back to me a while later, and she said, look, there are no promises, but I’m willing to submit this to a few Toronto publishers. If they’re interested, you’ll hear back from me soon; if not, the ship has sailed. I was backpacking through the West Coast. Months passed. I thought that it was over, that it wasn’t going to turn out. She asked me if I was going to be able to finish my book. Dundurn Press put in an offer. And it was like this dream come true.
WWR: Did you learn anything reporting on the pandemic that applied to his home hospice care?
Mitchell Consky: Yeah. The first story I wrote for the pandemic was a story for the Walrus, and I originally pitched it, “how are healthcare workers coping with varying degrees of distance?” I spoke to a father who had to live in an Airbnb separate from his family. And it was just such a common experience for so many physicians and healthcare professionals at this point because they weren’t able to be near their families, and there were all these different elements of consideration in terms of distancing themselves and limiting exposure. I think approaching the sensitivity of that helped me understand my own story. And it also made me realize the larger story of Home Safe.
At first glance, it’s a story about my immediate family–my sister, my mom, me, and my dad, and us dealing with his terminal diagnosis. But on a larger scale, it’s about how we cope with varying degrees of distance. It allowed me to look at it in a different way. Because it’s not just a story about my father dying at home, it’s also a story about my sister trying to hug her dad for the last time before she has to say goodbye. Or my sister’s brother, a frontline healthcare worker who has to navigate his obligations to say goodbye to his brother. So there were all these ripple effects that I don’t think I would have paid attention to if not for that other coverage I was doing and thinking about the wider context of the pandemic.
WWR: In the memoir, you discuss how words can immortalize people, places, and events. Can you discuss why this is important to you?
Mitchell Consky: I did this thing after my friend Gaby died, where I would send his twin sister Sabrina a new story every single night. And as I mentioned in the book, they were wildly insignificant, drunk fanfare about us getting our first bar with fake IDs. Just all these drunken shenanigans and fraternity stories. But they were driven by so much more than to give comfort to a grieving sister. They were driven by this fear of him being forgotten, and the reality of the matter is that stories are all we really leave behind. Ernest Becker wrote this great book called The Denial of Death, where he talks a lot of immortality projects and we know, intellectually, as humans that we physically perish but we believe that we can symbolically endure. And so we try to inject our essence in all of these projects, whether that’s writing your name on a university building or coming up with a cure for cancer. We devote ourselves entirely to tasks and projects in an effort to outlast our physical capacities. We aren’t all going to be remembered forever, but the one thing we can hold onto is the stories.
The feeling of him returning through these stories alleviated so much of that grief. It was such a poignant reminder of how you can hold onto people just by talking about them. And I think the juxtaposition to that is how my father lost both of his parents when he was young–his mother when he was 15 and his father when he was 23–and he never spoke about them, he never shared any stories about them. So in a way, he lost them twice; he lost them physically and symbolically. I think that’s what the book is about: how we can hold onto people. We don’t have to say goodbye forever. We can say goodbye to the physical people in our lives, but we can hold onto them and immortalize them through words and stories.
WWR: In some ways, the memoir portrays father-son devotion, depicting his resilience, passion, and individuality. How did it feel when interviewing your father? Did writing about your father alter or change your perspective of his life?
Mitchell Consky: He was more vulnerable than he was ever able to before. But the truth is, even the interviews we did together were still very limited because he was dazed out on morphine or tired from his treatments. So he would give me these little tidbits, but really a lot of it was in the entries with his brother and sister after he died. Like, I went to his hometown after he died, and there was a lot of context that I didn’t really know. I didn’t know that my dad’s father died in a hospital when my father and his two siblings were away, praying in a synagogue. I didn’t know those details, and it added so much beauty to the story because I was thinking about that comparison. My dad’s father didn’t get to breathe his last breath surrounded by family, but my father did, and there was redemption in that, I guess.
There was so much to be gained from looking at this retrospectively that made me know my dad in so many different ways. I think we look at our parents like they’re just parents. We don’t really think of our parents in the context of being a child or navigating the world and trying to understand who they are. I think I really got that by writing this book and trying to access different parts of him that I never could before.
WWR: Was there anything you wanted to communicate about your father but couldn’t, given the circumstances and timeline?
Mitchell Consky: There’s a lot. He had this great sense of fashion. It was ridiculous. He put such careful attention into his ties and shoes. There are a million idiosyncrasies, but what happens when we devote people to text–it’s more than about immortalizing them, they become a character on a page. You can’t fully encapsulate someone through words. It’s too limiting. There are so many different details about who he was that it’s impossible to articulate just through words. The thing is, so many people know him from different areas of his life, and it’s almost like they wouldn’t be able to understand who he was behind closed doors, just like we wouldn’t be able to understand who he was in his office or in the courtroom. It says something about how we don’t really know each other because everybody acts differently in a different context. My father’s best friends and colleagues never would have known that he would have been the guy jumping around in his underwear and dancing to Shakira. Like, that wasn’t a concept to them.
WWR: In creating this memoir, you extensively interviewed your family and extended family members. What was this process like, and did it pose any difficulties?
Mitchell Consky: It was hell (laughs). And this ties into the last question because everyone has a different perspective of who my father was. In trying to accommodate everyone’s perspective, I was diluting the waters too much and taking away from my own perspective of my father. It ultimately turned into a negotiation process. My aunt and uncle were very protective of my father–and rightly so, as I am too–but they didn’t want anything to be misinterpreted. So they were hyper aware of word choices or the way things were communicated throughout the story. The same was true of my sister and my mom. And not only that, but they were depicted in the story, as characters in the book. So I also needed to be sensitive to the way they were depicted. There were multiple drafts and re-reads. I’d sit with my uncle for hours, and he’d sit with a pen and cross stuff out or write notes in the margins. The same with my aunt. My mom read the book more times than anybody ever will. It was beautiful. But it was also extremely tedious, and it made me realize I don’t think I ever want to write about family ever again.
WWR: Film plays an important role in the memoir and your family history, offering a sense of connection where language falls short. What role does film play in your life today?
Mitchell Consky: I’m currently doing a second master’s degree in scriptwriting and story design. I think film is one of the most harmonious mediums. I don’t believe in the misconception in most cultures that film is the ultimate medium, where a book is only good if it becomes a movie. I don’t believe that. But I do believe there is something so powerful about all of these elements coming together: the music, the writing, and the performances. It’s an accumulation of all these different elements coming together that moves you in different ways.
My dad grew up in a movie theatre, this comforting place. He would go with his brother and sister all the time. His sister would sometimes work the snack bar. He and his brother would clean up afterwards or help with the ticket booth. There was just something so powerful about a small community of people coming together and sitting next to each other as they watched a film. I think I kept returning to that symbol because that’s what quarantine did for us. Not for everyone, some people were totally isolated and couldn’t be around their families. But for many people watching TV, whether it was Tiger King on Netflix or whatever–that’s the biggest part of film for me. It’s not just about escapism or storytelling and all that, but it’s about the togetherness that watching a film can offer. It’s that togetherness that the book is really about.
WWR: The memoir references and shares thematic similarities to Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie. Did this novel inspire you during your writing process?
Mitchell Consky: A hundred percent. I didn’t mention this in the book, maybe in an earlier draft I was considering it, but while this was all happening, I had a book club, a virtual book club, with my friends, and the first book that we were reading was Tuesdays with Morrie. And I’ve read it multiple times at this point. Mitch Albom is one of my favourite writers, specifically for a book he wrote called The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto. But Tuesdays with Morrie was really the first book that I read that confronted the concept of death with bravery and humility. I think a lot of the time with fiction or in shows or movies, grief and death are portrayed one-dimensionally. Just in terms of bereavement, people are shown in all-black, collapsing to their knees in front of a rain-soaked gravestone. That’s all you get.
But Tuesdays with Morrie looked at not just death but the journey of it. And what made Morrie such an interesting character was the fact that he embraced the journey. He genuinely looked forward to the connections he could make nearest to the end. It was such an opposite reaction to what we’re used to in our death-illiterate society, where we’re not willing to talk about this stuff. And just that he was able to speak about it added so much promise. Also, the fact that there was the immortalization of Morrie through his talking and storytelling to Mitch who was able to keep him alive.
In this book club, as we were reading it again, it definitely set a framework for how I wanted to interview my father, and also, thinking about Gaby and how I would have wanted to interview him, it definitely contributed to the progression of the book. It’s not a coincidence that there are similarities and parallels because I think it definitely informed my writing style. It definitely moved me in a direction to write something similar.
WWR: What do you hope readers who have lost loved ones will take from this memoir?
Mitchell Consky: Grief and loss are opportunities for deep connection. Whenever something really bad happens to somebody, the default reaction is to think that they are the anomaly, that the universe is conspiring against them, and that they are separate from everybody else. And what was most apparent through my experience of grief was how universal it all is. There were so many times when I didn’t know that that was going to be the case; when I felt so alone. But the fact that I had all these friends who had also lost a father alleviated some of the pain. One of the reasons I think the book resonates, if it does, is because of how unremarkable it is. It’s a story about a family losing a father, which so many families have experienced. And the unremarkable-ity of the story makes it so accessible. And that accessibility allows for a universal experience. We have all grieved somebody. This is not to dismiss people’s pain–grief is extremely painful–but is to inform them that you are not alone and that there is so much you can do. It’s okay to lean into dialogue. It’s okay to immortalize the people you have lost through storytelling. It’s okay to talk about them. You don’t need to suppress your pain. There’s Camp Erin Toronto, an incredible place for kids or volunteers who have lost a parent or loved one to come together and embrace that universality of grief. Grief is an opportunity for connection and togetherness. You are not alone in this.