UNTIL DEATH DID THEM PART
They lived, loved, against all odds
When Nadia Cashman first spotted Ricky Brooks, something inside crackled and sparked.
“I couldn’t stop looking at him,” she told the Citizen later. “I knew from Day 1 he was the love of my life.”
It will conquer all, that love thing. They were both in electric wheelchairs, with rods in their spines. Nadia suffered from spina bifida, with many complications. Ricky had cerebral palsy, with a body and limbs off-kilter. They would never take moonlit walks, and instead wheeled around together in their castle, Saint Vincent Hospital, both beeping as they backed up.
And, “Hell, yeah!”, as Ricky liked to say, they would get married. He is enthusiastic like that, a brown-eyed man who slays with his smile. Sept. 5, 2009, it happened, with a gown and tiara, a tux and shiny shoes, rose petals and a ring, cake and balloons and 150 guests — nothing disabled about it.
We all have fairy-tale days, don’t we? But not fairy-tale lives.
Nadia died on Aug. 26, from complications associated with persistent ulcers in her back. She was 36. Her funeral was Monday.
The Citizen profiled Nadia and Ricky several times. Staff and readers were taken with the idea of a romance and wedding inside an institution catering to some of the city’s most vulnerable citizens.
Many things were not easy for them, including maintaining a marriage.
Nadia moved to the Montfort Long Term Care Centre, on the grounds of the east-end hospital. But there was no room for Ricky, now 34. It took eight months to reunite them under the same roof.
However, Nadia’s health took a turn and she came back to Saint Vincent about three years ago, said her mother, Hélène. A transfer could not be arranged for Ricky, and they spent their final years apart, maintaining a marriage by shuttle.
Hélène said Ricky was with her and husband Gerry on the night before Nadia died, in a care unit at the Civic hospital campus. He was given time alone with Nadia behind a drawn curtain. Like he knew.
“He was rubbing her on the forehead and telling her, ‘Hon, you’re really sick now, but I love you and I’ll always love you. Someday we’ll see each other again.’ ”
She says Ricky is coping pretty well with the loss. We have, perhaps, little to teach the disabled about resilience.
“She was very precious to us. We try to console ourselves by saying she must be in a better place.”
A few days ago, Hanif Patni, the president of Coventry Connections, wrote to correct some of the “flawed” math I had used in a column supporting the lockedout taxi drivers at the airport.
He broke it down his way: there are 40,000 trips per month from the airport, at an average fare of $40, for a total of $1.6 million. Now, divided by 150 cabs in the bargaining unit, it works out to more than $10,000 per car. And here they are crying about being asked to pay industry-average fees of $1,200 a month?
Abed Madi looks out the window at Tim Hortons and just smiles at the calculation. The chairman of the airport unit of the union, Unifor, has assembled a table of monthly expenses. He ought to know: he’s been an airport cabbie for 30 years.
First of all, the $10,000 amount is gross revenue per car, not per driver. The cars can work 18 hours a day, even more. So often, there are two drivers, splitting the $10K. A driver working alone, say 12 hours a day, might take in $6,000 or $6,500, Madi estimated.
Now, expenses. He sorted them into nine categories, from the old stand: rent ($390 with tax), to insurance for a single driver ($530) to gas ($1,150) and maintenance and repairs ($300). Total expenses: $2,875.77.
Total expenses under the proposed contract, same driver: $3,844.95.
Deduct this from a take of $5,000 to $6,500 per driver, and it might leave three grand.
From that $3,000 or so, of course, there is income tax. And we wonder why drivers are having kittens? That’s a $1,000 monthly pay cut.
Madi also said the union offered to swallow, in phases, a 100-per-cent increase in the monthly rent of $345. Coventry, he said, is sticking to its $4.50 per fare rate (plus tax), with $1.50 going to the taxi dispatcher.
(Coventry, meanwhile, will make $1 million a year for “dispatching” from the same curb every day. Huh?)
Patni concludes by saying service levels are already on the rise because 1,500 cars are now permitted to pick up at the airport, not 150.
In math, you divide; in business, apparently, you divide and conquer.
He was rubbing her on the forehead and telling her, ‘Hon, you’re really sick now, but I love you and I’ll always love you.’