Curtis McLaren’s love of life was magic
LIFELINES
There might be some who would say there was no magic in Curtis McLaren’s young life. His parents knew within two weeks of their third and youngest child’s birth that he had heart problems of the sort that necessitated four operations in his first three years of life — but all of them palliative, none of them healing, none of them ever presented as a cure. He was born without a left ventricle, the chamber that works as the heart’s main pump.
“ We always knew it was nonfixable,” said his father Stephen McLaren, a family physician with a practice in the Markham subdivision of Cornell, where the family lives. “ It’s remarkable he was able to get as far as he did.” He was just 17 when he died Oct. 17.
There was no cure for Curtis; there was never a cure. When he was 10 years old, sitting in his new sweater on Christmas morning reading the Guinness Book of Records
he’d just received as a present, he suffered a massive stroke that left him unable to walk, talk or even sit up.
Its aftermath was the only time his family had ever seen him sad. They had wheeled him down to the public atrium at Sick Kids so he could feel the bustle and flow of the real world again. But instead of beaming at passers- by, as he always had, he was quiet and still.
“It was palpable,” said Stephen. “ He was upset and sad.”
“ People were looking at him,” said his mother Patti. He was given a pacemaker; otherwise he wasn’t going to survive. And then Curtis got so excited about that operation because he thought he’d be getting fixed, finally. Up until his stroke, he’d been a kid who was up for anything his older sister and brother, Laura and Rob, did. The family lived on Main St. in Unionville then and Curtis played on the Unionville T- Ball and baseball teams. He banged on his father’s drums. He used to ride his bike outside pretending he was his hero Arnold Schwarzenegger on a motorcycle. He was a kid with a huge grin, happy every single day, still at the age when he would morph in his mind into his action heroes living out grand adventures — when he had to teach himself how to walk and talk again.
After six months as a day patient at the Bloorview MacMillan centre — he refused to stay there; his parents drove him and picked him up every day — he was walking, had regained his speech and the use of his left hand. “ You could see stubbornness in his eyes as an infant,” his father remarked. He once told his mother that after his stroke he thought about his mortality every day, but no one would ever have known that. To the world and to his own tight- knit family, he was a focused, funny, sunny kid. So the same weekend he came home from rehab, he got on his bike again. His father had to hook his hands to the handlebars. He rode up and down the street and then put it away. Forever. If it was the end of childhood, it was also the beginning of Curtis’ great love. He discovered cards — soon he was able to cut, shuffle and deal with one hand. Then it was card tricks, complicated ones, involving astonishing sleight-of-hand his parents could never work out, that wowed his school friends. He always had a deck of cards with him — in his knapsack, pockets, his mother’s car.
At lunch at Markville Secondary School, a group would always gather whenever he’d practise his tricks. He wasn’t a showman or a showoff ; he used his cards to engage people.
“ He was always laughing; his laugh was infectious. When he was in my class and he was laughing, people wouldn’t stare, they wanted to go to him because he just overflowed with happiness and joy,” said Brian Fisher, who was Curtis’ homeroom teacher in Grades 7 and 8 at Unionville Public School. But recently he had started slowing down.
Just this past September, doctors at the Hospital for Sick Children sat him down and said to him: Here’s your future. Your heart is failing. You can carry on as you are now, maxed out on all the meds the doctors can think of giving you, yet losing energy despite popping seven pills each and every day. Or you can try for a heart transplant that might not work. No guarantees.
That night he sat in the kitchen with his parents and cried for only the second time in his life, they believe. Then he got up, went to his room and turned up the volume on a Jimi Hendrix CD (“ Hendrix was his thing this summer,” his father said), and when he came back down, sat in front of the TV and watched The Family Guy.
“ He was laughing and chuckling away at the show,” said Stephen, “ and went to bed happy.”
Three days later he emailed his cardiologist: “ Let’s go.” One week before his scheduled date of Oct. 24 to start the tests to see if he qualified for a transplant, Curtis and a group from his Grade 12 Computer Technology class were out shooting a movie for a project.
It was his favourite class; he was planning to study digital media arts. They were shooting a mock news item — a robbery at a bus stop — and Curtis played one of the witnesses in the bus shelter. On his way back from the shoot, he collapsed and died instantly.
In the teen world of text messaging, word of Curtis’ death spread instantly. His former teacher, Brian Fisher, had become a family friend and decided he should go to Markville high school to try to comfort many of Curtis’ friends. But students from the other three area high schools also showed up. Fisher said he talked with 150 distraught teens who were worrying and sad about not saying goodbye to Curtis. There was a bristol board card to sign. But everybody always remembered Curtis with his card tricks. And that is how the idea was born. They would say their goodbyes; they could tell Curtis what he meant to them with playing cards.
Within 12 hours, the students had been to every high school, distributed the cards to anyone who wanted to write something to Curtis, collected them, put them back in their packages and returned them to Fisher.
“ They collected three full decks,” said Fisher, who presented them to the McLaren family. They tucked them unread into the coffin with Curtis. At the funeral home, others placed more playing cards with messages on them into the open coffin. There were cards by his side; Curtis was practically covered with cards. And someone, at some point, had tucked an ace up his sleeve. cdunphy@ thestar. ca