RIP Mike O’Brien
National Post
Nathan Liewicki,
May 26, 2015
REGINA — In his final blog posting, Mike O’Brien said he
exuded faith — faith in his radiologist, surgeons, nurses, pharmacists and
counsellors — but not in God.
“Of course, I may be wrong. I often am. Fortunately, if
God really exists, I’m confident he’ll look at my overall record and let me
slide on the faith/skeptic issue. It just sounds like the kind of decent thing
he’d do,” he wrote on Sunday.
That same day O’Brien died, succumbing to synovial
sarcoma, a cancer first diagnosed in the summer of 2011. He was 51.
The actor, known for his role on the TV show Corner Gas,
started the blog in March 2014 to chronicle in a humorous way what was
happening to his body. He called it The Big Diseasey.
“There’s so much stuff out there that will make you sad
and depressed, and if you have cancer, why on Earth would you want to get more
sad and depressed?” he said in an interview earlier this month. “Cancer pretty
much gives you that. You don’t have to go find more written material to make it
worse.”
Growing up in Inuvik and Victoria, O’Brien discovered
early the power of making other kids laugh. Though he considered becoming an
actor, he chose journalism instead, starting his career at the Medicine Hat
News in Alberta, then moving east to the Regina Leader-Post. It was there he
started acting again, and landed a recurring role on Corner Gas as small town
liquor store/insurance agency owner Wes Humboldt. He had a regular role on HBO
Canada’s Less Than Kind, and, after a series of small movie roles, he’d landed
a leading role as the killer in a horror movie.
Leader-Post reporter Barb Pacholik was a colleague of
O’Brien’s from 1988 to 2002. “I think what people now remember a lot was the
humour and that’s what brought him to radio and CBC, where he got into comedy
programs,” said Pacholik.
O’Brien’s ability to crack repeated off-the-cuff jokes —
even about the stage four cancer that was cutting his life shorter than he
could have predicted — is who he was.
O’Brien was admitted to palliative care in February. It
was there that the cancer spread to his lungs, lymph nodes and kidney.
In the early days of March, friends and family flew to
Winnipeg to say their goodbyes, thinking he was about to die. Instead, he kept
blogging.
“I want to thank him for showing us all how to live while
dying,” said Pacholik. He filled what time he had left remarkably well and made
the most of it,” she said.
O’Brien is survived by his wife Robin Summerfield and
young son Will Lang.
O’BRIEN, Mike (Michael O’Brien)
Born: 1964, Inuvik, Northwest Territories, Canada
Died: 5/25/2015, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada
Mike O’Brien’s western – actor:
The Pinkertons (TV) – 2015 (Judge John Shirley)
No comments:
Post a Comment