Paul Quarrington was already dying by the time I met him, but all we talked about was how best to go about this business of living.

My job, in overseeing a series in which he would spin out his story in writing and video, was essentially to engage him in conversation, ask him questions, talk with him so much that he would forget there was a video camera trained on him, distract him from the inevitable self-consciousness that awaits anyone asked to expound on the prospect of facing the great hereafter, or the great whatever, that lay ahead.

A natural storyteller, the acclaimed Canadian musician, novelist, screenwriter and filmmaker would hold court in his Toronto kitchen, where we sat for hours at a time talking about what it means to live, while facing certain death.

Months before, Paul had received what he called “The Diagnosis”: Stage Four lung cancer. There was no Stage Five.

He approached the news in the spirit of the bon vivant, rushing headlong into a great sensory overloading of life’s experiences. He drank, he partied, he stayed up late and misbehaved.

It was a visceral, utterly human approach, and, to me, felt like such an antidote to all the usual worthy and earnest tales of people delivering their 10 great lessons or their last lectures that aim to make sense of life before leaving it.

And yet he made such sense of life along the way to living each day like it was his last. (That was a phrase that came up in the kitchen conversations and stuck — it became the headline for the first story he wrote for the National Post; it was the tagline that accompanied each of his stories and the video segments online.)

“It’s a life and death struggle I’ve got going on here,” he wrote in that first piece. “Except that, you know, I wouldn’t put any significant money on life raising the final flag.

“But having decided that life is beautiful — not a decision I laboured over, by the way, more a certainty that seemed unassailable — one year should seem as full of beauty and grace as 40.”

This is how he described it in one of the conversations: “The big secret is to … squeeze all the juice out of things before you go. So that’s what I set out to do.”

In the next kitchen conversation, that desire to keep on living his way into dying was tempered by the reality of lugging around an oxygen tank — which he did, by the way, to bars, to his publisher while he finished a book, to music studios while he was composing and recording with his band, to his favoured venue, where he was performing.

“It’s not that I want to become a more boring person, but there are certain practicalities that you kind of have to deal with. … It’s sort of like I’ve got Cinderella shoes. … You’ve got to be home at a certain hour or you’re gonna run out of air.”

Paul Quarrington kept up his Cinderella act until Jan. 21 — eight months after he received The Diagnosis. He died at home, surrounded by family and friends. He was 56.

National Post

Anne Marie Owens is the National Post’s Managing Editor, News