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The Current Transcript for October 30, 2018

Host: Laura Lynch

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

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VOICE: We call upon you, our Father in heaven. Please wipe away the tears. Bring peace to land and give us resolve, to never again allow for racism, bigotry or hatred of any kind.

LAURA LYNCH: Rabbi Daniel Korobkin prayed for peace last night as hundreds gathered in the chilly night air in Toronto to honour the victims of Saturday's shootings in a Pittsburgh synagogue. As people mourn, Jewish communities are also warning of a rise of anti-Semitism fueled in part they by websites where hate can flourish. After that, a master storyteller is also a master of ravens.

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They've got a wonderful diet of chopped up angus beef and mice. Biscuits soaked in blood. It's a bit of a treat for them. They just love it.

LL: The sounds of the ravens who live in the Tower of London. Their master, Christopher Skaife, is describing their breakfast menu. Skaife carries the heavy responsibility of ensuring the birds don't fly the coops, so to speak. As legend has it, that if they disappear, the kingdom will fall. He has charming tales to tell of ravens and of ghosts in the tower. And in an hour.

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VOICE: It was really nice too to get the story behind his journey. And to see the man you know that through organ donation we can help and change.

LL: Last week, we brought you the story of Pat Loder and Rob Buttle, two strangers brought together when Buttle received the heart of Pat's son after he died. Now that conversation has sparked another, raising heartfelt and difficult questions about expectations, obligations, gratitude and grief. Listen in to that. I'm Laura Lynch, sitting in for Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

Pittsburgh shooting stresses a need to 'deplatform' sites that spread hate, says tech reporter

Guests: Jordan Helfman, Bernie Farber, April Glaser

SOUNDCLIP

Sounds from a vigil in Toronto.

LL: Last night in Toronto, people came together in a vigil for the 11 Jewish congregants shot dead at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh on Saturday morning. The U.S. president, Donald Trump, visits the city today to offer his condolences to the local Jewish community. The massacre, the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history, has shaken Jewish people around the world, including here in Canada. Some Jewish parents are struggling to find ways to speak about the shootings with their children. And that's something Rabbi Jordan Helfman has been trying to help with. Last night, he spoke with parents and children at Holy Blossom Temple, his Toronto synagogue and Rabbi Helfman is with me here in our Toronto studio. Hello.

JORDAN HELFMAN: Hello. Thanks for having me.

LL: Rabbi, tell me about the questions you're hearing from Jewish children about what happened in Pittsburgh.

JH: The biggest question I've been getting is why do people hate Jews and why is there anti-Semitism in the world still today?

LL: And what are you able to tell them?

JH: We speak a bit about the history and about difference and how it's our responsibility to be there for other people who are also different and how bullies and others hate difference in the world. And we have to maintain our difference, but still live inside of a world that is challenging and not positive towards difference.

LL: This must be a difficult conversation to have with children.

JH: It is, it is. And with the little ones, we talk more about being there together, all of us being with each other, that we're all responsible for one another as a Jewish people and also with the entire world. And with the older kids though is when they really get into questions about identity and the fear that they had walking to synagogue last night.

LL: Really? What did they say?

JH: So some of the parents were more forthcoming than the kids, but parents spoke about how when their kids were leaving the cars to walk into the synagogue. They turned to them and said, mom, is it safe in here tonight?Which are really painful words to hear from our parents and from people coming doing what they do every Monday night, coming what they do to synagogue for service.

LL: Unfortunately though, not surprising, given what's happened. So what are you able to tell them or tell the parents? What is the answer to that kind of fear?

JH: I mean the first thing we have to acknowledge is that fear is real and that this is a occurrence, which we pray and hope was a one off and was something that will never happen again here in North America or around the world. And then we say also that we need to come together and be with each other in these moments. And a lot of people are coming out this Saturday morning for services. I know the Muslim community is going to come and join us and do a ring of peace, a circling protest and solidarity around our synagogues and in spite of that fear, we still need to come together and be with each other.

LL: Now I understand that before moving to the states, one of the 11 people who were murdered in Pittsburgh, had been a member of Holy Blossom. What can you tell us about her?

JH: Yes. Joyce Fienberg grew up at Holy Blossom Temple. Is one of the pictures on our wall of honour, of all of our grade 10 students who have been confirmed and was married at the temple and it was one of our hardest moments of my week to lead a Sunday service and have her cousin sitting there and holding each other in the back of the room.

LL: And what have they been saying to you about what's happened?

JH: They talk about her, the kind of person she was, how she was there early to set up the food for after the service and the comfort that she found in that community at the Tree of Life community and how when they were waiting for the news that fear that they hadn't heard and what that might mean.

LL: Rabbi Jordan Helfman, I want you to stand by while I bring two other guests into the conversation. The attack in Pittsburgh happened at a time when anti-Semitic incidents have been rising dramatically both on and offline. Bernie Farber is the former CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress. He is now chair of the Canadian Anti-hate Network. He's with me in our Toronto studio. And April Glaser covers technology and business for Slate.com and has written extensively about social media sites such as Gab, the network that was used by the man charged in the synagogue attack. And we have reached her today in Philadelphia. Hello to you both.

BERNIE FARBER: Hello.

APRIL GLASER: Hi.

LL: Bernie Farber, let's start with you. You have been battling neo-nazis and anti-semites for decades. Is this moment different?

BF: Well it's different only in the extent of the violence that we have seen. A lot of people approach me and asked how can, how could this be? How could this happen in 2018? I have to tell you, I am shocked at the deaths, traumatized and heartbroken, but sadly not surprised. We already had an example of what can happen right here in our own country. Just a year and a half ago, a mad man, an Islamophobe, walked in to a mosque and murdered six Muslims at prayer. And I remember talking to a number of people, saying at that time, honest to goodness it's really just a matter of time before we potentially see something like that happen in our own synagogues. So look, it is an issue that's going to trouble us for a long time to come. I take solace from the fact that at the vigil yesterday, thousands were with us, many from the Muslim community and many from other ethnic, faith and racial communities stood with us. This is a good thing, but I'm not terribly sanguine as to where things are going to be going over the next short while.

LL: Can you give us a sense of the scope of the situation here in Canada? How have anti-semitic incidents been increasing and what are we talking about?

BF: What people either fail to realize or have not embraced, is that anti-semitism as described by historian, Robert Wistrich, is the longest hatred. It's been around for almost 2500 years. It has absent flows and Canada has been absolutely no stranger to anti-semitism. After World War 2, after the Holocaust, one would have thought that Jew hatred would have gone the way of the dinosaur, but that did not happen. There are times here in Ontario in the late 40s and 50s that Jews couldn't purchase land. There were universities that put actual quotas on how many Jews could attend law schools and medical schools, etc. We had groups like the Heritage Front, neo-nazis. This has been something that has been part of our culture for a long time and what we're seeing now are new expressions. They call themselves the alt-right, Proud Boys, the Soldiers of Odin, they are Nazis. That's what it comes to and what we're seeing, especially here in North America, our political leadership actually emboldening these individuals to take action. When you have the president of the United States using assault of words and vilifying immigrants and refugees, this is what leads to these types of things.

LL: And I want to get into more, but first I just want to turn to April Glaser. Can you remind us about this website, Gab, and what role it played for Robert Bowers who is the man who's been charged in Saturday's attack.

AG: Sure. Gab is an online social network that was created in 2016, that's supposed to be a kind of a safe place for people to say whatever they want. It's a free speech, kind of absolutist platform, that was created as people who engaged in hate and harrasment on the more mainstream social networks, were getting booted off and this was supposed to be a place where they could go. Robert Bowers did have an active account there where he would regularly post anti-semitic missives and memes and what have you. And it was really a place where he was able to socialize and hate and something that's really important remember about Gab and these other places that allow for hate speech to flourish online, is that when people create communities around hate, when they can socialize around hate, they develop a politics about hate. And as they gain confidence in their anti-semitism or their racism, there are instances where that has spilled out into the real world and we do see that for instance, Saturday you know that he was active on Gab, which is you know this kind of hate speech friendly social network and then he took it to the next level.

LL: As I understand it, Gab has been taken down for now, though the CEO is insisting he'll have it back online. Are there other similar sites that Gab users can go to?

AG: Yeah, so I mean to be clear, you know there's been hate speech on the mainstream social networks for years too and they've been getting better about taking that down, but there is a website or rather a chat app called, Discord, that I've been investigating. Where I found over 20 neo-nazi and white supremacist and racist groups there, where people could kind of exchange memes freely, you know about Nazism and about racism and talk about their hate there very openly in these chat spaces. And that's a place where kind of gamers go to congregate, but it's also a place where white supremacists and neo-nazis go to recruit. There's also a Stormfront, which is the oldest and largest neo-nazi, white supremacist chat board or message board on the internet. And that's the place where for example, Dylan Roof, who murdered nine people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015, was very active and you know said that he wanted to take his hate offline in his manifesto. And then we saw Anders Breivik was also very active on Stormfront. So we do see patterns.

AG: Anders Breivik, the man, the gentleman in Norway, who blew up a building and then shot children on an island off Norway. Over 70 people died from his hate crime and so we do see patterns where people who engage in hate crimes are initially active in these online communities, where they feel safe, kind of finding community in their hate.

LL: Now, Bernie Farber, you were just talking about Donald Trump I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the current political climate in Canada and how that might play into the of anti-semitism.

BF: Absolutely. As I said, we have a situation where we have a president in United States who basically mainstreams hateful language and to a certain extent, we're now beginning to see that a little bit here, especially in Ontario and in Quebec, where parties have been elected that have engaged and are engaging in discriminatory attitudes. We have a new Premier in Doug Ford who took a photo with Faith Goldy who was running for mayor. She is undoubtedly a neo-nazi enabler. She has gathered around her, a number of neo-nazis and white supremacists. She may not be all that well known outside of Toronto, but has become kind of a figurehead for hate and for neo-nazis in Toronto and actually garnered 25,000 votes. And so when a Premier.

LL: That was only 3.4 per cent though.

BF: It was a small percentage, but it was still enough to fill a large hockey arena and that is something that we have to take into account. And if you add Kevin Johnson, who is another hater, charged with hate crimes in Mississauga, where he got close to 14,000 votes, the number's become somewhat astronomical in terms of hatred itself. And the fact that the premier, even though he was urged by many to step out of this picture, this actual photo he took with Faith Goldy, who then used photo to give herself credibility. Yes, he renounced anti-semitism, that's easy, but he did not renounce her. He did not renounce neo-nazism and that emboldens them. That gives them in their minds the permission to step out of their garbage cans, dust themselves off and continue on with their evil work.

LL: Rabbi Jordan Helfman, I want to bring you back into the conversation because you were originally from the United States.

JH: I am. I am.

LL: And you're hearing I'm imagining from Jewish communities there about what are they saying about the climate there and how they're dealing with the tragedy?

JH: The communities in the United States are reeling, are also in a period of real hurt around this tragedy and there are different calls. Some are lobbying for gun control right now, the some point to the upcoming midterm elections as a potential moment for change in the States. And many are upset by the leadership that has been shown by the president.

LL: And there are thousands signed an open letter to Donald Trump to say in Pittsburgh to say they don't want him in the city, unless he renounces white nationalism and I'm wondering as a rabbi and an American, what you think of commentators who say the Trump administration is trafficking an anti-semitic tropes and has some culpability.

JH: So I won't speak directly to the administration itself, but I will say that there are many lists you can find where prominent Jewish leaders are the ones that are singled out and as the issue in the Democratic Party, where Bloomberg is trying to buy the election sources, trying to buy the election and that language is used in a very loaded way.

LL: April Glaser, you tweeted about the anti-semitic comments you yourself have faced recently, especially in the wake of some of your reporting on the alt-right online. Tell us about that.

AG: Sure. I mean I'm a Jewish woman who investigates neo-nazi and white supremacist groups on the internet and they have threatened to dox me.

LL: Can you describe what doxing is for people who may not know.

AG: Doxing is when they try to find your online passwords or information about you, that you would rather keep private, where they get your address. Doxing has resulted in things like them calling the police to come to your house arbitrarily, you know various forms of harassment where you get kind of flooded on Twitter or in my inbox with anti-semitic slurs and it's very, very jarring because you know you see these things on your phone. I can't not be on Twitter because I'm a journalist and that's where news breaks and I cover a lot of different things. I can't not being online because I'm very dedicated to following what's going on all the time because that's my job and so I can't just turn it off. And so I have to watch it, I report these things and unfortunately Twitter has not always said that it violated their hate speech policies. And it's been very challenging, but at the same time I continue to go into these groups and find them and report on them, but this is kind of what comes with, this kind of a collateral that comes with researching these groups is you're going to get a lot of anti-semitism too. And one thing I'll say is that part of it, the narrative with the anti-semitism at least online is that Jewish people are bringing immigrants into the country and so it's very much tied with other forms of xenophobia.

Explain that a little bit more. How do those things go together. Sure, so Trump is saying that like the immigrants who are coming into the United States are degenerate, are the worst of the worst and then the narrative goes that it's Jewish people who are laying out the red carpet for immigrants to come through. And the idea is that if the Jews are somehow removed in some way, then this will help the immigrant problem. This is what anti-semitic people are kind of saying in these online forms. So that's kind of the illogical narrative that I see trumpeted.

LL: I'll juststay with you for one more question. What else do you think needs to be done to prevent hate and anti-semitism from flourishing online then?

AG: Finding these communities and deplatforming them is incredibly important. I mean sure they're going.

LL: Deplatforming meaning just getting them off the internet.

AG: Getting them off the internet. Having companies refuse to provide web services to them. No longer providing hosting, no longer providing payment services, right and not just waiting til violence erupts, but actually taking active measures and when something is reported, turning it off.

LL: Couldn't there be a backlash to that though as some would say?

AG: Yeah and no so, Alex Jones is a good example of somebody who has lost a lot of his hosting on the internet and a lot of his spots and he's politicized it because it all happened at once. But when it comes to hate speech, we know time and time again, that hate speech is form of violence and that it provides the breeding ground for violence to spill out into the real world. And have a real zero tolerance policy where it's enforced consistently and not just when something terrible happens is very important. And the idea is not to say that we're ever going to fully quash these communities online, they'll always find another place to go, but rather to make them harder to find. To make it harder for them to congregate, to make it harder for them to find community within their hate because a lot of these people wouldn't find other neo-nazis otherwise, unless they had these online forms.

LL: We've got about a minute left. Bernie Farber what do you think can be done in Canada to fight back against the growth of anti-semitism here?

BF: We have hate laws here that have to be used and have to be enforced.

LL: You're saying they're not being used?

BF: Not as well as they should be and police are having some difficulty in terms of getting that out there. Number two, we have to educate ourselves. Urge people here, go on to antihate.ca, which is our website, learn about who the groups are, educate yourselves, stand with us and mostly I would say this in the end, yes Jews, the Jewish people today are traumatised in terms of what happened. But on Saturday, this coming Saturday, we will all be in synagogue. We'll be in synagogue for Saturdays to come. Hate will not cripple us, but we need good people to stand with us and to fight this scourge.

LL: Rabbi Jordan Helfman, thirty seconds, last word to you on this.

JH: What people are looking for now is physical and spiritual security and we hope that we can give them that. We pray and hope that working with the forces here in Canada, we can give them the physical security. And also we know when they come that we will give them the emotional security. The kids are saying in school that they are hearing some of things that are going on online and so we know they need to come in. They need to see people around them and they need to reach out and create more peace and wholeness in our world.

LL: I thank all three of you for being with me today. Bernie Farber is the former CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress and is now chair of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network. Rabbi Jordan Helfman is the associate rabbi at Toronto's Holy Blossum Temple. They were both with me in our Toronto studio. And April Glaser covers technology and business for Slate.com. She was in Philadelphia. Well the CBC News is next. Then, Christoper Skaife's job responsibilities include the care and feeding of a few birds and holding together the United Kingdom. My chat with the Ravenmaster of London in our next half hour. I'm Laura Lynch, sitting in for Anna Maria Tremonti, and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

How the ravenmaster of London protects the kingdom with birds

Guests: Christopher Skaife

LL: Hello. I'm Laura Lynch, in for Anna Maria Tremonti, and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

LL: Still to come in the days after our conversation between two strangers brought together by a donated heart, we heard from many of you. In half an hour, we'll hear from two women on their different perspectives on the value of donor families and organ recipients connecting with each other. But first, the Birdman of the British Isles.

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Sounds of raven calls.

LL: The melodious tones of a raven's call. Bird experts say that ravens have about 80 different calls and Christopher Skaife says he can identify about a dozen of them. It's all part of the job. Christopher Skaife is Ravenmaster at the Tower of London. It's a crucially important position since, as legend has it, if the ravens leave the tower, great harm will befall the kingdom. And that's why the birds Merlina, Rocky, Poppy and the others, seven in all, get one-on-one attention, starting at the first light of day.

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[Opening gate]

VOICE: We're going to make our way to the raven's enclosure. It's a new enclosure that was put in about two years ago. So we're just going to make our way through the little gate now. It's a little bit stiff like I am early in the morning. I've been an old soldier. Good morning you lot. Good morning. So I can see the ravens, they're all kind of hopping around now. We're just going to get some meat and throw it in their enclosure. We're not going to let them out yet.

[Raven calls]

VOICE: They've got a wonderful diet of chopped up Angus beef and mice. Biscuits soaked in blood. It's a bit of a treat for them, they just love it. Morning Poppy. Morning Poppy. There we go young lady. That will keep you busy for a little while. Good girl. Now sometimes I throw her rats as well. And rats, I don't know anybody's ever cut a rat in half, I wouldn't advise it, to be honest with you, but it is really, really stinky.

[Spraying water].

That is a mouse's tail poking out your mouth and there's a dead mouse floating in your water now, isn't it. Why have you put that in there for? Oh my goodness me. I'm just filling up the water bowls now and I can see that Poppy's decided. On the side of it, Poppy has got a mouse sticking out of her mouth and the tail is dangling down. It's disgusting. And the other mouse, she's bit off its head and chucked it in the water bowl. So that would be me going to get that shortly as well.

LL: Yeah, it sounds delicious right around breakfast time. Christopher Skaife has written a memoir, The Ravenmaster: My Life with the Ravens at the Tower of London, and he is visiting Toronto. Hello.

CHRISTOPHER SKAIFE: Good morning.

LL: You're in Toronto. The ravens are in London. So who is looking after them?The Kingdom is at risk.

CS: Oh I have a wonderful team of four raven assistants that actually help me look after the ravens, although I am keeping a good eye on what they're actually doing.

LL: Anything happen while you've been away?

CS: No everything's nice and calm. The Kingdom is safe.

LL: Now listen, I apologize to our listeners who may have been listening to that opening bit of tape, as they're eating their breakfast because a raven's breakfast is decidedly different. You start every day with dead mice and rats, biscuits soaked in blood and yet you're calling your job the best job in England, why?

CS: How many Ravenmasters are there in the world? I think officially, I'm the only one. I get up early in the morning. I spend all day observing and looking at the Ravens and then I put them to bed at night.

LL: It just sounds like an idyllic existence. You actually live in the Tower of London too, don't you?

CS: Yeah. Now they say every man's home is his castle you know and in my case, a castle in the city of London, how fabulous is that? There are currently 37 Yeomen Warders living inside the walls of the Tower of London. And actually we live there with our families, as well. We have our own pub there. We have a church. We have our own doctor on site.

LL: Let's get back to the ravens. There's one raven who doesn't deign to sleep in the enclosure with the other birds. Let's listen to this.

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VOICE: We're going to go and see where Merlina is. I think I can actually see on the rooftop, although I'm not wearing my glasses at the moment, so I might be wrong. Hi young lady, should we come and say hello. Do I want biscuit or do I want steak later on? Hmm, I think I've worked out what I want. Steak. Yeah?

[Clicking sound]

VOICE: We have this clicking sound that we make to each other. It's like a hey I'm over here, I'm OK. Hello. So what she's done is she's just picked up the food I've given, a nice bit of beef. You're not going to. You are? No? Are you? Are you going to get that in your mouth? Yes. Yes you are. Imagine sticking in three quarters of a great big steak into your mouth in one go. That's what she's just done. She's just run off now and she's going to hide it around tower green, so that she can come back if she gets a little bit peckish throughout the day.

[Raven call]

VOICE: I'm telling this story, not you. OK? Actually that's probably not a good place to hide it, tucking it in the bannister going down there. Sometimes I despair with these birds.

LL: What a conversation. Now chunks of beef? I didn't know ravens loved angus beef that much.

CS: Yeah absolutely. They get a wonderful diet. Sometimes some liver as well. One occasion we used to throw the raven food out and around the tower and some seagull had picked up this piece of liver and just actually dropped it and it hit a lady on the face and slid down her face and it was wildly embarrasing.

LL: She has a great story to tell.

CS: She has a great story to tell. Yeah, but probably not her children.

LL: Now it was really interesting listening to you actually having a conversation with Merlina. What's your relationship like with her?

CS: Merlina actually came to us when she was about a year, a year and a half old. And so she'd been what I call in the book, "humanized." And over a period of time, she's become my pal, my best friend really. Over the years I've just been observing the ravens, watching them and I realized that like us, they have their own personalities and characteristics and she's certainly a really clever raven.

LL: And she's also unto herself, isn't she?

CS: She is a free spirit. Yeah absolutely.

LL: Now are you as close with the other ravens?

CS: No. We have I a distance between us because I want to keep the ravens at the tower as wild as I possibly can. Because I give them much more freedom of movement around the tower nowadays than they ever have had before. If they were to fly away, they wouldn't rely on humans to actually need to survive, they could go and survive on their own.

LL: But do you have like an enemy among the ravens?

CS: Yeah some of them look at me with a little bit of disdain and think, oh he's here again. He's bothering us again. Yeah absolutely. One of them being Munin. She didn't really like me very much.

LL: She didn't and then she since died I understand.

CS: Yeah, sadly Munin was one of our oldest ravens, but unfortunately she was 23 and she died of an old age related illness a couple of months ago, which was very very sad for us.

LL: Is 23 an old age for a raven?

CS: It's a really good age. Yeah in the wild, depending on environmental conditions that they live in and in their teens between 15 and 20 years. The oldest one of course that we had at the time of London was a raven that died in 1924 and he was 44 years of age.

LL: Good Lord. Wow. I wonder what he did to live such a good life.

CS: I think he had some good Angus beef there.

LL: So after Munin died, I think you got another raven named Poppy, is that correct?

CS: Yeah I have breeders around the country that we can get ravens in. And so when Munin went we replaced her almost immediately with another raven, a baby raven that actually was living around my house with myself and my wife. So I've just introduced her into the enclosure now.

LL: We just have a little bit of tape with you and Poppy. So let's listen to that right now.

SOUNDCLIP

Hello Poppy. Hello Poppy. You ready? Go. That was pathetic. Come over here. Come over here, come, come. We're learning a trick at the moment. You ready? You ready? Go. Good girl. So I've got a biscuit in my hand and I'm actually throwing it to Poppy and Poppy likes to catch it. You ready, ready? Go. Good girl. Who's a good girl?

[Raven call]

LL: It sounds like you are teaching a dog a trick. Are they like pets for you?

CS: Yeah I mean Poppy, she's a beautiful bird and yeah, yeah, she's kind of like a dog to us, yeah, but much more affectionate.

LL: And what about brainpower?

CS: Well they're extremely intelligent. I work alongside Queen Mary University in London and the students come in and I've spent a couple of years now studying the ravens at the Tower of London. In fact, their professor describes them as feathered apes, which basically suggests that ravens have the same capacity of thought as a primate.

LL: And also means that they're probably pretty good at doing things like stealing.

CS: Ravens have been known to steal stuff. In the tower for instance, they've worked out how to steal a sandwich from a member of the public. I describe in the book as like a military mission. As this raven goes, hides underneath a chair, somebody is silly enough to put their sandwich on it and it kind of pokes its beak up through the chair and grabs the sandwich and pulls it down and in the case of Merlina, she comes running back to me as if I was trying to steal the sandwich, trying to give it to me and I say, it's not for me. I don't want it. You stole it.

LL: She also has an affinity for cigarettes?

CS: Yeah. She's not a smoker, but she is an anti-smoker. So one day actually, someone was just about to light up a cigarette. She sneaked over and she stole this whole pack of cigarettes. Went into the middle of the tower green, she brought out every one individually and just completely and utterly smashed them. You know they're quite expensive so yeah, but you know it's good anti-smoking device.

LL: Yeah, that's what she was doing, trying to get them to quit. So we've still got some lovely tape I want to play for listeners, we're still in the midst of your daily morning routine at this point. Let's listen to you letting the ravens out of their enclosure.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: I'm going to slide the door open now. We're just going to let the first raven out now. This is Jubilee. It's going to fly out at quite some pace. So standby. Come on then young man, come on out.

[Raven flapping wings]

VOICE: Now you may have noticed when he was flying out that you heard a lot of commotion coming from two ravens. Now that is Erin and Rocky and because they're the dominant ravens here, they were going, oy you're in my area. Get out my area now. And that's why he went a fast pace and got out of it quite quickly. So what we're going to do now is we're going to let out Gripp and Harris. Come on in you two. These two are going to come over here now. These two.

LL: Christopher Skaife, there is significance to the order in which you let the ravens out every day, isn't there?

CS: Absolutely, yeah ravens have a pecking order. Excuse the pun, but they do. And so I let the non-dominant ones out first so they can go to their territories around the tower and at night time I do that in reverse as well.

LL: What happens when you mess with that?

CS: When I mess with it all hell breaks loose. Chaos, absolute chaos. And there was an example of that many years ago. It was my birthday and my wife was taking me out for a lovely meal, but I had to put the birds to bed. It was one of them cold, wintry, drizzly type evenings. So I went on tower green and Merlina was nowhere to be seen. She was normally up in a holly tree hiding anyway. So I went with the other birds to bed. And there was two that weren't in the pecking order, that we're near the enclosures so I thought for a bit quick speed, I put them to bed first. So I've done that. Then I realized that the two dominant ones were watching me and they just looked at me and I knew what they was thinking. They was thinking you've done that out of order. So I went to try and put them to bed and they actually went up to the south side of the White House steps, which is a set of wooden steps and they were right at the top of it. So I had to climb up in the dark and it was raining and I had my winter boots on. So I climbed up to the top of the steps and just as I was about to get them, I slipped and I hurt myself quite profusely on a beam.

LL: I don't want to get too graphic, but how did you hurt yourself?

CS: It was a man issue that I hurt myself on that was extremely painful and I just think the birds kind of base jumped off it at that same time as I kind of smashed myself in between my legs and they went and went into their enclosure and I kind of had to embarrassingly climbed down these steps.

LL: You describe one point looking up at them and you're sure they're doing something.

CS: Yeah they was laughing at me. I can guarantee you they was laughing at me. Those looking at me going silly old man down there, what's he doing.

LL: But the story doesn't end there.

CS: No, no, no, that's just the beginning. They eventually went to bed and I kind of slammed the door behind them a little bit harder than I probably should of. So the last one I had to put to bed was Merlina and she was nowhere to be found. So I walked around the tower for nearly an hour looking for her, couldn't see her at all. So I thought this is it. Running out of time, my wife be waiting for me. It's my birthday so I'll go and get my sharkseye. Now a sharkseye is a really big torch that we have in a store that helps me to discover where ravens hide in dark recesses around the tower. And so I turned it on and I was searching around the tower. It was just like something from the Second World War, this great big flashlight beaming around the tower. And as I went under the archway of the Bloody Tower, I heard this croaking sound and I thought it's a Christmas miracle, I know where she is. And she'd actually just hid underneath a wooden platform that actually goes into a tower called the wakeful tower where we keep our instruments of torture. It's in an area where there is a pit and doesn't really have much use this pit, apart from stagnant water and visitor rubbish and dead pigeon carcasses.

LL: Sounds lovely.

CS: It's not particularly nice to be honest with you and I wasn't relishing the fact that I had to go into this pit. It was about seven foot deep and there was a sort of old wooden steps that went down to it.

LL: You called it the pit of doom, didn't you?

CS: Yep. I named the pit of doom because it was certainly a pit of doom for me that night. So as I was actually going down because it was the only way that I was actually going to get out of underneath this platform. And as I got down to the third step, it snapped and there's this crack and I kind of remember you know these birds flashing around my head as I fell into this pit of doom, upside down into the water and I could remember this pigeon carcass floating past my eyes. So I managed to get myself up and wipe the dirt and rubbish off me and then I realized I I didn't have my phone on me and I couldn't get out of this pit. So I was stuck there for nearly half an hour. But the thing about it is that Merlina actually had just kind of walked her way out from where she was hiding and sat on the fence above me, just kind of looking down at me and laughing at me.

LL: They're having away with you, these guys.

CS: Yeah and that's just one of the examples. I'm probably the only Ravenmaster that I know in history that's climbed to the top of the white tower and hung on the weather vane up there trying to catch a naughty raven. So I, you know, for the preservation of the ravens and the safety of the kingdom, I've done some really crazy things.

LL: Right, but Christopher you can't leave listeners hanging. How did you get out of the pit?

CS: I had actually broken two steps and I managed to just wedge them inside a wall and stand on them and I had to kind of jump up to grab hold and I'm quite short, but I just managed to get hold of the tip with my fingertips and I had enough strength to pull myself up eventually. I actually missed my meal. So we decided to have beans on toast for my birthday.

LL: What a lovely celebration.

CS: What a lovely celebration, but she did see the funny side of it and I made the mistake of one, not putting the birds in the right order and two, not taking my phone with me.

LL: And quoth Christopher, never more.

CS: Absolutely, quoth the Christopher, never more.

LL: Now that legend about the kingdom falling if the ravens leave the tower. Where does that come from?

CS: It's a really interesting question. Actually the stories of the ravens don't really date back much earlier than about 1880. Now the history is or the legend is, King Charles the Second came to the Tower of London. The wall astronomer at the time, a man by the name of John Flamsteed, had a telescope and he was you know working out his calculations of the stars and the planets and the moon. And he was getting fed up with the ravens around it. It was one of the tallest buildings in London. So this morning he went down to the king, said squire can I get rid of these confounded ravens and the king said of course you can. Until someone went to the king and said, if you get rid of the ravens the Tower of London will crumble into dust and a great harm will befall the kingdom. Of course King Charles the Second, the merry monarch, is quite superstitious. His father, King Charles the First, had been executed. There'd been a plague in London 1665. The Great Fire of London, 1666. So he thought, I better keep six here by royal decree. So that is the legend of the Ravens at the Tower of London. But it probably didn't really start appearing in that much detail until after the Second World War.

LL: OK and is it true?

CS: Absolutely. Absolutely. It's true to this day. Yeah. I mean I'm a storyteller, so I tell stories about the legends and the myths and the laws of the Tower of London. So it absolutely is true. Otherwise I'd be out of a job.

LL: Well speaking of telling tales, that is part of your job too as the tourists come to see it. With Halloween upon us, I wonder if you could just touch on all the stories you hear of the ghosts that are in the tower.

CS: Yeah I mean I like to call them echoes of the past, which is a really nice way of saying it. So do I believe in ghosts? Well yes and no. And there have been some odd things that go on at the tower and one of them is a story that I tell in the book about a young girl. I was putting the ravens to bed one night and one evening it was about half past seven at night, there was a little girl sitting on a bench by the side of us. And the tower was shot and I didn't recognize her as one of the resident's daughters or anything like that. She was wearing just normal civilian clothes. She wasn't in any fancy tunic costume or anything like that and I just said to her, excuse me young lady, I said I need to get these two ravens past you. So could you just move over this way. You can watch me put the birds to bed, but just move over this way. So I mean she was just looking at me. I didn't really notice any, I didn't take any notice of who she was or what she was doing or anything like that. So I opened up the enclosure. I turned around to see if she'd gone and she completely disappeared. And there was no way, no way at all that she could have walked past me in that split second and even to this day I have no idea who that little girl was.

LL: And she wasn't a guest of any of the other Yeomen Warders?

CS: I've asked all around and she was not a guest of any of the young warders and it was just one of those strange, strange, I mean I've had several of them that I mention in the book, but this is one of the strange, strange moments that I just can't explain.

LL: Chilling. Let get back to the ravens. So if you have to keep the ravens there, how do you do it? How do you keep them from leaving the tower? Aside from making them understand that you're a source of food for them.

CS: Well we had a new enclosure put into the Tower of London about two and a half years ago. So that really does help me to keep the ravens at the tower. Previously before, we would trim up the odd flight feather to kind of ground them around there, but nowadays actually I don't do that very much. I call it feather management, which is a rather nice way of saying it. So it very much depends on the size of the bird, the weight of the bird, who they're bonded with, what time of year it is, the weather. So all the ravens at the Tower of London now have the ability to fly off if they so desire. But with the use of the enclosure and food helps a lot and my observations, I actually don't have to do that much trimming. I mean I still do the odd one, now and again, if I see a raven get a little bit unruly, but other than that, I don't actually do it very much now.

LL: But there was one reason why, a sad one, that prompted you to change how you do trim the ravens feathers. Tell me what happened.

CS: Yeah early on, this was before I was a Ravenmaster actually. It was a sad occasion. At the time we had some scaffold works taking place at the white tower. Two of the ravens had climbed up the top, Munin, the Black Widow as I call her and Thor. And it was at the time when we used to trim up the flight feathers and the story talks about me going up to the top of the White Tower, climbing up the scaffold and Munin jumped off and she was light, she glided down on to tower green. But Thor actually jumped off and he couldn't fly and he was heavier and he fell down to the floor and hit the floor quite hard. And so by the time I actually got down to him, I could see that he was in, you know he was dying. So I picked him up and held him to my chest and he died in my arms. And from that moment on was I said to myself, if I ever take over as Ravenmaster, this is never going to happen again. And so over a period of four or five years, I changed it. And now all the ravens, if they jump of any where they are in a tower, they just glide down and enjoy themselves. In fact, many of them when I put them to bed at night time, fly around the tower and do a couple of loops off the tower and sometimes they fly outside the tower and then come back and then go to bed.

LL: Sounds like you found the solution and I'm sorry you had to recount that. I'm wondering nowadays aside from protecting the Kingdom, at least according to the legend, what do you see as the role of the ravens in the tower?

CS: They have three million visitors that come to the Tower of London each year and we have the crown jewels and the war regalia there and armour. The ravens are also a big draw as well. And the ravens work, you know they don't get free board and lodge, they have to be seen by the visitors as they come in, but I don't want the visitor to interact with the raven because ravens are beautiful. They need to be looked at, observed and watched in awe and how beautiful they are and how intelligent they are. That's what I see the role of the ravens doing. I mean it's a really privileged position as the Ravenmaster to help educate people about ravens, how smart they are, where they live in the environment, how they should be looked after as well. So I see the ravens that we have at the Tower of London as educational role as well.

LL: You've had a rich life. You've experienced conflict in your life in the military. Now you've got this life with the ravens and I'm wondering how they have changed you.

CS: The ravens were my teachers and I am their pupil. So whenever I go out and look at a raven, I spend a lot of time looking at them. They always seem to surprise me in what they do and how they do things and they just, I see them be excited and happy and angry and bored and miserable when it's raining and it's just like us, they're just like us and they're wonderful like that. They're so beautiful.

LL: Christopher Skaife, I thank you for sharing your tales of the ravens and being so honest about what they've done to you over the years. I hope you take good care when you get back there with them.

CS: Yeah hopefully I will spend many years with them and enjoying them and learning from them. Yeah absolutely.

LL: Thank you.

CS: Thank you very much for having me, Laura.

LL: Christopher Skaife is the author of The Ravenmaster: My Life with the Ravens at the Tower of London. And he was in our Toronto studio. Well coming up in our next half hour, organ donation and anonymity. Two intensely personal stories, two different points of view. I'm Laura Lynch, sitting in for Anna Maria Tremonti, and you are listening to The Current.

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Why a transplant recipient says writing a donor family can feel impossible

Guests: Joan Wynden, Sherry Robinson

LL: I'm Laura Lynch, in for Anna Maria Tremonti, and you're listening to The Current. Last week, we brought you the story of a profound meeting. Anna Maria spoke with Pat Loder and Rob Buttle, two people brought together by organ donation. Pat's son, Jeff, died in July of 2016 when he was 20. His liver, lungs and heart were donated to others in need of transplants. Rob Buttle from outside Kingston, Ontario was the person who received Jeff's heart. After the transplant Pat and Rob wrote letters to each other, letters that had to be anonymous, according to provincial regulations. But Pat Loder and her daughter who live in Newfoundland and Labrador, launched a search to try to connect with the recipient of Jeff's heart and it worked. A few weeks ago, Pat and Rob met in person and Pat had a chance to listen to her son's heart beating in Rob's chest.

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VOICE 1: It was really nice to get the story behind his journey and to see the man you know that we could help, but also to hear that heart beat and know that you know Rob's got a second chance at life because of our son. It's extremely, it's extremely emotional.

VOICE 2: I think it was the touch, like to be able to hug her is where it all came together. We just kind of clicked and if I were to ever, ever lose one of my, we have four children and it'd just be devastating. I can, I feel for Pat everyday.

LL: Their story touched a nerve with many of you and we received a few letters that stood out. One was from Joan Wynden in Courtenay, BC. She wrote to tell us about her experience as the sister of an organ donor and we have reached her at home. Joan hello.

JOAN WYNDEN: Hello Laura.

LL: What were you thinking as you listened to Rob and Pat?

JW: I was very moved by the story. It was so heart-warming and it felt like that connection kind of completed a circle and I'm sort of a person who feels the need to have things of a piece and that just felt so complete to me and so right. And we faced a similar loss from 11 years ago and chose to have organs donated from my baby brother who was an adult.

LL: Tell me a little bit about your brother.

JW: We came from a large family of five. When he was born the youngest were twins, who were 10. I was 14. So he was sort of raised by all of us. He was the darling and he was a sweet, sweet guy who you know was an academic and who did very well. He was just really attuned to the world.

LL: Sounds like a wonderful guy. That must have been so difficult for you when he died and then you came to a decision to donate his organs. How did you decide to donate Paul's organs?

JW: Well he was actually on life support for a few days and when the family got to Vancouver, there was a big meeting with the medical staff and all the family and friends and right away the doctor started talking about transplant, which you know for a family in crisis is quite a jolt. But you know as it turned out, Paul had signed up to be an organ donor, but they still needed the family's permission. You know we felt if that was his wish then we would respect that.

LL: Do you know how many people received his organs?

JW: Yes there were five successful transplants.

LL: And then what happened in the months and years after Paul's death?

JW: You know a counsellor from the transplant society worked with us at the time and she had said that you know it was likely we would hear from recipients, but it would probably take a while. So you know I waited a year. I waited two years and after 11 years nothing and that's been really difficult. I would just really like to know that it meant something to somebody and we were you know never told it would be anything other than anonymous, which is fine, but you know. And one of my brothers, I was talking to him this weekend and he was so choked, he could hardly get the words out and he just said I want to know if his heart is still out there. You know he said I don't care who or where, is he still out there in some form?

LL: Joan if you were in the position again of having to decide about donating the organs of a loved one, how do you think you would handle it?

JW: I'm not sure. That's a really difficult question. At this point you know in the abstract, we've done something good, but in my heart I feel the second layer of loss. You know that we reached out and you know there's just nothing. It's just conning to the void and there isn't anyone out there who's willing to reach back and say thank you. This had meaning. This meant something to us. It just really is an echo of the original loss and I would hope that I would be able to do it again, but I'm not sure.

LL: Joan I'd like you to stay on the line, while I invite someone else into the conversation. Sherry Robinson also heard Pat and Rob talk about meeting in person, after Rob received Pat's son's heart donation. Sherry is a liver transplant recipient and she is in Kitchener, Ontario. Hello.

SHERRY ROBINSON: Hello.

LL: Sherry, you had a very different reaction to Pat and Rob's story. How did it make you feel as you were listening to it?

SR: Well I I did. I did have a very different reaction. I was in awe listening to the story, but I had an overwhelming feeling that I needed to put my voice forward to protect the anonymity of transplant recipients and there's a multitude of reasons for this.

LL: You received a liver transplant?

SR: I did. It was 20 years ago. So it's been quite some time. The way a transplant recipient goes through the years surrounding the transplant from diagnosis, up until the time where they're in recovery, is probably one of the most challenging times a person can experience. Your life sort of disappears by degrees when you have a major organ that's failing. You just feel like your entire life is suspended. The focus is entirely upon waiting for an organ and there's an odd guilt that goes along with that, that fortunately the transplant team, in particular the counselors of transplant team, help you with because it's a difficult position to be in when you're waiting for an organ and you know that for that to happen, someone else has to die for you to be able to continue to live. Unfortunately, one of the side effects of that for me and I'm not speaking for everyone, but for me is that to be able to wrap my head around that and get through day by day, while you're waiting for years for this transplant to occur, is that you tend to objectify a little bit the process and in particular the organ and the fact that it's coming from someone who has died, unexpectedly. When that organ comes and when you have the opportunity for the transplant, the counselors do give you a chance to be able to communicate with the transplant donor family. I myself, I could not at the time write a letter, I could not bring myself to express that. There was a huge mental block in my head and I hope that this will help Joan understand a little bit of maybe why people haven't reached out.

LL: What is the block about?

SR: I think a lot of it is just simply that you are in such a state of crisis post-transplant and that's something that no one prepares you for. You think in your mind that you'll be cured when you have a new liver, when you have a new heart. But the healing process takes so long and is so difficult, incredibly difficult and it's very pain-filled. You really do focus entirely upon yourself, not only that because your life has been slipping away by degrees, you have to re-establish yourself from like even within your own family. You know when I received the transplant, I had a 4-year-old daughter who didn't know me that well because I had been sick from the time she was three weeks old and I think I shut out a lot to be able to cope with what was immediate and right in front of me. It not, it wasn't necessarily the right thing to do and I thought a lot about the donor and about thanking them, but there was a mental block there. I had this new organ within me and I needed to make it my own. I needed to re-establish control of my own body and there was a lot of denial that went into the fact that I was carrying someone else's organ within me.

LL: Joan, I'm wondering as you listen to Sherry, what is going through your mind?

JW: Well first, yeah, hello Sherry and thank you for telling your story.

SR: Hi Joan.

JW: Yeah, I understand. You know I think I have some comprehension of what you laid out of what your life was like during that time and I'm really happy for you that you know you're able to receive an organ and see your daughter grow up and that's wonderful. And I am still at a loss as to why it's so difficult to just reach out and say this had meaning for me.

LL: You're still at a loss as to why Sherry can't sit down and write a letter now 20 years later?

JW: Mhmm.

LL: Sherry?

SR: Well I think in part that's why I agreed to this interview. This is somewhat a little bit of my letter. The because I have carried the ongoing frustration of never having been able to write that letter. And I think a lot of it is just for part of my mental health. Like I believe there is a spirit that carries on after a person has died. I do believe that, but I don't believe that that spirit is embodied in any way shape or form within the body after death, whether it's, whether it's within the entire body or whether it's within a specific organ. And when I listened to the interview from last week, I was a little taken aback by the sense that there was the spirit of that young man's still beating within the heart that is in another person because it's very different from my own belief system. I can't, I feel like I have a pact with the person that donated the organ, I do. But the sense of obligation that goes along with contacting a family and thanking them scares me a little bit. I'll be honest. I honour the organ and I honour the transplant everyday. I look after this organ, I've had it for 20 years and they didn't anticipate it was going to last that long. But I don't have a sense of obligation to the family. I don't know if I just missed that part or if it's just something I shut out because I am afraid of the feeling that there's somebody else within me.

JW: Actually, I feel the same way. I don't believe my brother is you know in someone else right now. You know and I thought of myself in that position like because I you know checked into the BC Transplant Society website yesterday and they do make that an option now that recipients and donor families could meet, if both are agreeable, and I'm not even sure I would want that. It just made just to remind me of how my brother's not here, but if a recipient or recipient's family could say this had meaning for us, I'd just feel that my heart would be easier and I could say yes, it had meaning.

SR: I always had that option, but it was very difficult and I passed on it. And they give you the option of passing on it too. And they did raise that probably a half dozen times in the 10 years after my transplant. I just always said, it's ok I'm good.

LL: In the letter you sent us, you wrote, this is a quote, "Am I grateful? You bet I am. Every day." Now what would you like your donor's family and Joan to know about how you feel about the liver that you received?

SR: Well it's very simple. When I was diagnosed with the illness, my daughter was 3 weeks old. I was in hospital trying to breast feed and change nappies with one hand because I had an I.V. in the other. I thought I was going to die. I had been given a death sentence. That organ allowed me to live long enough and to heal enough to be able to dress my daughter so she could see her first day of kindergarten. That was I mean I know most mothers when they send their child off to the first day of kindergarten, go back in the house and shed a tear or two, but I shed more than a tear or two, let me tell you because it was very poignant. And you know I've watched both my kids grow, become successful. I have lived a very full and very meaningful life and a lot of that is due to the fact that I had this gift of life given to me. I am grateful for it every day. I can't think of a single person who has had a transplant who is not grateful. But there is a difference between feeling that gratitude and being able to express that gratitude to someone who is deep in the throes of loss and when you've lived your life for years with loss, with impending death, to go back to that point is so hard to put yourself mentally back to that point. I have felt bad about it, about not having written the letter for a long time and listening to Joan brings it home again. It's why I wanted to be able to talk with her today. Please don't ever think that it's not because we're not grateful. There's a huge degree of gratitude, but it's a difficult thing to express.

SR: And you know I think you're quite right. Like you needed to take care of yourself and you needed to make yourself whole, but I wonder if your donor family can feel your gratitude. Do you think they can? Do you think they know it?

SR: I don't know. I don't know. I have not put myself in their heads a lot.

LL: But Sherry, do you think maybe after having heard Joan today and that yearning for a connection, does it give you pause? Does it make you think well maybe it's not too late to write the letter?

SR: It does. It does. Yeah and I'm hoping that 20 years after the fact, it's not going to just stir up a lot of grief all over again for them. That's the risk that I feel is there.

LL: Joan, what do you think of that?

JW: Oh I think no. I mean you know, it could be nothing, but wonderful for us.

SR: I hope so, but it, how do I explain this. I think a family, when they make a decision to donate organs, they know that that's giving someone else a chance for life. And I think that, I think the meaning should be found in that, but it seems like you're looking for, well and you are, you're looking for external acknowledgement of the gift that was given. And I think that has to come from within. I think you need to be at peace with the decision to donate those organs within yourself and not look for that external thanks as well. It's nice and it's nice when it comes, but it shouldn't be a requirement. A lot of people cannot cope with the difficulty and there's a real head game that goes around with organ donation. You really do carry a huge degree of guilt along with it and everyone needs to be able to heal in their own way and that's the mental aspect of it is it's part of that healing. It's not fair to the donor families. I will agree with that, but I don't think we've been doing this long enough to really understand what the recipients need as well. There's got to be a better way of doing this or relaying the feelings of both parties. Probably both you and I need to go to our respective transplant centers and tell them you know what, we need to we need to send out reminders later on that this is still an option. That this could still have meaning to the donor family. So maybe you and I can make some change happen.

JW: You talked about feeling guilt and I just think, no you know, that's so unhelpful. I just it's hard for me to hear you know that kind of peace about that I have to separate you know some external feedback and know that something good is out there, but I just feel like it would be so meaningful to hear that.

SR: Well I will make an attempt to contact the donor family, if they're still available for contact and perhaps this will spur the people who were recipients from your brother's organs. It may spur that as well, but if not, don't think for a minute that the recipients are not grateful.

JW: I would love to hear that voice.

SR: Yeah.

JW: You know, that's all.

SR: Well, I can be that voice for today, anyway.

JW: Okay.

LL: Joan and Sherry, I just want to thank both of you for being so frank and honest and discussing your feelings around this really difficult subject. And I wish you both well going forward.

SR: Thank you.

JW: Thank you Laura. Thank you Sherry.

SR: Bye bye Joan.

LL: Sherry Robinson is in Kitchener, Ontario. She received a liver transplant 20 years ago. She has not reached out to the donor family. And Joan Wynden is in Courtenay, BC. When her brother died, 11 years ago, five of his organs were successfully transplanted. She hasn't heard from any of the recipients. And just as their transplant stories are unique, so is another we heard in response to Pat Loder and Rob Buttle. Donna Hart was diagnosed with heart disease in late 2014 and was told she needed a heart transplant. If she didn't get one, she probably had five months to live. On Mother's Day of 2015, almost exactly five months later, the heart came through.

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VOICE: I was just like really sad. I was crying a lot and I was crying because I knew that someone had died and how sad that was. And yet you're so relieved, but you're so sad that someone had died and because of that you had the potential to live. And in my mind, I thought I'm going to live.

LL: Eleven days after the surgery, Donna was home and working on rehabilitation. And a year later, she competed in two sporting events. The Ride for Heart in June of 2016 and the Canadian Transplant Games that August. She earned medals in both of those competitions and sent the medals to the family of her heart donor. Then a couple of months later, after her donor's children tracked her down through social media, something happened.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: It's after dinner and somebody rings our doorbell. Typically we don't answer the doorbell at night, if we're not expecting someone, but for whatever reason I did. And there's this man at my door and he's holding two medals. He's got the Base Alright for Heart medal and a bronze medal from the Canadian Transplant Games. And he says to me, I think these are yours and I'm just looking at them and I'm staring at them and it just seems like forever, but I'm sure it was only seconds that I realized that they were my medals and this was my donor's husband and so immediately I asked the man. And I called, Barry, my husband and I'm like Barry, my donor's husband's here. And so he came in and we just started to chat. It was just it was just really surreal. He said to me that he came with the knowledge that I might just shut the door in his face and I said to him, I can't imagine like anybody doing that. This is the family that saved my life. In some ways, like we had both sort of been looking. He had much more information than I had because he had the medals. So he stayed for two hours. It was wonderful. It was wonderful to get to know about her. It was wonderful to know about his kids. Of course, I'm always sad that someone has died, but it was wonderful to know that she had lived a good life right up to the day she died. For me that was really comforting because I never want to think that my donor had suffered, it's just too hard to think of. He asked me if his daughter could come by to my house. I said, yes. She's never shown. And I think a lot of people just like to know that they can that doesn't necessarily mean that they will. I have received letters from him, but he has not come by the house since. So I think they just wanted to, they just wanted to know. They just you know they just wanted to know. This was a great gift that I received. It saved my life and I think for them they just wanted to see who. I also think the other thing about the heart is like you can feel it. We've got a pulse. So you can't, like if you get a liver or kidney, it's I don't know if you know how you would know that that's going on right. But the heart you can feel the pulse and when you are in the end stages of heart failure, you don't hear your heart beat. You don't like now you can lay in bed and you can hear your heart beat, but when you're in the end stages of heart failure, you don't feel that. So like even as a recipient, we're always keenly aware that that's going on that you know your heart is beating and that's someone else's heart and that's what's keeping you going.

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LL: Donna Hart is a recipient of a heart transplant in 2015. It is clear that this topic has provoked a lot of response from our listeners and an awful lot of feelings that are being brought up by this. If you have anything to add to this, please get in touch with us. Tweet us @TheCurrentCBC or me @LauraLynchCBC. You can post on Facebook at facebook.com/cbcthecurrent or you can e-mail us through our website. Go to cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on the Contact Us link. Get in touch with us if you've got something to say. That's our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for Q. Kids in the Hall members, Bruce McCulloch and Scott Thompson are on the show with author Paul Meyers. His new book is all about the sketch comedy troupes' history. Love those guys. And remember you could always take The Current with you to go on the CBC Radio app. It is free from the App Store or Google Play. I'm Laura Lynch, in for Anna Maria Tremonti. Thank you for listening to The Current.

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Oct. 30, 2018 episode transcript

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