Sheona

When I hit my late 20s about 10 years ago, I figured I was pretty much "full up" as far as friends were concerned.

I was lucky enough to be surrounded by a ton of interesting people who I had known since practically forever and with whom I barely had time to keep up friendships. I was busy, really busy, and I just didn't have the time nor the inclination to invest in a brand new friendship.

And then I met her.

It was at a keg party of all places. An affair to which Rob - my then newish boyfriend - dragged me. We were surprised to arrive and find a house overflowing with hundreds of debacherous teenagers and when he got lost in the crowd I gravitated towards a woman closer to my own age who seemed similarly bemused at the attention we attracted from boys a decade our junior.

Sheona was a colleague of Rob's - a set script supervisor - and after a few drinks we let our inner cougars roar and formed a bond that I have come to cherish as one of the most important in my life.

Here's the thing about friends you meet later in life: they love you for the person you are, not the person you were. There is no comforting common history and no sense of obligation. There is simply chemistry and a sense that no matter how busy you are, you must fit this person into your life because they were sent to make your life better...to make you better.

And so Sheona was. And has.

Sheona has inspired me to dream and to dream big. She is a mother. She is a partner. She is a maker of beautiful, important films that celebrate life and loss. When I spend time with her I come away invigorated, renewed, filled with the sense of my own strength and possibility.

Sheona helped me through endless rewrites of my film script and sat proudly through its premiere. She celebrated with me when I married, mourned when I learned I might never have a child and celebrated again when Graham made his debut.

Her daughter's birthday party was the first one Graham ever attended and when I read the eulogy at my mother-in-law's wake it was her face in the crowd that steadied me and gave me the strength to continue.

Sheona moved 3,000 miles away from me last week and I don't know what I'm going to do without her.

She has been my rock these past several months. I have literally cried on her shoulder and she has fortified me with her wise words and the gentle, pragmatic way she has of looking at the world.

She and her actor partner are off for greener pastures on another coast and as much as I know we will always be friends, I am still bereft over the distance that geography will inevitably create between us.

Godspeed Sheona.

Thank you for being my friend and for making my life better. Thank you for teaching me that one's life can never be too full to accommodate a kindred spirit.

Capturing A Short Life

What are you doing tonight at 10 p.m.?

I'd like to suggest that you settle into your couch and watch a moving and life-affirming documentary which was produced and directed by one of my dearest friends Sheona McDonald.

Capturing a Short Life is a film about families dealing with infant loss and it reinforces how important it is to remember and celebrate the lives of children who are on this earth for just a short time. Sheona, herself a mom of two, has broached this subject with astounding grace and sensitivity.

Just a few weeks ago Sheona and her children were at our home helping celebrate Graham's birthday and the subject of the film came up. "It must have been so difficult to make," my mother observed.

But Sheona's answer was not what you would expect.

"It was actually easy in some ways," she said. "Because people are desperate to tell their stories. They want to be acknowledged as parents. As a society we don't know how to talk about the death of a child, so these parents never get a chance to talk about their child's life."

And that's just the kind of sensitivity and perspective that Sheona brings to the film.

"We have, on the whole, desensitized ourselves to violence. Images of war, stories of rape, destruction, murder, child-abuse, etc seem to fill the landscape of our news and media and we have become used to those images," she added in an e-mail to me today.

"We accept them and seem, somehow, to process them. There are no violent, graphic, bloody images in CASL and yet so many are afraid to watch because of the fear of what? The emotion? The fact that this can happen here, to us, our friends, family, neighbors?"

Capturing A Short Life makes its television premiere at 10 p.m. Tuesday, December 9th on CBC Newsworld's Series The Lens. You can also learn more about the film by visiting its web site.

I will be watching (for the second time - I was at a screening last winter) and I hope you will be too.