For over twenty years, Samantha Albert lived in limbo, balancing her energy between her roles as wife, mother, daughter, sister and friend with the role of a patient with a life-threatening and incurable illness. As she navigated a precarious balance between illness and health, she became an enthusiastic practitioner of Tai Chi. She also devoted herself to writing, often saying that “while her medical life was her full-time job, she moonlighted as a writer and writing mentor.”

 

Her work has been published in The Globe and Mail and Edible Toronto and an excerpt from her memoir, I Met Death on the Avenue Road Bus, was published in Waiting: An Anthology of Essays from the University of Alberta Press.

 

Sam and her husband made their home in Stratford, Ontario, where they occasionally encountered irascible swans. Their son, Zev, escaped the swans for the big city of Toronto where he works in theatre and film production and fights off raccoons. 

 

She died on April 16, 2021.