A Rich Mourning Journey Guided by a Benign Ghost
In Search of Puffins: Stories of Loss, Light and Flight, Marjorie Simmins. Pottersfield Press, 2025.
Marjorie Simmins’ latest memoir deals with the heavy grief of losing her husband to cancer at the height of the COVID pandemic in the spring of 2020. Simmins’ husband, the writer Silver Donald Cameron, was prolific but best known for The Education of Everett Richardson: The Nova Scotia Fishermen’s Strike 1970-71, The Living Beach: Life, Death and Politics Where the Land Meets the Sea, and the posthumously released Blood in the Water: A True Story of Revenge in the Maritimes. The grief of such a loss is permanent, but Simmins must learn how to press on, practically and in a way that gives her remaining time meaning. In the immediate aftermath, she writes, “It’s the atoms and molecules I want, a rare freckle here and the deeply creased cheek there.”
She has written extensively of their romance in a previous memoir, Coastal Lives, where she describes meeting him at the age of 37. At the time, she was hesitant to fall in love with a much older man. He was grieving his deceased wife and living in a tiny fishing village in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, while Simmins called Vancouver home. She had no desire for a love affair. In Puffins she notes, “I . . . needed more to believe in love, even than to love.” The book serves as Volume III to her life story, following her second memoir, Year of the Horse. That said, she recounts sufficient detail here that the book also stands alone.
Her grief travels on multiple planes: the loss of her best friend, the loss of her writing and business partner, the uncontrollable forces of change on Simmins’ life, and the loss of a sought-after public figure. Of the latter, she notes the mixed blessing of being able to hear his voice and observe his familiar mannerisms in video, as Cameron was also a well-known documentary filmmaker and interviewer of prominent environmental thinkers from across the globe. But such online ghost-watching could also become a crutch, and a hollow representation of the real man who shared her life for two decades.
As a fan of Cameron and his works, reading Simmins’ recollections and reflections on his life was profoundly moving, invoking a mix of nostalgia for his books and what they meant to me at the times I read them and a shared lament for what has been lost. Puffins serves to memorialize Cameron without being a complete biography. We see the man behind the legend, and Simmins reveals touching details of his fastidiousness, his admiration of other men’s meticulous craftsmanship and his determination to replicate it. Yet she struggled with his fame. “. . . The public acted as though they owned Don at times [and] I was appalled at their pushiness and self-entitlement.”
Cameron managed their finances, a mutual decision. Simmins touchingly recounts having to learn all accounts, inflows and outflows of money, while planning online and in-person memorials in different provinces, restoring and selling the Cape Breton house and finding a new one in Truro, “the only place in all of Nova Scotia where I haven’t spent a lot of time with Don.” She leaned heavily on friends and family, many of whom shared time, energy, and tools for renovations. Simmins carries on a dialogue with Cameron throughout the memoir. His voice acts as a spirit guide. It is a comforter when needed, guiding her through the difficult decision to leave her adopted home in Cape Breton. “I can’t live in Cape Breton without Don — or, no matter how benign, with his ghost.” Cameron’s voice is encouraging, just as it was in life.
Even with Cameron’s reassuring voice in her head, it is terrifying to take these logistical tasks on because they represent living a life without him, independently, “frightened of having a [mortgage] of my own.” We feel her anguish and bitterness at the changes forced on her life by loss. At first, Simmins can find only the “satisfaction at doing things well for someone you love,” such as ensuring Cameron’s sailboat has a good permanent home.
In the meantime, she reignites her passion for musicality, playing guitar and joining the church choir, finding strength in her voice, and co-owning a racehorse. But she finds herself unable to write, despite having been a professional writer long before Cameron entered her life. She has become reliant on his voice, on their exchanges through the process, and on him being her first and most important reader. Perhaps the moment that breaks her is when he’s on his deathbed, apologizing for having failed to read her latest, promising he’ll get to it tomorrow, her knowing he can’t.
Memoirs of grief can bring comfort to those going through something similar. For me, it gave me appreciation for my good fortune in finding a loving relationship, and the emotional foresight to consider the future when one of us will be left alone. Sharing intimately in a writer’s pain can also be difficult. Simmins’ structure and subtitle elegantly assure us it gets better, that she will find her place in the world, geography notwithstanding, even after losing the man who for her was home. There are delightful glimmers of hope sprinkled throughout, like the moment a neighbour says that seeing her walk her dog each morning is a daily delight and reassurance. It’s part of her quotidian routine, yet demonstrates a sense of belonging in the world, even on her own.
— Chris Benjamin’s latest book is a short story collection called The Art of Forgiveness.
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