Toshiko Stewart

When you lose someone you love,

Your life becomes strange,

The ground beneath you gets fragile,

Your thoughts make your eyes unsure;

And some dead echo drags your voice down

Where words have no confidence.

Your heart has grown heavy with loss;

And though this loss has wounded others too,

No one knows what has been taken from you

When the silence of absence deepens.

Flickers of guilt kindle regret

For all that was left unsaid or undone.

From: “For Grief” by John O’Donohue

I am sorry to tell you that Toshiko, my best friend, lover, wife and mother of our children died peacefully on April 6, 2020. As our nephew Chad said, “I knew she was beautiful but I never knew she was so strong” Toshiko fought with the cancer that killed her for eight years. She dealt with the indignities and inconvenienceswith grace and often humor and accepted the excrutiating pain as just one more indignity. Her bravery and strength left me in awe.

After a determination that chemotherapy was not benefitting her she was admitted to the palliative ward at St. Pauls hospital in mid-October with a prognosis of two long weeks or maybe even two short months. That didn’t sit well with her and she determined to be around for our first grand daughters birth in mid-February. She was so determined in fact that she was releaed from palliative at the end of December in better shape than when she entered. That allowed us a bit over two months together at home before she went back into palliative in mid March. During her stay at home she designed and hand stiched (she never used a machine for any of her quilts) a beautiful quilt for baby Opal. She was so happy to see the pictures of Opal lying on the quilt with her brother Kailash. (jpeg attached)

The strength and determination she showed in refusing to give in to cancer until she achieved her goal was a continuation of how she approached life.

When Toshiko was a young girl living with her family on the farm in Central Hokkaido she read a book about Florence Nighingale and determined right then that she would be a nurse. So after high school this little farm girl went off to the big city and put herself through nursing school by working in a ramen noodle shop. After earning her RN she was taken on as an operating room nurse at one of Sapporo’s main hospitals. Being an OR nurse is often considered the apex of a nurses career path but after a year in th OR Tosh went to her head nurse and asked to be transferred to duty on a medical ward as she didn’t feel that passing instruments and wiping the surgeons brow was the nursing challenge she wanted.

So she went on to a medical ward and was happy and fulfilled dealing with the nursing needs of her patients. She was pretty good at it to as the other attached pictures shows. One of her patients was a professional movie poster painter. Yup, that was an actual career back when she started nursing. He was so pleased with Toshiko’s beautiful smile and her nursing that he produced a painting of her in the style of a movie poster. (the Japanese charcters say that beautiful teeth are the gateway to health)

As a young nurse she often worked the night shift and soon discovered that the shift differential payment that was part of the contract wasn’t being paid to the night shift nurses. Although this was well known no-one had ever complained about it so Tosh went to the union and said, “this isn’t right” and as a reward at age 23 she was put in charge, with two older nurses, of negotiating with the Ministry of Health down in Tokyo to get this rectified. For many months while continuing to cover her shifts she was flying back and forth to Tokyo ( quite an adventure for a farm girl who had never been on a plane) At one point the authorities offered to make the payments to the nurses at Toshikos hospital but she insisted that every nurse in every hospital that was entitled to differential payments had to be paid. This held up the settlement for several months but in the end all the nurses received all their back pay (several 10’s of millions of yen in total) which was a lot of money back in the 70’s.

This determination and sense of justice remained with her throughout her life and was an inspiration to many that knew and worked with her. That is certainly the case with Yoko, James and myself.

The words at the beginning express where I’m at right now but with time and a return to normal life I hope to travel a bit and meet up with many of you.

I hope that you, your families, friends and neighbors remain untouched by this terrible virus that haunts us all. Thank you for your friendship over the years and your many kindnesses to Toshiko and myself.

Brian Stewart