'The stories will be the last thing to go': Robert Munsch on his legacy as one of Canada's great storytellers

Robert Munsch laughs during an interview with The Canadian Press in Toronto on Jan. 23, 2014. In a recent interview, the famed children's author has revealed he is living with dementia. (Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press)

Beloved children's author Robert Munsch, known for classics like Love You Forever and The Paper Bag Princess, revealed that he has dementia.

 "I can't drive, I can't ride a bicycle, I can't write. So it's been really whittling away on who I thought I was," the 76-year-old author told The Next Chapter's Shelagh Rogers in an interview he called his "last hurrah."

Munsch said the diagnosis came as a "relief," since he could sense that something was wrong. 
The author was famous for dropping into schools and reading stories to classes. Although those visits have had to stop, the stories remain within him.

"My stories, strangely enough, are all there," Munsch said. "The stories will be the last thing to go, I think."

Read more of Munsch's exclusive interview with The Next Chapter.
 

Inquiry into Joyce Echaquan's death leads to reckoning over systemic racism against Indigenous people in Quebec

This week, Quebec's coroner Géhane Kamel discussed the findings of her inquiry into the death of Joyce Echaquan, who died in a Quebec hospital last year after recording hospital staff using racial slurs against her. Kamel said that appropriate care was denied to Echaquan based on "prejudice and biases that contributed to [health-care staff] not taking the situation seriously." 

Among her recommendations, Kamel urged the province to recognize systemic racism within its institutions. Premier François Legault said Tuesday that the circumstances around Echaquan's death were "terrible" and "unacceptable," but he disagreed that there is systemic racism within Quebec institutions.

This war of words has become "detrimental to addressing the real problem," Daniel Béland, a political science professor and director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, told The Current. "It's our duty to make our society better, to improve our society, and in order to improve our society, we need to fight systemic racism."

Atikamekw Nation Grand Chief Constant Awashish told As It Happens that it was difficult to hear the premier denying the existence of systemic racism in the province. "I think he's just seeing ... the result, and he doesn't see the cause," he said. 

Awashish said Echaquan's courage to film her treatment by medical staff has emboldened other Indigenous people across the country to speak up about racism. "More and more are coming up, are coming forward, to talk about the situations that are similar, the situations where they feel uncomfortable, where they're being mistreated or they're being called names," he said. 

"They feel like now they're being listened to. That's the effect of what Joyce Echaquan left behind."

Experts are calling for more rapid COVID tests. How accurate are they, and when should you use them?

An Abbott Laboratories Panbio COVID- 19 Rapid Test device is displayed at a pop-up COVID-19 testing site on the Dalhousie University campus in Halifax on Nov. 23, 2020. (The Canadian Press/Andrew Vaughan)

FIRST PERSON My husband died when I was 40. I found solace and friendship with young widows

Sarah Keast (second from the right) found a community and understanding in other young widows like herself. (Submitted by Sarah Keast)

In 2016, Sarah Keast lost her husband Kevin to an opioid overdose and found herself searching for "widow friends."

"I couldn't really talk about it with people my age," Keast wrote in her essay for Now or Never. "My friends couldn't understand me in the way I needed them to."

She met her first widow friend through a local parenting group and felt an instant connection. "I realized I felt more connected to her than I had to anyone since losing Kevin," Keast writes. Within a few months, two more women joined the group. Five years later, the four women still have regular get-togethers, which are filled with both joy and sadness. 

"Our beautiful friendship exists because four men lost their lives at an early age," Keast wrote. "We miss them desperately but at the same time, we are so happy to have built what we have from the ashes of our losses."

Read Sarah Keast's essay on Now or Never.

Ancient Jordanian town destroyed by a meteor blast may have inspired Biblical stories, scientists say

Artist's depiction of the blast that levelled the city of Tall el-Hammam 3600 years ago. (Allen West and Jennifer Rice)

Archaeologists say that the once-thriving Bronze Age town of Tall el-Hammam in Jordan, not far from the Dead Sea, was annihilated by the explosion of a meteor 3,600 years ago. Researchers have suggested that the destruction of Tall el-Hammam might be the inspiration behind Biblical legends like the destruction of Sodom — in what is described as a "rain" of "fire and brimstone" — or the destruction of the walls of Jericho.

Excavations revealed the destruction of Tall el-Hammam that didn't have any ordinary explanation. Malcolm LeCompte, who was part of the research team, told Quirks & Quarks that the town, which was mostly made of mud bricks, had upper stories just blown away and that the “human remains and bones were abundant.” 

"The evidence we have suggests that it was something like … a megaton-yield event in terms of its equivalent in atomic or nuclear bombs," said LeCompte.

A microscopic examination of the debris found sand grains with unique cracks and fractures within them called "shocked quartz," which are often found in the debris from super-high velocity impacts, like those generated by a meteor strike.

Learn more about this catastrophic event on Quirks & Quarks.