I spent the past couple of days reading the newspapers we get delivered on weekends, The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star.

Theoretically, I have a leisurely weekend, or at least a leisurely Sunday, reading the papers, eating a croissant, feet up, cat happy, a fire in the fireplace. 

Theoretically.

This time, tending my flu in self-isolation, I finally did. 

After scanning the front pages, I turned to the death notices in The Globe and Mail to see if there was any mention of the coronavirus. Mostly not, of course. Not yet, aside from one mention that I’ll get to.

There was, however, a big obituary of the former Globe and Mail journalist and later political activist, William Johnson, 88. My husband worked at the Globe for years and knew Johnson a little. The excellent obituary by Eric Andrew-Gee mentions his nickname, Pit Bill, which led my husband to tell me a story about Johnson’s long-ago run-in with a Globe editor, one he found entirely characteristic of the man. 

Johnson—who mainly lived in Quebec—was called a provocateur, Jesuitical, confrontational, especially after he left journalism in 1998 to head up an anglophone rights group, Alliance Quebec. Although a francophone himself, Johnson battled the Quebec sovereigntists seeking to separate from Canada. He opposed government legislation that gave greater rights to the French language, writing that it turned anglophones into “pariahs, like a contamination.” 

This, though he spoke French at home.

My husband remembers Johnson as quixotic and unpredictably passionate about causes he took to heart. Here’s the story. Plague-related, as it happens.

One time in early 1986, Johnson was sent to Haiti to cover an outbreak of the swine flu. He got so emotionally involved with the story that he wrote a detailed three-part series on the outbreak, each part of magisterial length. Feeling that Canadians weren’t three-parts fascinated with the Haitian swine flu, the foreign editor asked Johnson to cut it down to one part and write a different lede, a new opening sentence.

Fireworks ensued. A lengthy battle, during which the exasperated foreign editor read out the disputed lede to my husband. 

“The pigs are dying in Haiti, their cries heard across the land.”

My husband figures he remembers it pretty precisely. As one would.

Johnson’s lede ever made the paper. But this memorial notice did on Saturday–not of Johnson–with the first mention of COVID-19 I’ve seen in the death notices. Read it to the end.

“It was 20 years ago today that we said goodbye. You left us too soon and we were heartbroken. Our lives have been somewhat compromised since your departure but we’ve all managed our way through our grief.

“Your daughters are now 24 and 22 and are thriving, your husband… is enjoying a successful career. 

“After your passing, I ran my first (and only) marathon and welcomed my children… to our family.

“I think about you every day. I hope that you welcomed Dad into heaven on February 24, 2014.

“It’s not the same without you but I am expecting you are in a happier place now, particularly in light of the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting stock market crash.

Love (your sister)”