Vancouverite transplanted to the USA (’04), widowed at 33 (’05), now living in Toronto (’06). Rebuilding my life one brick at a time.

Sections:
(click to navigate to each)

1. About This Website
2. About Gail Edwin
3. The Story of David and Gail
4. About David Fielding
5. Why Toronto?
6. Five Years Later
7. gailatlarge : gailontheweb

About This Website:

[Banner photo credit: Photo of me by Mark Demeny. Shot in Vancouver in 2006.]

gailatlarge.com was registered on December 12, 2005.

From July 2002 to December 15, 2005, the content of this site was hosted on Blogger. The earlier posts will look wonky until each of the nearly 1,100 posts migrated from Blogger are corrected for new formatting, photo re-linking, and general cleanup. I’m sure there are broken links and all sorts of idiosyncrasies due to migration.

This is my first domain. I’m learning as I go. Please be kind enough to let me know if something needs fixing, either in the comments here or by e-mail. (But hold off on telling me about the posts before December 15, for now. I’m still working on them.)

All photographs and videoclips, unless otherwise noted, are my creations. If you would like to use them, you must a) ask permission, and b) use my name and link back to my site. Stealing will only bring you bad karma.

There are protected posts. Passwords are available to friends — just contact me if I haven’t sent you one already.

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About Gail Edwin:

Here’s the abridged version…

My parents immigrated to the prairies of Saskatchewan, Canada, from the Philippines in October 1974, when I was 2 and my older brother was 3. They were sponsored by German farmers (also immigrants) and we, being farm help, lived in their heated barn. My parents had never seen snow before, or experienced subzero temperatures. My earliest memories were of cows.

Most of my childhood was spent in St. Boniface, a French community in Winnipeg. Brother #2 arrived in 1975, the only one of us who is Canadian by birth. After living 10 years in Winnipeg, I would say it was a good place to grow up. The provincial license plate says “Friendly Manitoba” and it’s true.

In 1985, after one moving attempt to BC that was interrupted by a highway accident, we bid a permanent farewell to Winnipeg to live in milder winters on the Pacific Coast. I went to high school in the Fraser Valley, an hour east of Vancouver, surrounded by mountains — a completely different world from central Canada.

At 18 my university plans fell through, and I moved to the Canadian Rocky Mountains (Banff, Alberta) for a year to strike out on my own. It was there, surrounded by other travellers, where I caught a serious case of wanderlust. I worked to save up some money and travelled down the West Coast to California to stay with some friends before buying a ticket to Australia at age 19, where I spent 13 crazy months and kept on going… through New Zealand and Southeast Asia… eventually landing in London, England, 20 years old, totally broke and bearing a very suspect one-year-open return ticket from Bangkok, Thailand. I wasn’t exactly greeted with open arms (in fact I was searched and interrogated), but in spite of everything I made Scotland my home for two very formative years. I loved it there, but my visa expiration date got in the way.

Back to Canada in 1995, where I based myself for the better part of a decade, in Vancouver. For nearly seven of those years I lived in an apartment on the beach with this view of the Pacific Ocean. In the early years I would bike all the way around Stanley Park, swim in my building’s outdoor pool, and then walk to work. I continued to travel as much as possible and went abroad often, but was always happy to return home to Vancouver after road trips and flights around North America and all over Europe. Life was good.

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The Story of David and Gail:

Then in 2004 I met David from Pennsylvania, and life got even better.

At first I flew back and forth between coasts, but my heart was with David in Pennsylvania and we moved heaven and earth to live together in Scranton. We planned our wedding, flew in our restored 1954 Piper Tri-Pacer, and road-tripped many weekends to New York City, Philadelphia, Washington DC, and various other East Coast cities. David also flew to Vancouver twice to visit my family and friends, and made a summer trip to Toronto to meet me there.

To comply with U.S. immigration policy, I returned to Vancouver in May 2005 to wait for my fiancee visa. On August 5, four weeks after our Toronto rendez-vous, I got a call from David. He was in the hospital — they found a tumour in his lung. I caught the first flight to New York from Seattle the following morning, and the biopsy was on Tuesday. The diagnosis: small cell lung cancer. We were devastated, but determined to get David into remission.

The next four months was trial after trial. David’s cancer did not go into remission, it spread outside of his left lung within a month and rapidly to the rest of his body. We were married as planned on October 1, but had to scale back the wedding to a few friends and some family members. David was so ill he barely made it through the ceremony, and was taken to the ER after the vows.

After months of aggressive radiation and chemotherapy treatments and five trips to the hospital, David was rushed by ambulance for the last time on December 15. He was transferred to the hospice the next day, and died in the early hours of December 18, with me and our cat Hugh by his side. I held a memorial for David on December 28, 2005, and scattered his ashes from a 1929 New Standard (D25) biplane Piper Cub stunt plane flown by Stanley “The Flying Farmer” Segalla over Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome in upstate New York on May 30, 2006 — what would’ve been his 39th birthday.

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About David Fielding:

That best portion of a man’s life, his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.
– William Wordsworth

Much of this website is devoted to David because he was the love of my life, and a tremendous supporter of all my creative endeavours. I think about him every day.

One of my long-term plans is to write a book about this man who changed my life, and who was such a positive influence in the lives of others. We all miss him very much.

In the meantime, more about David can be found here:

David’s writing
David’s photos
My photos of David
The category ‘David’ on gailatlarge.com
Some videoclips of The Flying Fieldings
David’s Flickr profile

In Memory of David Fielding — a fundraiser for The Lung Cancer Alliance

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Why Toronto?

I have been asked many times why I moved to Toronto, a city I have never lived in and visited only twice, instead of returning to Vancouver. I think this choice surprised even those close to me. There were several major reasons:

• Lack of time and money. U.S. Immigration gave me 87 days from the date of David’s death to leave the United States or risk deportation. They applied the status of “illegal alien” to me once David passed away on December 18 because my spouse visa application was still in process. This shocked our immigration lawyer, who had been handling my visa applications for nearly a year. By the time the lawyer was informed, I had far less than 87 days. Suddenly I had to pack up a three bedroom house, put it up for sale, and move back to Canada. I hadn’t been allowed to work in the U.S. so I had no income for a year, and David didn’t have any life insurance. With the help of others I tried to appeal USCIS’s decision and find a way to live in my own house to grieve in peace, but in my case there was no chance for appeal. The words from the Congressman’s office in Washington, DC: “Your application is for a spouse visa, but there is no living spouse.” If that isn’t insult to injury, I don’t know what is.
• Geographic location. I can drive to Pennsylvania and New York from Toronto, and I can’t do that from Vancouver. There are estate matters to attend to, but more importantly, I wanted to return to Scranton (where we lived) and Rhinebeck (where David’s ashes were scattered) without having to buy a plane ticket. From August to December 2006 alone, I drove about 10,000 miles in journeys south.
• Hugh. I didn’t think Hugh would’ve survived a trip to Vancouver at that time. He was 14 years old and so anxiety-ridden in the five minute car journey to the vet’s office that he’d practically give himself a heart attack. Vancouver is 4.5 hours by plane, and about that many days in a U-Haul. In winter, it would’ve taken me even longer. I’m grateful for the seven months Hugh was with me after David died, because they had been inseparable and Hugh was a living connection to my husband. Hugh passed away at the end of July 2006, and I had most of his ashes scattered over Rhinebeck in October, around the time of our first wedding anniversary.

Toronto is my home for now, and I’m trying to make the best of it. I miss Vancouver and I miss my friends and family there terribly, but I visit when I can.

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Toronto, Five Years Later

So much has happened in the past five years, I wrote a post about my fifth anniversary in Toronto (March, 2011), and the other anniversaries in between. In five years I’ve changed homes three times, lost a pet, gained two, then lost one, was a contractor with the Ontario government and with my former BC company, embarked on a brand-new career with one foot on Bay Street, couchsurfed in Slovakia, Norway, Barbados, and other far-flung places, flown in police helicopters and WWII cargo planes, and drove 70,000 miles (112,654 kms) in road trips. It’s been a rollercoaster, but I’m still hanging on.

My Toronto life by the season. Here’s the latest set: [Autumn 2011]

Are gailatlarge and gailontheweb the same person?

In a word, yes.

I started off as gailontheweb.blogspot.com in 2002, when I first started writing in Blogger. I used the name gailontheweb as a login at every site I frequented, including Flickr. When I decided to register a domain in December 2005, I chose gailontheweb.net because gailontheweb.com was taken by a real estate agent, but soon after that I found a better hosting company and tried to transfer the domain over to them. The first company gave me such a hassle over the process that I eventually gave up trying to transfer it and had to choose a whole new domain name, hence gailatlarge.com. I still have many accounts under gailontheweb.

http://gailatlarge.com/blog/category/me/

Profile on Flickr.com
Profile on Utata.org

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