The Collection
This is Love
Bill Staubi, a retired Canadian man from Ottawa, reflects on his life and art collection after being diagnosed with terminal liver cancer in
Key takeaways
- Facing mortality prompted Bill to prioritize meaningful legacy over fear or regret.
Main topics
- Terminal illness and acceptance
- Art as legacy and identity
Notable quotes
"I needed to let it go. I let it go. It's gone."
Conclusion
Bill's journey from shock to purposeful action transformed his art col
Transcript preview
Speaker 1 (0:02) How often Speaker 2 (0:02) are you thinking about art? Are you always kind of looking around and thinking, wow, I like that piece? Speaker 1 (0:09) Constantly. I went out yesterday for a task that I had to perform on the way home, popped into a gallery, ended up buying two pieces of work. Speaker 2 (0:19) Bill Stobie lives in Ottawa. He's been collecting art for a long time. But wait, you know, if you're a guy who's going to buy two pieces of art a day, do you have to give yourself kind of a budget? Like, this is how much I can spend each week, each month. Speaker 1 (0:34) Yeah, like most people, I live on a limited income. It's not a huge amount of money. So, yeah, there are times I have to walk away or pinch myself or decide whether... I really want to go away for the weekend or do I want to have that painting? Speaker 2 (0:50) Let's talk about 2023, before everything happened. What was going on then? Tell me about your life. Speaker 1 (0:59) I've been retired for about 16 years now from a long career with the correctional service and was enjoying my retirement, attending a lot of art auctions, events, and just enjoying life like an average person does. But I had assembled this large collection over a long period of time and I was at a point where I was thinking I'm going to need to move some of these works on to somewhere else simply because everything was in my two-bedroom apartment. And when you've got that many art pieces, it's hard to move around things. And so you worry about scratching a canvas or chipping a frame or cracking a piece of glass. How many pieces did you own at that point? At that point, about 1,300 objects. Speaker 2 (1:44) 1,300 pieces of art, all in your apartment. What would a wall look like in your apartment? Speaker 1 (1:54) Well, every wall in the apartment looked the same. Artwork from the floor to the ceiling, from one corner to the other corner. Even in the bathrooms, they were full of artwork. You would see artwork hanging on doors. Sometimes I would take the door off the wall because it covered a section of wall. So I'd free that up. Speaker 1 (2:17) During the time I was married, we tended to pick stuff that was fairly conventional, paintings, small sculptures, that kind of thing. We would buy maybe one or two pieces a year. But when I moved out on my own, I started buying in volume. And because at that time I was also coming out as a gay man. I was buying work that was produced by queer artists, not exclusively, but looking for work that reflected my understanding of the queer community and the life that I was embracing at that time. I love work that is unsettling for me because I like to explore, well, then why is that? Speaker 2 (2:59) Bill had been living on his own since he was 45. And then in November of 2023, when he was in his late 60s, he says he started feeling unwell. He was having abdominal pain that he thought was connected to a surgery he'd had years ago. He went to see Speaker 1 (3:17) his doctor. They did some blood tests and came back and said, we have good news and we have bad news. The bad news is you have liver cancer. The good news is that it's in your liver. And my general practitioner said they'll do some surgery. They'll cut off the cancerous portion. Your liver regenerates itself over time. So eventually you'll end up with a healthy liver out of this. But the interim part will be difficult. So I'm going to refer you off to an oncologist and let's get this started. So I trotted off to the oncologist and that's when things really changed. He came into the room very tense, very nervous. Oh, Mr. Stobie, I'm so sorry to be meeting you at this time in your illness. I so wish we had caught you earlier when we could have been able to do more for you. And I'm thinking, calm down, drama queen. You're going to lop off a chunk of my liver? It's going to grow back. Bob's your uncle. I'll be fine. So I interrupted, and I said, I don't understand what you're telling me because, and I related what I had been told. He said, oh, no. He said, your GP should never have made that diagnosis, even if he thought that's what the case. He never should have told you what the treatment would be because that's not his job. He said, in fact, you're terminally ill. It's incurable. It's untreatable. Right now, all I can tell you is we'll do what we can to make you as comfortable as we can for the time that you have. which prompted, of course, the question for me, how much time do I have? And he was reluctant to, as most doctors are, to start talking numbers. But I explained to him, look, when I leave here, given what you've told me, the first thing I'm going to do when I go home is fire up the computer and type in a bunch of stuff and try and get a number. And hopefully I'll find the right number, I'll find the good number. But whatever number I find, that's the number I'm going to proceed forward with. Speaker 1 (5:10) I'd like for that to be based in at least some science, some intelligence. And he said, okay, I understand the average for a person your age and your state of illness, stage four terminal, is 18 months. And then he proceeded to explain what an average was, which I said, no, I have an MBA. I understand some will live longer, but some don't make it to the average. So I left there very different expectations and plans than I came into the office with. Speaker 2 (5:42) What was the trip back home like? Speaker 1 (5:45) A lot of quiet. I had taken a friend with me just so that they would remember things that I didn't remember from the explanations and things. So yeah, it was a very quiet ride home and a very quiet first evening. I didn't know whether to tell people what to do, how to respond. I was certainly in a state of shock. What I had thought was going to happen in my life was not. and facing this news that I might have only 18 months on average to live and recognizing that it might be even shorter than the 18 months. So it took me a couple of days to be comfortable talking to people. But once I decided that's what's happening, there's not much you can do to change what's going to happen. So you need to figure out what you need to do between now and the day you drop dead. And I kicked into project mode. Speaker 2 (6:43) What Speaker 1 (6:44) did you do? Speaker 2 (6:45) Did you make Speaker 1 (6:46) a list? I mean, Speaker 2 (6:47) what is project mode death? Speaker 1 (6:50) Yeah, I thought about what are the things that need to be done. I started researching medical assistance in dying and applied for that. And I started researching a funeral and started negotiating with a funeral organization. And then I