I recruited Darren Zenko to write for this site earlier this year. He seemed keen to participate, and I was eager to have some share of his prodigious gifts for irreverent humor and subversive invention. In addition to these – standard fare for anyone who knew him – he told me that he had learned a very great deal from his time listening, watching and talking with people in the cancer wards and treatment centers he’d been spending much of his time in. He had some hard-won wisdom, he told me, and hoped to live and to give it expression. Most sadly, the disease took him last week, at age 39.

Darren Zenko – DJ, journalist, short story writer, novelist, and gadabout, RIP

Sometimes, rarely maybe, or maybe that’s just me showing my age, Edmonton seems to be filled with big-hearted and beautiful people, like it did last night. Sorry that it had to be a funeral. Zenko abides. Godspeed to him.

As an observer and writer Darren would have pointed out, there’s a reason they put funerals in the movies. It’s so that people can have epiphanies, set aside quarrels, bond through shared emotion and experience, see each other anew, show their kinder natures. Grief makes us better people.