Lost & Found in Light

Saturday, February 21, 2026

This afternoon I came to an opening of an art exhibit by Marilyn Calleja, an acquaintance, in a café-turned-gallery. I followed a sequence of paintings arranged like a quiet promise. The exhibition’s theme is movement, from dusk to dawn, from darkness into light. It starts with the moment when the world shifted and subsequently, darkness invaded the artist’s days. Darkness held on tight until light broke again, in the crack of dawn, exploding in magnificent colours: red, orange, blue, purple and then, as promised, a sliver of light peeked. By the final painting the sky had opened into full morning, with almost defiant light.

Some people spoke in hushed, reverent tones, as though dawn might be startled away. Others expressed awe, exclaimed and laughed. Old friends hugged, happy to see each other and celebrate Marilyn Calleja’s achievement and talent. Her light shone so bright the dimly lit café glowed.

I found myself moved by the certainty embedded in the concept. Night yields. Morning comes. Darkness is transitional. The arc is upward, outward. Even the title of the show carried reassurance: an inevitability of light.

Marilyn Calleja, "The Crack of Dawn"

From there I drove to a hospice. It is located next to Toronto’s old Don Jail. My friend Gilles Goyette had voluntarily checked himself in to the 10th floor of this place he would never leave. The hospice is inside a facility, aptly named Bridgepoint.

My friend’s room was quiet. No mechanical sounds of machines, no monitors that beep signals of life and warn of the looming crossing of the bridge. He is not here to extend his life. Gilles is here to die with dignity and with no pain. I’ve been away and haven’t seen in him almost a month. His body, a creative conduit, once animated, restless, now reduced to essentials. His mind still sharp though and his smile, upon recognizing me, is as sweet and warm as ever. Along with his good friend Michael, Gilles speaks for hours. He shows us what he’d worked on that day, curating thousands of words. Creativity shoots through his fingers to a keyboard. Bursts of light.  He will create, invent, curate, to his last breath, till his last flicker of light dims.

My friend’s bed is adjacent to a large east-facing window.

Beyond, the sky pales next to his light.

It strikes me that the exhibition and this room are not opposites, so much as mirrors. Both are about transition. Both are about thresholds reached and their crossing.

In the paintings, darkness is metaphoric, aesthetic and fading. In hospice, darkness is literal and approaching. It is a fact that rearranges points of view.

During the short time I’ve known Gilles (way too short!), Gilles had walked me through his various artistic projects and creations. My favourite is called Lost in Light – a series of still photos he chose from the thousands of images his camera snapped from his window. He curated the series from these random snapshots of life and light. And the beauty in each of these moments, how they flow seamlessly, how they capture fleeting moments in people’s life, as if mid breath, takes my breath away.

I love getting lost in Gilles’ light. I love what I find.

I sit beside him and try to reconcile the two movements I had witnessed today. The paintings convey a narrative: emergent light overpowering darkness.

In the hospice room, at dusk, I witness emergent darkness’ attempting to overpower my friend’s light. I think of a line in a poem of one of his favourite poets, John Ashbery, “The miracle took you in beside him.”

And I ponder the big question, what is death? Is it a dusk that takes us into permanent night? Or is it another kind of dawn, one we cannot yet see from where we stand?

The large window complicates the question. It faces sunrise.

Tomorrow morning, light will spill across his bed. It will touch his closed eyelids first. It will outline the bridge of his nose, his unruly hair, the now-wild beard, the stillness of his chest.

The sun will rise whether he greets it or not. The world will move from darkness to light, again and again, indifferent.

From where I sit, Gilles appears to be moving away, away from speech, from spaces, from the weight of gravity. It does feel like dimming. Like nightfall.

Watching Gilles, I realize that perhaps I’d been too certain about what darkness means. Blackness contains all the colours after all. In the art gallery, dusk is only beautiful because we trust dawn to follow. But maybe what we call darkness is simply the bridge we cannot accompany someone through, to the light.

I imagine the arc extending beyond my field of vision, the other side of a bridge hidden in fog.

Perhaps the direction depends on the vantage point. For those remaining, his leaving is a monochrome sunset, color draining. For him, if there is something beyond our sight, perhaps it is a glorious dawn, in purple, blue, orange, red and bright yellow. Like the colours in Marilyn Calleja’s mesmerizing painting, titled “The Crack of Dawn”.

Or maybe there is no metaphor adequate for the moment.

When I hold Gilles’ hand, the room is dim but not dark. The sky is in between, neither day nor night. A suspended hour.

The art show offers a linear reassurance: darkness → light. Hospice offers a question mark. And yet both rooms ask me to pay attention to subtle gradations, to the way color shifts slowly, almost invisibly. To the fact that transformation is rarely abrupt.

I glance at the window facing east, towards the unknown horizon. I imagine tomorrow’s sun arriving faithfully at its appointed time. Whether my friend is moving towards darkness or light is not something I am able to determine. I leave this question to the theologians.

What I can do is sit with him in the half-light, in that fragile final stretch, the bridge-point. In the in-between. And bear witness.

Wednesday, February 25, 2026

This evening, Gilles’ light rose from his body. It’s like he joined the great and boundless light from which it first was kindled.

Photo by Sara Arahon

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