It was Tuesday, May 24, 2016...you know how when you land the flight attendant says it’s now permissible to “use transmitting and receiving functions your portable devices” while you’re taxiing to the gate?...

I’d just landed on a 14-hour flight from Hong Kong...and as soon as I flicked my phone out of airplane mode, it blew up...emails and texts all about one thing: The Tragically Hip had just announced that their singer, Gord Downie, had brain cancer...

At first, this didn’t make sense...had the jet lag kicked in already?...was this some kind of hoax?...I mean, this was Gord...he was practically a Canadian superhero...nothing like this was supposed to happen to him...

But it was true...the emails and texts kept popping up...dozens, hundreds of them...and we all know how the next 18 months played out...

When Gord left us in October 2017, it was really rough...the best tweet I saw that day was “Canada closed: death in the family”...the country spent the next week trying to explain to the rest of the world how a singer of a rock band had brought an entire nation to tears—even the Prime Minister...where else in the world does something like that happen?...

The answer is you have to be a special kind of person: artist, writer, thinker, activist, and poet… this is the story of Gord Downie, Canada’s own rock poet…

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