They were there when my grandparents and a school friend died in the 90s: open casket, Sunday best, a familiar face subtly altered by embalming fluid and makeup.

Disturbing and uncomfortable, yes. Particularly in the latter case.

Aaron was run over in front of his high school. An older student was playing a game of chicken with a classmate. He lost control of the car and killed Aaron as he sat on a nearby curb reading violin sheet music. It was a beautiful October day. He was in Grade 9.

I remember seeing the bruising on his face and hands that makeup couldn’t hide. The puffy, swollen cheeks that made him look unlike himself. The tiny, not-quite invisible stitches holding his eyelids closed.

I wanted to un-see those details. I still do, and can’t.

But that reckoning was necessary. Through such terrible details I came to understand and accept that he was dead.

Remembering my writing friend, Tim

The last three times I’ve been to a funeral or wake, I have seen no bodies.

Last week, I went to Tim’s wake. He died of brain cancer. He was 48. He’s the first of my adult friends to die.

We met through our writing group over eight years ago. Knowing he was losing his ability to select a perfect word, form beautiful sentences and finally to communicate at all was wrenching.

For a writer, how could it not be?

Brain cancer took all that from him along with his physical health. When I last saw him in May (I don’t think he wanted to be seen), he was thin and frail. His hair was gone, the new surgery scars vivid on his skull. His hands shook. The pauses between one word and the next were punctuated with effort rather than his usual thoughtfulness.

When I arrived at the funeral home with another writing friend, I dreaded seeing the final changes chemotherapy and more surgeries had brought upon him.

I needn’t have worried. Tim was gone.

Instead, there was a slideshow.

Tim’s slideshow: Facets of a life I never knew

Tim was a private person. I didn’t know very much about his family when he died. I don’t think I ever will.

I’m happy to know there was a time when he fell asleep with a baby on his chest. I liked the photos of him with his sisters and their children, and the photos of him as a child.

I had seen some of his more gruesome Halloween costumes before, and the photo of an office cube he once filled with popcorn. He loved practical jokes.

There were also some particularly moving photos of Tim with his new bride, who is now his widow.

But the Tim I knew, Tim the writer, wasn’t in those photos. How could he be? We rarely took photos when we met.

My friend and I left the funeral glad to have supported his family but still crushed by his loss. To be honest, without having seen his body, it’s hard in some ways to believe that he’s gone.

So I’m not bothered by the trend of people taking selfies at funerals. As Caitlin Doughty has eloquently observed, they’re a blip in a far larger cultural shift to digital mourning that includes everything from funeral homes to PowerPoint.

If photos are now a primary tool of grief, then take them.

Take photos of everything, everywhere.

Because the slideshow at the end of the universe awaits us all.

*

2026: I wrote this essay on Medium after Tim died in 2013. When he passed, I hadn’t yet been struck with the inspiration that would set me writing The Xenthian Cycle, though Tim gave feedback on the novel that rests like an abandoned city beneath its bones.

I named Anna’s and Malcolm’s son in Tim’s memory.

Their daughter, Erin, is named for my classmate.

The post The Slideshow at the End of the Universe appeared first on E.M. Williams - Fantasy Author.

Before taking the course, I’d finished a novel draft and was working on a second project. I was excited about my ideas. What I didn’t know was whether I could write. Close friends and family had read for me, but blindly trusting their opinions struck me as foolhardy.

What I wanted, of course, was feedback from people who weren’t invested in me.

I was working on U of T’s campus in Media Relations at the time. As a staff member, I only had to pay the tax to take a course through Continuing Studies. To this day, I deeply appreciate that benefit.

Hopkinson is an award-winning speculative fiction author. She happened to be teaching creative writing at U of T the semester I signed up in 2005.

Through that course, I met my writing group. Hopkinson’s feedback sessions set the rules for our meetings over the next seven years. It was a transformational period in my life.

Diana continues to read my drafts. I named Anna and Malcolm’s son Tim to remember T. J. O’Neill, our late colleague.

Taking my School of Continuing Studies journey full circle

When I published Chaos Calling earlier this spring, I reached out to the school to thank them for the opportunity all those years ago. I told them about our writing group’s success. They were kind enough to post this piece about my experience and downstream success.

Thank you to the School of Continuing Studies’ Marketing team for featuring my work.

You can read the article on their website.

Curious about taking a course? You’ll find more information on their website.

The post Chaos Calling featured by U of T’s School of Continuing Studies appeared first on E.M. Williams - Fantasy Author.