December 17, 2005
A couple of years ago, Ryan Merrywether met Rachel Gojevic at a friend's party, and when it became apparent that Ryan liked her and wanted to be with her, she sat him down and had a talk with him.
It was about her cycstic fibrosis.
"When I first met her" Ryan said, "I didn't know what cystic fibrosis was. But she insisted on being very up front about it. She wanted me to know what was involved."
She was 20, he was 21. She was cherubic-faced, petite - "five foot nothing," Ryan said - and sweet-natured.
"Very, very sweet," Ryan said. "She was an angel, which was my nickname for her. I called her 'Angel'."
Ryan, in his way, became an angel to her. When they started seeing each other regularly, he saw how hard it was for her to get around to her various medical appointments from her home in Coquitlam. She had to make constant trips to the hospital for her tests.
"Rachel couldn't take transit because she didn't want to be exposed to viruses and flu because of the CF, so she took cabs alot."
So Ryan bought a car just so he could act as Rachel's chauffeur. It was a 1987 Toyota Tercel station wagon that he bought for $1,400, all that he could afford, and on the day he bought it it broke down on the Pattullo bridge.
"Oh, man, it was a beater," Ryan said. "On the insurance papers the colour was given as 'brown', but on the dealership papers, somebody as listed the colour as 'ugly'. I showed the salesman and he said, 'Oops, sorry.'"
Rachel christened the car.
"She named it the Ugly Brown Banana," Ryan said. "I have no idea why she chose 'banana' but that's what it was."
So, for the better part of a year, Rachel and Ryan saw a lot of each other. Ryan, himself, was living in Vancouver. He was originally from Ontario, having drifted west four years ago, and he had found himself drifting here, too - from one friend's couch to another, from dead-end jobs to welfare.
He wasn't a street kid, but he had no idea how to live on his own. So one night when he first arrived in Vancouver, he showed up for the weekly dinner at Covenant House, the advocacy and shelter service for the homeless and runaway youths, and there, he met Andrew Dagg, a Covenant House outreach worker. Dagg liked Ryan, but saw a kid in danger of ending up on the street, so he convinced Ryan to enrol in Covenant Houses's Rites of Passage program - a program that allows kids to live at the house's residency. Residents can stay for up to two years, but only if they pay rent, hold down steady work and, if they can, go to school.
"I really knew nothing," Ryan said. "I had no life experience living on my own. If it wasn't for Covenant House I have no idea where I'd be. They taught me how to survive."
Ryan's life stabilized. He moved out of Covenant House last year and got a good job selling cell phones. And he had met Rachel.
It was to be a short and sweet relationship.
In the spring of this year, Rachel's condition worsened. She died April 23. Ryan was by her side.
"A few days before she died," Ryan said, "she asked me if I was comfortable. Me! This was a girl on her deathbed, and she wanted to know if I was comfortable. But that was Rachel. She cared so much that she was the kind of person that made you want to care, too."
Ryan was a pallbearer at Rachel's funeral.
And that week, as if in sympathy, the Toyota Tercel that Ryan bought to chauffeur Rachel died, too. Ryan parked it and hasn't driven it since.
And that would have been the end of this story if not for a call the Covenant House received from a couple of guys at a North Vancouver body shop. Two managers at the body shop told the Covenant House that, as an act of charity, they wanted to give away a comfortably refurbished car to a deserving recipient. The body shop wanted to work in conjuction with the Covenant House to help kids apprentice with them.
The folks at Covenant House were more than happy with the offer and gave the body shop Ryan's name. He could use a car.
And so, on Friday afternoon, a reception was held and the car was presented to Ryan wrapped in paper with a large red bow tied on top of it.
Ryan was asked to say a few words, and he said it was all pretty surreal for him, he couldn't quite believe it. He thanked everyone and tore off the paper. The car wasn't ugly, or brown. It was magenta, and it was perfect.
Later, after driving the car home, Ryan said he was thinking of christening the car, just as Rachel had done with the Tercel.
"I was thinking of calling it 'Angel'," he said.
JJ
