My mother gave birth to her fourth and last child when her eldest was thirteen. There had been a four-year gap between the first child and the second, two years between the second and the third. First came two girls, then two boys. Because I was thirteen it made sense that I would be relied upon to help with the new baby, and so I did. Which, I always thought, helped equip me with the ensuing common sense capability in the care of newborns when my own children were born, beginning a decade later.

When my husband and I married, my brother was five years old. Several years later when we took possession of our first house, a modest, semi-detached bungalow located in the far outskirts of Toronto, my little brother would come to stay with us occasionally for weekends, and busy himself happily searching in the ditches across from our house in a newly-developed suburb, ecstatic to find tadpoles and frogs within easy reach.

Baby Billy, up close and in a personal encounter with a pony

When he was in high school, his interest in the natural world by then well developed, he kept a veritable menagerie of caged reptiles in my mother's basement. Eventually, he adopted for a while, a raccoon that lived in the house, free to roam within reasonable parameters as long as my brother was present. My mother by then owned a cottage in an enclave near Brampton, Ontario and my brother one summer, with his raccoon, located there; I don't recall what ever happened to the raccoon after that.

One summer when our three children were toddlers, Bill came with us to spend a week at a relative's cottage, on a lake in north-western Ontario. We had paddled a boat toward a bit of a swampy area and he was determined to exit the boat close to the water's edge to search for a rare/endangered (Blandings) turtle. He found the turtles, and when he returned to the boat where we were awaiting him he was covered with leeches.

Over the years my brother became a committed birder, going to great lengths to see various species passing through at the spring and autumn equinox, eventually travelling the globe for that very purpose. There was one memorable time when he was attacked by a large goose outraged at his probing presence. In the meantime, he had obtained his science doctorate and taken a position as a professor of botany at Dalhousie University, where he remained his entire academic career. Now 65, he is retired, and he is at the end stage of an inoperable liver cancer.

His years of association with and support of the Nature Conservancy has gained him recognition from them; A coastal reserve not far from Halifax has been named in his honour, the Dr. Bill Freedman Nature Reserve.

Dr. Bill Freedman Nature Reserve includes 150 hectares southwest of Halifax

Bill Freedman has a long history of involvement with the Nature Conservancy of Canada, and served as its national board chairman and its Atlantic board chairman. (MIKE DEMBECK)

Almost coincidentally, his daughter Rachel, living in Vancouver, gave birth to a bouncy baby girl several days ago. My brother Billy is at the end of palliative care, his devoted wife George-Ann continuing to look to his comfort and his needs. His son Jonathan has flown down again to Halifax from his own home in California to be with his father to the end, and the end is not far.

My brother's bout with cancer very closely resembles our father's, though the cancer is a different one. Each was lethal, however, and ended with each of them bed-ridden and swiftly wasting as the cancer spread and consumed them. Bill's cancer, when discovered, was already in an inoperable stage and it had metasticized. From diagnosis to end-of-life it has been a swift transition for him. He never experienced any warning symptoms before diagnosis. He has always been a healthy, vibrant and active person. Throughout chemotherapy he experienced little discomfort, but the drugs, though prolonging his life somewhat, were unable to diminish the size and number of primary tumours, only the secondary ones, and only temporarily.

He has suffered no physical pain, just the intolerable agony of knowing that life is swiftly slipping away.