The Palliative Care Centre gets an EV Charger

Five years ago January I spent every day for two weeks at Catherine’s side in the Provincial Palliative Care Centre. My time there, though filled with anxiety and anguish, also feels like a magical bubble of wrap-around support after a six years of caregiving, and I hold a soft spot in my heart for the centre and its staff and volunteers.

It was Catherine’s wish that the piece that she created with BJ Sandiford, The Spirit of Charlottetown, be donated to the Centre. It took a five year procrastination to get me there, but yesterday I loaded the piece into the car, drove out to the Centre, and dropped it off. It was my first time inside the door since the day Catherine died.

Here’s the piece displayed at Receiver Coffee in 2016:

I’m happy that The Spirit of Charlottetown will have a second life: Catherine’s vision for the piece was to represent the care and support she was receiving, from myriad corners, as she lived with cancer. It will continue to do so.

One of the things I learned during the days I spent at the Centre in 2020 was that both of the palliative care physicians of the day, Drs. Lecours and Baker, drove electric vehicles. Despite this, there was no EV charger in the Centre’s parking lot, an absence I felt myself, as we’d purchased a Kia Soul EV just the month before, and having to worry about where and how to charge it was an overhead I didn’t need.

In the months following, I advocated for the installation of an EV charger at the Centre with the provincial government, and received words of encouragement from MLAs James Aylward (then Minister of Health) and Natalie Jameson (MLA for Charlottetown-Hillsborough Park, where the Centre is located). I’m happy to report that, five years later, it appears that this is about to happen: on my visit yesterday I spotted the electrical setup in place:

I’ll choose to see this EV charger as a part of Catherine’s legacy as well.