Shortly after I arrived at the drop-in centre this morning, someone pointed out the new sign on the cupboards: Memorial service for Fred Whitehand, December 2.

It took a few minutes to register that I knew Fred, and then my mouth hung open.

“Fred’s dead?!?”

He’d been hospitalized a few weeks ago for pneumonia, and I thought about visiting him in hospital, just to let him know I was thinking about him, but I didn’t because I thought that might be intrusive. The last time I saw him before he went to hospital he’d looked awful, and was coughing a lot. I was worried. She said he’d come out of hospital and was at home, in his room in the Diplomat Hotel. She said he was just going to rest a bit before he started going out. So I assumed that meant he was better.

I thought it was just last Saturday that I’d overheard someone talking about him but his obituary says he died November 7, a week before. He had a heart attack in the shower.

I didn’t know much about him, but he was there pretty much every single time I went to the centre. He always came up early to get his juice, and he was one of only a few people Alberta allowed to get juice in advance of the meal. If I sat down at a table for a while, it was often his – he sat at the same table as John. He read a lot, usually fantasies I think, and he walked with a shuffling limp. I liked making him smile – it was a relatively rare occurrence, around me at least. He once told me he had a BA, in geography, I think. He also told me he never ever allowed food into his room, so as not to attract roaches. I once asked if I could take his picture, but he said he’d rather I not. I wonder if he’d known that he would be dead just a few months later if his answer would have been the same? The question reminds me of something I read in Documentary Now! Contemporary Strategies in Photography, Film and the Visual Arts (which I returned to the library before I finished so I’m going off memory here) that said documentary photographers work in the future perfect tense where something will have happened.

I guess he was buried last week where his mother still lives, which just happens to be about 10 minutes from my parents’ home where I grew up. During one semester of spares in high school, my friend and I often hitchhiked into his town for Basken Robbins. Sister Christine is holding a memorial service for people at the drop-in since a funeral wasn’t held here. I’m really sad I can’t make it but I will have just landed in New York then.

Even though I barely knew him at all, I’ll miss his shuffling gait and unassuming presence, and of course the possibility of getting to know him better.