New Pathway.
It is heart-warming to see an outpouring of thankfulness to others from the closest family of a departed. Shawn Goldman, whose son Kai passed away on January 12, has provided an example of gratitude to the community, which had tried to help terminally ill Kai fight cancer and to help Kai’s relatives deal with the loss. The New Pathway was aware of the tragedy which rocked the St. Demetrius Catholic School in Etobicoke. And we were overwhelmed to find that Shawn Goldman came forward to share this story to help those who are suffering, and to encourage other communities to come together and help those in need.
Kai Goldman was 19 when he passed away. Kai attended the St. Demetrius Catholic School as his father Shawn raised him and his sister Corazon as Ukrainian Catholics. Kai’s long-term fight with cancer is a story of human resilience based on the Christian faith. He had his first brain tumour at the age of five when he went through surgery, radiation- and chemotherapy. In some time, the family was told that the treatment was not working and Kai was diagnosed as palliative when he was 5.5 years old. As Shawn told the New Pathway, alternative medicine and prayer helped beat the terminal diagnosis, and Kai survived the tumour.
The illness struck again in 12 years, in the summer of 2014. It was not the recurrence of the original cancer, but a brain tumour caused by the radiation that Kai went through when he was five years old. Kai decided to fight again, and part of his journey was his decision to get baptised, said Shawn, and continued: “I’m a convert to the Ukrainian Catholic Church and I didn’t force him to get baptized. Kai was baptized by Fr. Peter Shumelda at the Marian Shrine on Weston Road in May 2015. After his baptism, the tumour disappeared – the next MRI in July 2015 revealed that it had shrunk by 80%. And all of the doctors at Sick Kid’s and Princess Margaret hospitals told us that it would be impossible to get rid of that tumour. But it disappeared completely and Kai was in remission for a year and a half.”
During that period Kai lived a very full life – he was in high school, played soccer, baseball, basketball, hockey, and went to Costa Rica. Unfortunately, another MRI in December 2016 showed that four tumours had come back. Shawn Goldman said to the New Pathway that it was important to let people know how the community responded: “My daughter Corazon attends St. Demetrius Catholic School. When we had the news that Kai’s cancer returned, I went to school and told the principal, Ms. Hordienko, that this time Kai’s chances of surviving were very small. I just wanted to let her know about that, but she went to the school’s parent council, to the Yavir School of Dance and to Fr. John Tataryn at the St. Demetrius Church.
They chipped in and sent me, Kai and Corazon to Niagara Falls, they put us at the Hilton Hotel on the 44th floor overlooking the Falls. We had an amazing family trip that gave us some beautiful memories. Another member of the community, who helped us, is Chris Mores, one of my daughter’s classmates’ father, who works at the Newmarket Mercedes-Benz dealership. Kai’s tumour in the brain stem was affecting his walking and he eventually had to be in a wheel chair. Chris saw us driving a small car and when the dealership received a mini-van on Christmas Eve, he immediately thought of Kai. Chris went to the management and the owner of the dealership, and they agreed to donate the van to our family. They put new tires and brakes on it, and did some body work. And on Ukrainian Christmas Eve, Chris told me that they are going to donate it to us. Our old car actually got wrecked beyond repair at that time, so it was a real blessing for our family. Those acts of kindness show a Christian response to a family in need – the Gospel tells us to bear each other’s burdens and that’s what the community did.”
Shawn and Corazon Goldman (centre) wtih Chris Mores (left) of Newmarket Mercedes-Benz and a family friend Milton Rusonik. The dealership granted a Dodge Grand Caravan van to the Goldman's last Christmas when they found that Kai Goldman was confined to a wheel chair.
The other aspect of support to the Goldman’s is how the community came out to support the family when Kai passed away. It should be noted that Shawn comes from a Jewish background and he converted to Ukrainian Catholic Church six years ago. “You can imagine that it wasn’t an easy thing for my family to accept”, said Shawn, “but both the funeral home and St. Demetrius Church were filled at Kai’s funeral. Half of the church was filled with Ukrainians, half with Jews. Fr. Peter Shumelda led everyone in the panakhyda and then my father led everybody in the Jewish Kaddish prayer. It was very comforting to see that people can put aside historical grievances and pray together for a family. It was just like Jesus’ words in the beatitudes “blessed are those, who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” Families from our Jewish side and from St. Demetrius have been preparing for us meals and dropping them off at our home, moms and dads in my daughter’s class taken her for sleepovers. Chris Mores’s daughter Alexandra is one of my daughter’s best friends and when at the funeral home my mother was making eulogy for my son, I looked over to see how my daughter was doing – Alexandra was standing there, holding my daughter’s hand, and she was crying.”
The support for the family was particularly important considering that Shawn lost his wife, Caroline, five years ago. When Kai passed away, it was a really tough time for Shawn and Corazon. Shawn said, “No one can take away someone else’s pain, and me and my daughter are experiencing a lot of pain right now, but Fr. Peter Shumelda said to me that “a grief shared is a grief halved”. This community has supported us unconditionally – my family and the clergy of St. Demetrius, and Ms. Hordienko especially. I am a teacher and I’ve seen a lot of principals, but she went above and beyond what any principle would have done. My daughter’s entire class came to the church the morning of Kai’s funeral and they were there to support Corazon. When I shared this with the care team at the Sick Kids hospital, they were amazed because that’s very rare to happen. Most children, who experience this kind of loss, end up going back to school without the class or sometimes even the teachers knowing what they’re experiencing. We are now talking to Corazon’s teacher, Ms. Mihaylovich, and Ms. Hordienko about grief counselling not just for my daughter but for the rest of the class as well.”
Shawn Goldman said that he had a “big aha moment” when he realized that Fr. Peter Shumelda’s words “a grief shared is a grief halved” were true: “Christ had to die on the cross on his own but he went to his cross with support from the community, Simon of Cyrene helped him carry that cross. Through faith and community this very painful experience is made not so terrible. I don’t know how I would be getting through this without my family and my church, and my faith in God. It’s a painful story but I think it’s one worth telling.”
When we spoke to Shawn, he sounded shaken but full of grace and hope. He provided the guidance that, undoubtedly, many can think of following in their lives: “Sometimes you’re on the receiving end of it and sometimes you need to be on the giving end of it: last night a really close friend of mine told me that she had to go for an emergency mammogram this morning and she asked me to go with her. And I did.”
Shawn Goldman’s Story
“It’s a long story. I was raised in a traditional Jewish home in Toronto and my parents went to Synagogue regularly, and I went to the Jewish school. When I was a teenager, my mom and dad moved our family to Israel where I went to the Orthodox-Jewish Israeli high school. I served in the Israeli combat unit, I was an outstanding cadet of my unit after basic training. But I had a crisis of faith serving on the West Bank which was a moral crisis as well as spiritual crisis. When I got out of the army, I left Judaism and Israel, and I left God behind me. I was a spiritual seeker for many years, looking at other traditions, like Buddhism, Native American spirituality and psychotherapy. And my son’s illness when he was five started bringing me back to God. When Kai was diagnosed with cancer, the story of Abraham and Isaac, where Abraham had to sacrifice Isaac, which I read as a child, came back to me and I was meditating upon that. The first day that my son went to radiation therapy I prayed, for the first time in many years, and said to God “take me instead of him”. And when I was walking back to work after Kai’s first radiation session, a cab ran a red light and knocked me, broke my leg. After I got up, I said “Wow, somebody was listening to my prayer.” When half a year later Kai was diagnosed as terminal, he chose to visit my wife’s father in Germany on the “Make a Wish” foundation’s sponsored trip. We stayed for a week there in a Benedictine monastery, hearing the monks chanting all week, it was very beautiful and serene. At one point during that trip, I went to the church and at first I felt awkward being a Jew in a Catholic church, but I saw a statue of Moses in the corner and thought “Okay, I’m not the only Jew here.” I saw the cross and the story that stood before the cross, of the father who is watching his son suffer. That image really spoke to me and I prayed at that point to the God who was in front of me and asked for Kai’s healing. And eventually he was healed from the first cancer and that cancer never came back. Initially, I wanted to be baptised in the Roman Catholic Church but a friend of mine introduced me to the Ukrainian Catholic Church and I felt very at home there. In our liturgy, there’s a lot of psalms and a lot of Old Testament passages. In the St. Demetrius Church, there are images of prophets from the Old Testament on stained glass, in the sanctuary there are two icons, one of them of Abraham and Sarah welcoming angels and the other of the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac. So for me the Eastern Church represented more of a continuity between my Jewish background and my new Christian faith. I also learned of the stories of Andrey Sheptytsky risking his own life and the lives of hundreds of monks, nuns and priests to rescue Jewish lives throughout the Holocaust. And there was particularly the story of Fr. Emilian Kovch, who was giving baptism certificates to Jews during the Holocaust. Those stories made me feel very safe and very comfortable in the Ukrainian Catholic Church. Historically there have been tensions between Ukrainians and Jews but I only felt a lot of warmth, love and acceptance since I’ve been in the Ukrainian Catholic Church. I was baptised at the St. Elias Church in 2011 at Pentecost. Fr. Peter Shumelda was the priest at my baptism, he baptized my two children, Kai and Corazon, and he’s become one of my best friends. And the church has become our family’s second family.”
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