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John Shields left the priesthood and entered life as a layman at the age of thirty-one with $30 in his pocket. But he quickly adapted to his new life in Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, where he rose to become a leader in the Canadian labor union movement. During his intense career, Shields discovered an inner mythology that both guided him to do his best work and intensified his search for a higher consciousness. He became an environmentalist, joined the movement for cosmic spirituality, and eventually retired as the head of British Columbia’s largest union after successfully negotiating equitable salaries for women and instituting nondiscriminatory hiring practices—and by the time of his death in 2017, there was no one who had grown up in Victoria who didn’t know his name. When New York Times reporter Catherine Porter heard that Shields was suffering from a painful terminal illness and planned to become one of Canada’s first legally assisted suicides, she went to Victoria to meet him; she attended the wake Shields hosted for himself on the last day of his life and was present during his death. Porter’s story about Shields appeared on the Times’s front page on Sunday, May 25, 2017, under the headline: “At His Own Wake, Celebrating Life and the Gift of Death: Tormented by an incurable disease, John Shields knew that dying openly and without fear could be his legacy, if his doctor, friends and family helped him.” And they did.
