Elijah Shane Paull

He was born watching

Not crying — watching. Eyes wide and serious and already taking measure of the room, like he had reviewed the blueprints before arriving and was now checking them against the reality. He looked at me in those first minutes like he already knew who I was. Like he was already home, and recognised me as part of the address.

I fell in love with him in that moment. Not the idea of a son. Him. His eyes. His weight in my arms. The way his small fingers closed around one of mine like a question and an answer at the same time.

I was his, and he was mine. That was the whole agreement, and I never stopped honouring it.

Gravity

From the beginning he had a quality I can only call gravity. Not the loud kind — not the boy who dominated a room with noise. The quiet kind. The kind that made people lean forward slightly without knowing why. Teachers did it. Children did it. Animals did it. He would enter a space and something in it would simply settle, as if the room had been waiting for him to arrive before it could relax.

Lean and brown-eyed, with wild blond hair that refused any instruction. He didn’t posture. He didn’t perform. He simply was, and that was enough.

And he was funny. God, was he funny. Not the kind of funny that tries — the kind that is. Sharp timing. Precise delivery. A smirk that arrived half a second before the line, as if he were generous enough to give you a running start. He could puncture tension with a single look. He could make a whole room exhale with four words.

Fifty beating hearts

He loved animals the way a person with a calling loves their calling. Cats. Snakes. Lizards. Spiders. Guinea pigs. Mice. Birds. Creatures most people fear or dismiss or overlook — those were the ones Elijah gathered in and protected. At his peak his room held more than fifty living beings. Fifty. Each one fed. Each one known. Each one cared for with a meticulous, unhurried attention that still astonishes me.

He once stopped a boy from crushing an ant on the sidewalk, then crouched down and explained — patiently, seriously, with complete conviction — why even insects mattered. The kid listened. Of course he listened. Elijah had that kind of gravity. After that, the neighbourhood boys started bringing him things. Injured birds. Found feathers. Beetles they didn’t understand.

He built things

He was thirteen when he built his first real garden, a full backyard in a neighbour’s yard, designed from scratch and planted with his own hands. A hundred bags of soil. Six varieties of tomatoes. Seventeen different herbs. He planned it the way an architect plans a building — with precision and purpose and the calm certainty of someone who understands that good things take time and don’t rush themselves into existence.

I’d take him to the hardware store and watch him walk the aisles like he already lived there, running his fingers along rows of screws and washers like a musician feeling out a keyboard. Everything he built had a reason.

Later he turned to food. He became a baker, a quiet craftsman of nourishment. Flour on his hands. The heat of the oven against his face. The sound of onions hitting oil. He made meals when he could barely eat them. He made meals when he could barely stand. He cooked for others when no one was cooking for him.

Eleven

In December 2001, at eleven years old, he was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease and colitis.

From that day on he lived in a body under siege. Hospital stays every year, usually around the change of seasons. Experimental drugs, off-label medications, biologics. He became a youth test subject for pharmaceuticals, and nothing worked. Multiple surgeries, including the removal of his entire large bowel, and years with a colostomy before they could reconnect him. The pain never stopped.

He got into the veterinary technician programme at Vanier. It was his dream. He made it through orientation and then the illness knocked him down. He pulled himself up and tried a second time a year later, and it knocked him down again.

He didn’t complain. He endured. He faced every day with a calm I still do not understand.

July

In his last years Elijah lived with more solitude than he deserved. Friends moved on. The world forgot how much it owed him. He still took care of his animals. He still tried to work. He still showed up, one weary step after another.

And then he couldn’t any more. Elijah died by suicide on 7 July 2021. He was thirty-one.

He left a letter. He tried so hard to make it kind. He thanked us. He said he loved us. He said he was sorry — not sorry like an apology, not like a mistake he could fix, but sorry like he was already grieving with us, already watching our pain from somewhere just beyond reach. He said it wasn’t about any one thing. It was about all of it, and about waking up still inside the nightmare every single day no matter how much love was wrapped around him.

That morning he brought his mother flowers. Ordinary grocery store flowers, still damp from the cooler. He held them out to her, a clumsy hopeful bouquet, and she said it made her feel calm, like maybe something had shifted.

That is what I keep thinking. He brought her flowers.

What I want people to know

Not just that he died. How he lived.

That he kept feeding the cats and the snakes and the lizards even when his own appetite was gone. That he made his own food when it hurt to stand. That he remembered birthdays and scrawled the cards with a shaky hand. That he laughed at his own jokes, a soft private chuckle, even when nobody else got them. That he loved his mother so purely it was the last thing he acted on before he left.

Elijah was not a metaphor. He was flesh. He was blood. He was real. He was kind. He was funny. He was strong. And he is unforgettable.

People ask if I am over it. How do you get over a soul like his? I still feel him. When I garden. When I watch Star Trek. When I laugh at a stupid movie. Every time I see someone touch a dog, or hold a cat, or gently lift a lizard.

I will keep telling his story. Again and again. So no one forgets. Not now. Not ever.