Filmmaker’s poignant recollections of late husband a profound pleasure

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 21/02/2026 (254 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

This is a memoir about a love found, a love lost, a love found again and a love lost yet again. Which sounds like a recipe for chick lit.

But not so.

Rather, it’s an extraordinarily fine story that in fact transcends genre or, for that matter, gender appeal.

In 1972, 17-year-old Canadian Shelley Saywell met and fell in love with American classmate Daniel Peterson at a Canadian-run high school in Kobe, Japan.

But their passionate romance dissolved soon after Saywell returned to her family in Toronto, and Peterson to Ann Arbor, Mich., to attend the University of Michigan.

They then vanished from each other’s life for three decades.

In 2002 Saywell sent an innocuous message to Peterson on Classmates.com, which led to protracted email correspondence. She broke off a lengthy, problematic affair with former CBC foreign correspondent and documentary filmmaker Michael Maclear, 26 years her senior, almost immediately on her and Peterson’s reconnection via email, and long before she ever set eyes on him on their second go-round.

What eventually followed was a near-fairy-tale reunion, and a happy marriage two years later.

For 12 years thereafter the couple lived and worked in and from Toronto, Saywell as an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker and Peterson as a renowned art and architecture restoration specialist.And though she doesn’t highlight it, Saywell is a gutsy filmmaker whose work has taken her to many dangerous global hotspots (Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq).

In 2016, Peterson was diagnosed with stage IV small-cell lung cancer. He died in 2017 at the age of 61.

Their story is told in three alternate but interwoven takes — their adolescent romance in Japan in the early 1970s, their reunion in their late 40s and the more recent past of Peterson’s illness and death and Saywell’s allied post-death grief.

Even the numerous included mutual emails that chart the rekindling of their romance are literate and insightful, sentimental but never maudlin. (Saywell apparently printed and kept all their correspondence.)

Based on this memoir, working behind the lens isn’t Saywell’s only talent.

Perceptive little epiphanies about her baby boomer generation surface throughout. Reflecting on the deaths in rapid series from cancer of her friend “Ed,” her husband, her brother-in-law and her university boyfriend, she muses: “What is it about my generation? We lived as though we would never get old, and cancer has made that come true.”

She writes with an economy of language all the more powerful for being economical. The epitaph to her failed relationship with Maclear is writ in a single brief sentence: “I had existed in an eddy of Michael’s emotional debris, resigned to the limitations he put on our life together …”

Her analysis of changes in her behaviour following Peterson’s death is brave and astute.

She portrays raw emotion but in a classic, controlled way. Sometimes her writing is almost reportorial. Yet for all that, she manages to be moving.

Ultimately, her memoir is sad, very sad, but not a downer. Good writing can do that.

Douglas J. Johnston is a Winnipeg lawyer and writer.