This Maple Ridge woman is honouring her late husband’s wish — through a blog

The elementary school teacher pulled Danielle Raymond aside at the end of class. 

Earlier in the day, the teacher asked students to write a short story. It could have been about anything, and Raymond, a child who loved reading and writing short stories, revelled in the opportunity to flex her talent for storytelling. 

Writing had always served as her main source of comfort. 

Growing up, Raymond bounced around the Lower Mainland. She never had a relationship with her biological father. And when she was young, her stepdad — who filled in as a father figure — was diagnosed and later died from cancer. 

As she started to write more frequently, Raymond created an alien-like character, Spacey Casey, that was brought to Earth and told to learn about humans, school and how to act like a kid. Most stories she wrote in her free time revolved around Spacey Casey. So she decided to write about the alien for class. 

But the teacher’s feedback forced Raymond to re-evaluate her love of writing. 

“I remember my teacher pulling me aside and telling me that copying was wrong,” Raymond says decades later, insisting the teacher thought she copied the character from a different book. “I didn’t write about Spacey Casey anymore after that.” 

It would take years before Raymond found the courage to write for a large audience ever again. 

And meet a man who encouraged her to write a blog that would captivate hundreds of local readers. 

A chance interaction

The incident with the teacher, coupled with the death of her stepdad and abandonment from her biological father, led Raymond to turn inward. 

She began journaling but refrained from showing those words to anyone else. 

“Writing went from something that was fun, something I liked doing as a kid, to something that became necessary to survive,” Raymond said. “I just learned that I didn’t have anyone to talk to about my feelings, so writing became a way for me to do that for myself.”  

In high school, for example, Raymond remembers frequently retreating to her bedroom after a tough day. For hours, she’d open her journal and write a poem or put down a few coherent sentences to make sense of the feelings she was going through. 

“Once I would wrangle my feelings and experiences into a poem, I just felt lighter somehow,” Raymond said. 

Although she didn’t know it at the time, the feeling was similar to one evoked by a popular counselling strategy, “name it, to tame it.” 

The concept is based on the idea of having a cathartic release by identifying the overwhelming emotion you may be battling, said Raymond, who ultimately studied applied psychology at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. Raymond also received a master’s degree in counselling psychology and is now a registered clinical counsellor based in Maple Ridge. 

When she moved to live and work in Maple Ridge, Raymond signed up for a women’s-only jiu-jitsu class at a local gym, the Raptor Athletic Club. (The gym is now known as Unified.) 

Before her class, a coach, Toby Cleary, led his own kickboxing class. He was a man dedicated to helping others and spreading body positivity in the gym, Raymond said. For about a year and a half, Cleary never said anything to Raymond, carefully minding his own business and cleaning up the mats on his side of the gym. 

But one day he sent Raymond a friend request on Facebook and the two started talking. They eventually formed a relationship and got married. 

“It took him so long to say something to me. I noticed him. But I thought he seemed standoffish. But I didn’t realize he wasn’t standoffish, he was trying to maintain a respectful distance,” Raymond said. 

“I liked to tease him about that.” 

Talking about grief

Cleary quickly became a rock for Raymond. 

He read everything that she wrote, including research papers and personal reflections for school. He was always quick to hype up her work and urge her to continue writing. He did all that because he understood writing was more than a hobby, it was a passion that was hindered in her youth. 

“I remember so many times he said, ‘I know you have a book in you,’” said Raymond, adding that Cleary believed it was a shame that her work wasn’t read by a wider audience. In short, Cleary was an optimist whereas Raymond only saw obstacles and was overwhelmed by the idea of writing a book. 

“He had almost a sense of injustice on behalf of other people, like it’s not right that when you have all these things to say,” Raymond said. 

In 2022, however, their world was flipped upside down when Cleary was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. He passed away in April. 

The death led Raymond to reflect on Cleary’s wish for her to share her work. 

In August, Raymond started a blog, Grief Casseroles, on Substack. Raymond, who is also on leave from her counselling duties, posts roughly one article per week. 

It quickly racked up hundreds of subscribers and turned into a site where she publicly navigates grief associated with a shocking death — writing that resembles the work she did as a teenager to navigate tumultuous times. 

“Once it’s done, and I hit publish, I feel… I’m not sure. I wish I could describe it in a better way. But it’s a sense of heaviness that lifts off me,” Raymond said. 

Grief is a universal feeling that isn’t widely talked about or discussed in Western culture. Death is a taboo topic that people often avoid, and a 2019 U.K. survey found that six out of 10 people knew “little or nothing” about what happens at the end of someone’s life.

Raymond believes her writing has struck a tone with locals because it highlights her authentic feelings of grief in a society that typically caters visions of themselves online and in-person. 

Down the road, Raymond hopes that her blog will get noticed by people in the publishing world, and lead to some sort of book deal. She dreams of writing a memoir that touches on how to navigate grief. 

She also isn’t ruling out writing about Spacey Casey again — should she find the time between her weekly blog posts that honours the love of her life. 

“The Substack was 100 per cent his idea,” Raymond said. “This was his dream.”