If it weren’t for June Callwood, I might already have been dead for 20‑years. It was February 1983, and I was in Women’s College Hospital, recovering from a hysterectomy. As soon as June came into my room, she saw what the medical staff had missed: that I was suffering serious post-operative complications. Now, hospital personnel are used to dealing peremptorily with visitors who special-plead on behalf of their friends, but they had never experienced anything like Hurricane June. Within hours, doctors of increasing authority began visiting my bedside, and I was back on the operating table that same day. The next fall, Women’s College held a conference with June as a speaker. My case had transmuted into an issue, leading to my survival and reform of the system. So when it comes to June Callwood, don’t expect me to be neutral.

The impetus for this story emerged from a very dark place. In September 2003, June informed me—with unseemly glee—that she had untreatable cancer. Bewildered, I asked, “Why are you so happy?” She shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. My doctor phoned with the news while I was in Ottawa, and when I hung up I jumped for joy—yippee! Now, you can’t fake that.” Her words of comfort were vintage June: “Don’t worry—we’ll have a big fundraiser! You’ll see, this will work out well for everybody.” Well, not for me. Not for her family or dozens of other close friends. Not for the hundreds of colleagues with whom she has worked at organizations ranging from Maggie’s, for the protection of prostitutes, to the Law Society of Upper Canada. Not for the thousands of Canadians she has helped as the Queen Mother of volunteerism, nor for the millions who simply admire her.

Since June was still undergoing tests to determine the primary site of her cancer, I asked if she would like me to accompany her. “No, I’d prefer to go alone until I see what I’m dealing with.” When I stressed that she might be doing family and friends a favour by letting us support her, she replied, “I wouldn’t know who that person was if I acted that way.” Because one of June’s books, Twelve Weeks in Spring, describes how she and a team of men and women nursed a friend dying of cancer, I asked, “Can you foresee a time when you might like home palliative care?” June made a rude sound. “Would you want your friends feeding you and emptying your bedpan?”

A year and a half later, the only visible sign of her illness is loss of weight, easing her arthritic knees and inspiring a glamorous new wardrobe in ever-diminishing sizes. Her smile has never been more incandescent. Despite bouts of bone-weary fatigue, doctors’ appointments and the occasional weird symptom, dying becomes her.

On a fall day, June picks me up in front of my downtown condo, as she has so many times before, in her mahogany Mazda Miata, given to her by her family last spring for her 80th birthday. Like a string of other mini-­convertibles, driven top down with her hair blowing ever greyer and wilder, it’s the embodiment of a woman eager to participate in life full throttle rather than observe it through glass. June is an action figure in love with speed, sky and water. As a teenager, she was a freestyle, backstroke and high-diving champion; as the mother of one, she earned her pilot’s licence; as a grandmother in her 70s, she took up gliding, at last willing to trade off some of that forward thrust for the heady thrill of sailing tranquilly over the earth that kept her so damned busy.

I had not been looking forward to this assignment. The circumstances made it seem intrusive. When I apologetically floated my request over the phone, however, June responded with a whoop of laughter: “Well, it’s about time!” That statement carried much history, since June and I have been interviewing each other for three decades, beginning with a 1975 Q&A piece I did with her for Chatelaine. Later, she interviewed me for her TV shows, In Touch and Callwood’s National Treasures, and for her Globe and Mail column. Because she knew everyone with a public reputation, I often interviewed her for background for whatever magazine profile I might be writing. Somewhere en route, other journalists began interviewing each of us for profiles about the other. Now, as we fly the Gardiner Expressway headed west, my tape recorder no longer seems like a concealed weapon. June’s laughter has purged the situation of self-conscious grimness.