The Myth of the Miners Regret

When Masie Gulliford from Buchans started an online show called 'The Six Week Secret', urging viewers to enjoy life as if they only had six weeks to live, she didn't know it would go viral and empty three of the buckets of blue hope the town was saving for winter.

If she had, Masie would tell her friends, she would never have recorded a single show, as it was simply not worth the hard feelings that festered in the small community over views, shares and subscriptions.

Like most people who lived in the interior of the island, Masie didn't eat much fish, subsisting instead on trout and salmon, along with wild game and store groceries.

This diet caused them to live in a perpetual state of hoping for something better.

That longing had found a popular release online, with most people in Buchans running a video channel, or blog, giving their self-appointed take on self-improvement and self-help.

And because Buchans had once been a thriving mining town, the directions to a better life were time sensitive in a way that only the children and grandchildren of miners understand.

They knew that hope was a nonrenewable resource, which had to be mined over a certain period of time to a certain depth, and no longer.

For them it was little more than silver, gold or coal in that there was only so much before it ran out.

Masie's main competition in the Buchans self-help movement was Doug Peterson, who had a show called, 'The Nine Month Mystery', which urged people to live as if they'd just been conceived.

He also rented canoes to tourist to self-help themselves to the lakes, ponds and rivers that pimpled the forest around the town.

The huge success of 'The Six Week Secret' caused such an influx of hope-hungry tourist, that Doug had to turn many away, which led to some negative comments on his online videos.

He was so busy scrambling to find canoes that he had no time to answer them, which people took as a sign that he didn't care and thousands unsubscribed.

Since its founding and through the course of the mine's life, twenty-three men had lost their lives, two of whom were Doug's Grandfather Caleb and his twin brother Sam who counted Masie among his eleven grandchildren.

Death, strikes, the mine's eventual closure and occasional forest fire ripping through town had drawn the people together as close as capelin, and they moved like starlings when they entered and left the one church in town.

The division between blood relatives caused by self-help videos strained the town's ability to mine even more hope from their fractured psyches, to the point where an Assembly of the Afflicted was called.

This meeting was open to all residents, but only the Afflicted, those who had lost family to the mine, were allowed to speak.

If you don't have the blood of someone who died with a mouth full of earth, than don't come around here with a mouthful of words, was the official explanation of the rule.

Most people didn't think a meeting would make a difference and weren't even sure it was possible to reach an agreement on two life views that were so different.

How would it be possible to reconcile having six weeks left to live with not even being born yet? How could the end of life be contemplated before it even began?

The self-help community in Buchans had never been so abuzz.

Sales of India, the local favourite beer, spiked in the week leading up to the meeting as people, being the descendants of miners, believed in washing their mouth out regularly with alcohol to remove dirt and dust, and to rinse away as well any doubts that might be lingering in their throat.

Masie and Doug sat at opposite ends of the stage in the high school gym jammed with people and questions.

The Afflicted filled the first twelve rows of chairs with the remaining occupied by those who had no connection with the dead and, as was usual, the oldest surviving miner opened the meeting with his underground thoughts on the matter at hand.

Ceicil Holloway, a spry ninety-eight year old, after living much of his life inside the earth where he felt its heartbeat daily, had been diagnosed that past Tuesday with cancer.

He was given six weeks to live.

Having spent most of his life underground, he stated that while the earth is our final resting place, it is also the place of our beginnings.

Then he claimed that when a man and woman laid together and conceived a new person, that the sound of their hearts beating was the sound of someone knocking on the gates of Eden.

And now his own dying lay before him, like a small footpath to that same gate.

His words moved like loose gravel as he spoke and his consonants were sharp rocks.

The villagers listened as a small landslide of logic happened in front of their ears.

The only difference between being born and dying, he argued, was the perspective of others, as we don't know what's happening except we're either coming out of a hole, or going into one.

The people realized then that the two opposite views could be combined into one shared video channel, where people would learn about both the beginnings and endings of days and themselves.

Mazi and Doug embraced and the town emerged from the dark grey tunnel of doubt, holding buckets heavy with hope.

Ceicil later confessed that he'd just wanted the whole thing cleared up before he returned to the underground for good.

He wanted to die, finding solace in the peace he had helped broker, surrounded by thoughts of blue roses that only miners knew grew on their graves.

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