Illness transforms the things you most fear into the things you crave and would hold onto if you could.
I wrote the children's books, and those were wonderful tributes to my life as a daughter and a mother and just a thank-you to my parents for all the lessons in life they had passed on to me that I could pass onto my child and to other kids around the world.
It's really clear to me that you can't hang onto something longer than its time. Ideas lose certain freshness, ideas have a shelf life, and sometimes they have to be replaced by other ideas.
And as I stumbled onto Eastern philosophy and Buddhism, it was the first time I had ever read any sort of philosophy that really made a tremendous amount of sense. What I liked that was missing from my experience of Christianity growing up was a sort of acceptance, a sort of being OK with being imperfect and not focusing on the sin.
When I started out, at the CBC in Toronto, there was so little work. It was a different world from what it is now. Now we're blessed with so much production in so many Canadian cities.