Jonathan Pitre and me: How I learned the miracle of Ottawa's Butterfly Boy
video When he was still a young boy, Jonathan Pitre had an older woman approach him in the grocery store as he sat in a shopping cart being pushed by his mother, Tina Boileau. The woman took in Jonathan’s bandaged body and some of the red, angry blisters on his hands and other exposed skin. “Oh, mon pauvre enfant,” she exclaimed. Jonathan sat up straight in his seat, and shot back: “I’m not poor.” The woman learned, in a heartbeat, what I have come to understand in four years of interviewing and writing about Jonathan: You cannot project your life, and your expectations for it, onto him. He doesn’t want pity; he wants friendship. He doesn’t want you to turn away; he wants you to understand his disease. And he doesn’t spend time feeling sorry for himself: he’s too busy squeezing the nectar out of the life he’s been given. Jonathan’s life is full of pain, but equally full of love. And while it’s almost impossible to exaggerate the amount of suffering he endures in any ...