Despite the chemotherapy treatments that were robbing him of his energy, there was no way Paul Demers would not volunteer at the Festif! in Baie-Saint-Paul last summer.
“It was set in stone, he was going there.” On the other end of the line, Madeleine St-Gelais recounts what, in 2023, will have been the last Festif! of Paul Demers, her life partner for 33 years.
Because all the tickets had gone, and he wanted to participate in the Baie-Saint-Paul music festival that he had just learned about, Paul Demers signed up as a volunteer in 2022. “And he fell in love with it,” says Madeleine St-Gelais, “he had a blast, a blast, a blast, like you can’t believe.”
The only and implacable problem was that between the two editions of the event, Paul Demers had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. And the Woodstock-style camping accommodation offered to the Festif! volunteers – there are about 450 of them in total – was not suitable for a man in the middle of chemotherapy. That he could give his time was already a small miracle, as only the love of music can produce.
PHOTO PROVIDED BY MELYSSA ELMER
Paul Demers with the head of Festif! volunteers, Melyssa Elmer
“Paul really didn’t want to be pitied,” says volunteer leader Melyssa Elmer. Festive!
It took him a while to tell me that it was not possible for him to sleep at the campsite. He was trying so hard to live his life normally.
Melyssa Elmer, Volunteer Manager Festive!
After spending several hours trying to find a solution for Paul, Melyssa had to face the fact that there was no longer any affordable accommodation in the region, which is teeming with visitors. But because there was no question of him staying at home in Rosemont, the volunteer managed to find a room at the Germain, a hotel of certain luxury.
On Sunday morning, as he was leaving the premises, Paul learned that a generous and anonymous soul had already paid the cost of his room, a little over $1,000. “That upset him a lot, a lot, a lot,” his girlfriend recalled. “He didn’t agree with that.”
Melyssa would eventually tell him that the mysterious donor was none other than her great friend, Safia Nolin, to whom, moved, she had spoken about Paul. “Thank you so much for volunteering,” the singer wrote to him in an email sent on July 23, 2023. “It’s thanks to people like you that artists can have such cool places and events to play and do business, same for the public.”
“At that point, we broke his shell a little bit,” Melyssa remembers. But it was a mistake to know Paul very little to imagine that everything would stay that way.
He will then suggest to Safia to add $1000 to her $1000 and to donate it to an organization, the Fondation Mains de l’Espoir de Charlevoix, which provides financial assistance to people with cancer.
Motivation in the right place
This is Paul’s story, but also that of the passion of thousands of volunteers who make events like Festif! possible. Something like an antidote to cynicism. In Baie-Saint-Paul, they are responsible for reception, bars, set-up and dismantling, waste collection and many other tasks that are not always glorious, although essential.
“I started working with volunteers because I was tired of artists who were a bit jaded,” explains Melyssa Elmer. “When you work in culture, you sometimes lose track of why you invest so much, but when you see people who are so excited about music that they are ready to give up to 40 hours in a few days, it puts your motivation back in the right place.”
“Music and nature, those were his two great passions,” confides Madeleine about her Paul, who earned his living in computer-aided design, landscape architecture and as a badminton teacher.
A loyal listener of ICI Musique, he was delighted, in 2022 and 2023, to go and have a chat with his favorite hosts, Catherine Pogonat and Philippe Fehmiu, regulars at the Festif! “He embarrassed me in front of Fehmiu by telling him that I don’t like him, well, well,” Madeleine remembers with a tender laugh. “It’s true that his show is not my kind of music, but I like him.”
A man of passions
A few days after the Festif!, on August 2, Paul Demers will receive a painful update: a scan revealed that the 18 to 36 months of life that lay ahead of him had tragically shrunk. He had only three left.
“When he knew it was amazing and that he had to take advantage of it right now, he gave himself two beautiful portable speakers,” says Madeleine. “I can still see him settling into his big armchair, after taking his medication, and starting his music.”
Melyssa and Safia went to his house in October to collect the $2,000, which Melyssa hopes to double through a fundraiser. “We spent the afternoon listening to him talk about his passions. He showed us every plant, every tree in his garden.”
His favorite song? There were two, Madeleine replies. Two songs whose titles say everything about the sense of wonder and humility of man: Wowby André Gagnon, and Ordinary, by Robert Charlebois.
“He was an ordinary guy, my boyfriend,” she sums up, her voice proud, a sentence that has rarely sounded so much like a declaration of love.
Paul Demers left on January 2. He was 61 years old.
The Festif! continues in Baie-Saint-Paul until Sunday.
Check out the fundraiser in tribute to Paul Demers
Visit the Festif website!