Condolences
Thank you for writing this wonderful story to celebrate Wayne’s life. We weren’t lucky enough to know him well, but now we have an understanding of the depth of your loss. We extend our deepest sympathy.
Wayne Cox and Shirley MacKay
Wayne and Maureen have been our dearest friends for 45 years. We first met
shortly after we moved to Calgary in the late seventies. Newly married and the first time I had ever lived far away from my family and friends. Didn't know anyone and was lonely and really missing Vancouver. Brian came home after a racquetball game and said he had met a really nice guy whose name was Wayne Clifford and that he had invited us over to meet his wife. How kind of him. I was very nervous to meet them but went anyway. Wayne&Maureen were so lovely, newly married too, the same year! And so started our long close friendship. Our children are only months apart in age. We share many memories of fun times together travelling and just hanging out. Even after moving away from Calgary we stayed close. When I first heard of Wayne's illness I was in denial...right up till the awful day he left us. How could such a big strong loving guy like Wayne get so sick. He'll get better, there are treatments to try, he'll bounce back and on and on.
I love him dearly and my life has an empty spot in it without him. All of you know his fine qualities, no need to elaborate. I will miss you so much, Wayne. Love, Football Head♡
,
We got to know Wayne in the 80's/90's when we camped together with him and his family plus Bryan and Rose Bain and family at Christina Lake in BC. He was such a fun guy and he found many situations to be "mahvellous". His often dry sense of humour was a delight to all of us. Our deepest condolences to the family. Our thoughts are sure with you.
I met Wayne in 2002 and have many fond memories of my time together with him and Maureen, which increased dramatically in 2016 and again in 2022. I wrote this story to deal with my grief - and its length is proportionate; I shared it with Maureen, hoping it would help with hers. She asked me to share it with everyone.
A Game - and a Life - Well Played
On November 26th, 2022, Wayne Clifford and I sat down across from each other at his dining room table. He reached into the thumbless oven mitt that he called a tile bag, withdrew a single Scrabble tile and placed it letter-side up on the board between us; then I did the same. After a brief pause, I returned the two tiles to the bag while he slid some papers into his clipboard and affixed the thin metal blinder designed to guard any markings he might make. He lifted the tile bag over his head with his left hand then flashed the open, empty palm of his right before plunging it in again, this time counting silently from “one” to “seven”. He withdrew a clenched fist and carefully placed the first of his seven new tiles on the cherry wood tile rack in front of him. I started his clock, completing the ritual that preceded the hundreds, if not thousands, of battles Wayne and I had waged over that board.
At the time, I didn’t realize that this game would be different from the others. If Wayne knew it - or even sensed it - he didn’t let on. For me, it became our “51st” game - the one where I finally settled an overdue debt and ended a longstanding grudge. For Wayne, it was the last game he’d play; with me, or anyone else.
============
If Wayne was to describe his adult life the way he recapped a Scrabble game, he’d start by saying he bingoed early when he married Maureen on December 3, 1977. With the arrivals of daughter, Lauren (June 22, 1984), and son, Kellen (May 27, 1987), he and Maureen were “up by a couple of bingos”. It was a life to cherish and protect. And Wayne did both with each and every decision he made, never taking his good fortune nor his family’s well-being for granted.
Wayne’s cherished life also included an eclectic range of pursuits; all with two things in common: Competition and friendship. With the former he was fierce; the latter, generous and without bounds.
Wayne found both at the Calgary Scrabble Club. He joined in the early 1990’s and, for thirty years, fought for top rung on the ladder while serving as a director under each of NSA, NASPA and WGPO. Maureen “dipped her toe in” in the spring of 2001 - and from 2007 on it was rare to see either at West Hillhurst Community Hall without the other.
With my friend and fellow coffee table player, Jason Krueger, I walked into the hall on the first Thursday of August, 2002. Thursday nights in Calgary are typically three or four groups deep; in 2002, with regulars like Wayne, Siri Tillekeratne, Albert Hahn and Randall Thomas, there was definitely a pecking order. Siri took charge of instructions and introductions, advising - with the other customs of competitive play - that Wayne was to be addressed as “The Bearded Boss”.
For eight and half months, I didn’t know if the moniker was born of endearment or fear - that’s how long it took before we would meet across the board. It was both. Wayne was perfectly friendly, and fatherly, as he drubbed me 557-304. Being decidedly antiauthority, I struggled with calling Wayne “Boss”. Over time - mostly in recognition of her rapid improvement and partly as a form of quiet resistance - I began referring to Maureen as “The Better Clifford”.
The demands of work and raising my own family made me a “Scrabble acquaintance” from 2005 through 2014. When I finally returned to regular competition, I hoped my slope of improvement would continue on the same line as my first three years of play. But I plateaued. During the fateful summer of 2016, resistance and frustration boiled into open rebellion and, in a moment of pique, my relationship with Wayne went from “acquaintance” to “rival”. In an outlier game - with the tiles and flow lopsided in my favour - I thumped him 535-277. I joked that the score reflected a “changing of the guard” - first privately, then publicly. I had rationalized that both Wayne and I were in need of a new nemesis. Jason had long since left me in the dust. And, every week, it was plain to see that Wayne was growing exasperated with Siri - with whom he was waging a seemingly endless war, legendary not just in Calgary but across North America.
I knew it would work, and it did. Wayne insisted on a long term contest, with enough games to balance out any manner of fortune - good or bad - so that the final result could bring clarity.
“Best of 51. Loser buys dinner at a restaurant of the winner’s choosing. Plus one hundred dollars - cash.”
Having thrown down the gauntlet, I had little choice but to accept his terms. But I still bristled at being “bossed” so I added one of my own: That we call it “The Grudge Match.”
“Fine. Then we play them all. All 51. No quitting - no matter how bad things might get.”
While Wayne didn’t stipulate this at the outset, playing every game meant reviewing every game - regardless of outcome - to capture or reinforce any learnings that would help him and his opponent be better in the next game and every game that followed. On one occasion, we explored the pain that comes with losing a game that seemed well in hand by chasing a bigger spread - the Scrabble term for margin of victory. During the game in question, I had a comfortable lead when we entered the pre-endgame, which I define as the period during which each player has seven tiles on their rack with seven or fewer tiles remaining in the bag; near enough to the end of the game that victory or defeat becomes palpable but where some uncertainty remains and, with it, the potential for surprise, including disaster. Up by a bingo - about 70 points - and with the tiles AEENORT on my rack - I played with all seven tiles the word REATONE*, thinking something like “If I can atone for my sins it seems logical that I can reatone - should circumstance require”. Of course, I was also interested in the 50 bonus points that would come with the play.
“Hold”
In Scrabble, to “hold” is to indicate that you are considering challenging the acceptability of your opponent's last play without committing to the challenge - which will cost you a turn if the word or words challenged are indeed found in the wordlist agreed to at the start of the game. Conversely, if a word is challenged and not found in the word list, it must be removed; the player scores zero and loses his turn.
Wayne made some markings on the papers behind his thin metal shield, presumably tracking off the tiles on one sheet then doing some arithmetic on the other. He grasped and reached into the tile bag, silently counting and recounting the unseen tiles but withdrawing none, consulted his papers again, then surveyed all the uncovered squares on the board.
“Challenge”
When writing about Scrabble, a (*) superscript following a word, indicates the word wasn’t or will not be found in the wordlist and, if challenged, must be removed. If unchallenged, the play remains on the board and is referred to as a phoney if and when exposed in any postgame review. Embarrassed, I removed my tiles while Wayne at long last returned attention to his own, placing them one at a time on the seven consecutive squares now available with the removal of mine. Embarrassment gave way to panic: we were tied. I glanced over at the clock and saw that I had less than a minute on my clock before I would incur my first 10 point time penalty; Wayne had even less - only a few seconds. I had dutifully tracked the tiles right up until Wayne played his bingo, but didn’t track off those seven to determine what his remaining tiles were. I played five tiles for twenty points, hoping that Wayne couldn’t match that point total - or would go overtime trying. He did neither. In the blink of an eye but somehow unhurried, he placed all three tiles at once, announced “Eighteen… and out” then neutralized his clock with two seconds remaining.
I’m not prone to tears, particularly given my profession, but the board seemed blurry; and Wayne’s voice, as he totalled his score, “plus four” for my two unplayed tiles, seemed to be coming from the kitchen. After a moment or two, he began to talk about the game - not from the beginning, just the end. The lessons he enumerated from that unforgiving minute have stayed with me in every Scrabble game since - and some are lessons for life. Now, six years later, I remember his demonstration more than his words. Specifically, his process for gathering and considering relevant information, his “two plays” decision making, his demeanor and his focus - on what it takes to win - when everything is on the line, and time is short.
I don’t know if we started being friends that day. It might have been before or, less likely, after. But I wasn’t ready to stop being rivals. That was our 50th game and his 26th win. I gave him his one hundred dollars and asked about his favourite restaurant. But as we “bagged the tiles” I informed him that we were going again. Starting with the next game. Same terms. He pocketed his money then consulted his clipboard - as though inscribed with a proverb or commandment - before agreeing. It was November 29th, 2016.
The transition from “friends” to “best friends” was sneaky, in the same way - and over the same time - that Wayne transitioned from his first hematologic malignancy, chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), to his second, acute myelogenous leukemia (AML). In the continuing “clarifying” hours we spent together, Wayne would teach me everything he could about Scrabble while I taught him everything I could about leukemias.
When Wayne first told me that his hematologist suspected that a new myelogenous leukemia, not his old lymphocytic one, was responsible for the precipitous fall in blood cells called platelets - and with it his newfound propensity for bruising and bleeding - I challenged the idea as being too improbable, too outrageous, too… unfair. By then, Wayne was trying to teach me that none of those things should be the basis for a rash challenge. Absent perfect knowledge and foresight, he would argue that the decision to challenge or accept should depend heavily on perceived paths to winning and their likelihoods.
Wayne accepted. And when a bone marrow biopsy confirmed the new cancer, he pressed ahead with equanimity and purpose. Conversely, and through a blur of anger and denial, my reaction was “Wayne, do you ALWAYS have to play up?”. Wayne almost always did. And, with his pilgrimages to the National Scrabble Championship, that meant Division 1 - and the toughest players of his era.
I had never quite summarized it like this, but, if lymphocytic leukemia was a Scrabble player, it would play Division 2. Personality-wise? Cautious and consistent. But atypical lymphocytes, the cancerous cells one would see under a microscope, are certainly capable of surprising and game-turning plays, as Wayne found out when they bingoed him straight into the Peter Lougheed Hospital - where I work - with a nasty opportunistic pneumonia. As Maureen described it: Wayne went to bed with a cough and a bit of fever and woke up confused and blue as a Smurf. Wayne bounced back from that contest, and if we were to debate how he fared in the head-to-head with his first leukemia, he’d probably call it a split.
Myelogenous leukemia plays Division 1 every time. In a best of ten, you’re lucky to win once - maybe twice. Indeed, in the battle for “real estate” inside Wayne’s bone marrow, his new leukemia ran his old one completely out of town - and left precious little room for the manufacture of white cells (to fight infection), red cells (to carry oxygen) and platelets (to stop bleeding once it’s started). Moveover, its occupying blast cells, as seen under the microscope, are ruthless and rule-bending, brutalizing you with every play: Words so foreign you get cotton-mouthed with “holds”, scores so heavy that your eyes water, forks and blocks that change the board position so decisively against you that you’d “tip your King” if it were that kind of game. Myelogenous leukemia presses you for time, mocks your decisions and delights equally in dropping plausible phoneys that you can’t challenge and baiting you with bizarro plays that you have to.
If you’re willing to believe, like Wayne did, that life can imitate Scrabble - or vice versa - then I’d say he’d entered one of those stretches of the game where every draw was poor and every play demanded difficult trade-offs - induction chemotherapy followed by consolidation? Or even bone marrow transplant? Standard maintenance chemotherapy or experimental? And while he was able to fend off any more game-turning bingos, every play against him tested his equanimity and purpose. Occasional infections became recurrent, then refractory. Transfusions went from only as needed to every week to twice a week. But Wayne never wavered and never lost hope. With the few good tiles he saw and the few good white blood cells, reds and platelets he could make or borrow, he did yeoman’s work. His luck turned a bit as he managed to get one blank, then the other: In the spring of 2022, Lauren announced that she was pregnant and Wayne marshalled a new study drug to beat back his cancerous blast cells.
Then, on November 9th, 2022, Clara Clifford was born. When she went home from hospital, so did Wayne.
At home, Clara was eating and sleeping well. In between their precious visits, Wayne struggled to eat and slept a lot. As always, Wayne would have prepared for - even embraced - a challenging pre-endgame. On December 13th, Maureen and I had to bring him back to the hospital - the emergency room this time. It was a difficult day, but Wayne never complained. He kept his eyes closed and I imagined he was surveying the board - the way he always did when the last tiles were drawn - searching for his best “out in two” while divining and mitigating his opponent’s next move.
I don’t know the exact moment when Wayne became certain; that he had achieved everything that he could in life; that he had given his family everything that they would need. Maybe when he found out Lauren was planning her first trips out with Clara. Perhaps it was in the emergency, when he heard that Kellen was flying in from Vancouver that evening and that Maureen wouldn’t be home alone. Or maybe, it was when he at last got to a familiar bed on Unit 57, where he could rest, sip some ginger ale, and imagine his family gathered for Christmas. Whenever it was, I’m sure that in the early hours of December 14th, Wayne was settled.
He’d found his winning sequence. It was time to go out.
And all that’s left for us is to turn over any unplayed tiles, hold on to every wonderful memory, and say “Well played, Wayne”.
We’ll miss you.
P.S.
Wayne's Final Game
"The Bearded Boss": 420 Peter: 387
I have known Wayne for a long time as a squash, tennis and golf pal. He and I teamed up for several golf tournaments and won prizes multiple times, as recent as last August. I will miss his passion for sports and life in general as well as his wonderful wit.
Wayne was very patient and kind. I first met Wayne in the ‘90’s when I started to play Scrabble. And he was very helpful to me.
I especially remember going to Reno in 2002 in a van; Wayne drove and there were 9 of us jammed in the van. What fun! Wayne you were a great guy and you will be missed! Anna Marie Cook
I met Wayne in 2012 when my daughter Robyn and I joined the Calgary Scrabble Club. Wayne and Maureen welcomed us to the club and Wayne provided the cheat sheet given to all new players and explained how the club works. Wayne was a much stronger player than me, and he always encouraged me to play better and suggested that I track the tiles and study the game. He complimented me when I had a good day at the club or a good tournament result. Wayne always played "Like a Boss" and he was a very tough player to beat. I did manage to edge out a win against him a couple of times, but for the most part he beat me by a large spread.
Both Wayne and Maureen always helped out whenever the club hosted a tournament. I will always remember Wayne and will miss him.
Tom McKay
Uncle Wayne will be dearly missed by many as he made such an impact to all those around him. May the scrabble world be prepared for what’s to come up there!!! Love to my aunt and cousins during this difficult time. We’re thinking of you xo
To Maureen and family. Our thoughts are with you. Wayne was always a challenging opponent whenever we met across the Scrabble board at the many tournament games we played. He usually won, but was always gracious and happy to analyze the game and offer helpful advice. We will miss him.
Copyright © Funeraltech 2019