Rich Helms

Playwrights are often told to write what they know.

At seventeen, I died from an overdose of penicillin administered in a hospital. Well, my heart and lungs stopped. I later learned what a crash cart was. My white blood cell count collapsed to 1,600 from a normal 6,000–8,000, leaving me with virtually no immune system. The doctor told my parents to take me back to college, but warned them that the first serious cold could kill me. There was no treatment. We simply had to wait and see if my body recovered.

Fortunately, it did—slowly. Ten years later, my white blood cell count was still only 1,800. Fifty years later, it had finally reached 5,600.

I’ve walked with death beside me for almost sixty years.

Perhaps that is why my plays return so often to the place where life and death meet. My characters grieve, bargain, laugh, argue, and ultimately discover what it means to keep living when mortality is no longer an abstraction, but a constant companion.

Rich Helms is a true Renaissance man. After a 30-year career in computer research and development, he retired to engage in artistic pursuits. Having completed a post-graduate certificate in playwriting from Humber College, he has thrown himself into creating short plays. Awards include Audience Favourite, President’s Choice, and the 2026 Royal Canadian Legion District E Senior Literary Competition (Memoir). Rich is a member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada.

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