A Love That Could Not Wait:
The Remarkable Story of Knights of Baha'u'llah Catherine Heward Huxtable and Clifford Huxtable

by Jack McLean

About: At a college freshman dance, Cliff Huxtable spotted a lovely young lady sitting across the room. Approaching her to ask for a dance, he saw to his dismay that she sat in a wheelchair. Unsure what to do next, he cut in on a fellow-student who was dancing with one of the lady’s friends. “Come over and meet her,” the friend invited. “She is just like everyone else.” The young lady was Catherine Heward, confined to a wheelchair because of muscular dystrophy. Doctors had given her twenty years to live. Against all odds, she and Cliff would marry, travel the world during Shoghi Effendi’s great Baha’i pioneering project of the Ten Year Crusade, adopt a teenager and have a son, all before Catherine’s death at the age of thirty-five.

A Love That Could Not Wait is a remarkable testimony to the indomitable human spirit and the mysterious ways of God.

This is the story of the Canadian Knights of Bahá'u'lláh, Catherine Heward Huxtable and husband Cliff Huxtable, who opened the southern Gulf Islands of British Columbia to the Bahá'í Faith in October, 1959. Catherine was a wheelchair pioneer who died at age 35 of muscular dystrophy, but not before marrying, having a child and helping to establish the Bahá'í Faith in the islands of southern B.C. I remember meeting Catherine in Toronto when I was 10 years old, at the wedding of my aunt Edna Halsted to Ron Nablo in 1955. Theirs is a remarkable, inspirational story. The hard copy may be purchased from the Bahá'í Publishing Trust of the United States. [-J.M., 2022]