Сhapter EIGHTEEN
ON MY BRIEF VISITS to Cuba, I have been impressed by the contrast between Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in the public eye. Posters and T-shirts with pictures of Che and slogans from his writings before the Cuban Revolution leader was killed in Bolivia in 1967 are ubiquitous, but I have never seen a sign, statue, or picture of President Castro in the streets. The absence of his image is in keeping with his reputed attitude that nothing is permanent—even the sun will die in a few billion years—so why should people care about their legacy after they're gone?
I have never sought honors or fame, though one honor I received brought pleasure for what it enabled me to do. In 1986, I received the Royal Bank Award, which was presented in an elaborate ceremony in Vancouver before a tuxedo-wearing crowd that included my in-laws and my father and his companion, Fumiko. The award was a tax-free $100,000, and the pleasure it gave was the purchase of our beloved Tangwyn, a small piece of paradise on Quadra Island. When we finally purchased Kingfisher, a small cabin cruiser, in 2003, Tara proclaimed, “David, we've got everything we need in life. We don't need any more stuff.” If I ever receive another award of money, it will go straight to the David Suzuki Foundation's endowment fund.
The family at Tangwyn
Tara and I also believe we have given our children the best any parents could—unstinting love, a variety of experiences at home and in other parts of the world, and a good education. What more support do they need from us to face the future? Now our parental responsibilities are complete; though one may do so, there is no further obligation to pass on money, valuable goods, or property to them.
When Tara and I first met, one of the places we spent time together was her parents' waterfront cottage on Sechelt Inlet on British Columbia's Sunshine Coast. We loved it there. Across the inlet was a muddy beach where we would dig for clams, feel cockles beneath our feet, and set our crab traps. I would cast out from the family float and catch ling cod, and we would take the rowboat offshore and fish for rock cod. We even got lucky and caught the occasional salmon.
But the relentless pressure of people like me meant that over time the ling have disappeared, easy victims of their ferocious appetites and aggressive territoriality. The rock cod on which we depended for breakfast became scarcer and smaller, while more and more cottages sprouted up around us with the inevitable increase in boom boxes, outdoor parties, and water skiers. Across the inlet, an entire hillside was shaved bare of its trees, and then poles and roads appeared, warning of the huge development that followed and the homes that now light up the night. After fifteen years, it was time to find our own place to retreat to from the city.
We began the search with the help of Tara's retired parents, who could check out some of the places that interested us. We spent months scouring properties for sale on the islands between the British Columbia mainland and Vancouver Island in the search for an ideal site that would give us a sense of isolation yet was affordable and reasonably accessible to Vancouver. We had focused on three pieces of land that were available on Quadra and Cortes islands near Campbell River on Vancouver Island. When we walked onto the land Tara later named Tangwyn (Welsh for “place of peace and restoration”), we knew instantly it was what we sought. Its ten acres contained some magnificent old-growth Douglas fir trees, a small creek, and perhaps a third of a mile of water-front that included beaches, rocky promontories, and at low tide a huge tidal pool. A land bridge connected Tangwyn and unoccupied Heriot Island adjacent to us. Tangwyn became our talisman, the place where we wanted our children to feel a strong bond to nature. And it became the place where the girls and our grandchildren would learn how to fish, then clean, cook, and eat their catch.
I love to fish, because fish are a major part of my diet and of who I am. I know sportspeople and conservationists advocate catch-and-release fishing, but I don't. There is no question that when we “play” a fish, the animal is struggling for its life. Usually a fish is worked to exhaustion before being released, so upon liberation, it is an easy target for predators like birds and seals. Fishing for trout in a lake in the Okanagan region of south-central B.C., I noticed loons hovering near the canoe and soon realized they had learned to take a fish right off the hook or to grab it when it was released. Marine seals have learned the same thing.
Enjoying my favorite pastime around the corner from Tangwyn and the cottage
The fish don't volunteer to be a part of our “sport,” and the notion of torturing them for pleasure and then releasing them as if we are being considerate and protective simply perpetuates the notion that nature and other species are playthings for our enjoyment. I know vegans condemn the catching and eating of fish as antithetical to a reverence for life, but I accept that as an animal, I depend on the consumption of other life to survive (plants are life forms too), and I try to do it with respect and gratitude.
IF WE AVOID TRAFFIC jams and make all the ferry connections just right, it takes just over five hours (six if we're unlucky) to get from Vancouver to Tangwyn. As we ride the last ferry from Campbell River to Quathiaski Cove on Quadra, our excitement grows and we delight in the sight of the island hills covered in forest, the dense schools of herring, the fishing boats pursuing salmon, and the ever-present eagles ready to swoop down and take a careless fish. We feel the joy of arriving back where nature is still abundant and intact.
But when we talk to our neighbors who have lived in the area for fifty years or more, they describe a world that no longer exists around there: bays filled with abalone, red snapper, gigantic ling cod and rock cod as long as an arm, herring so abundant they could be raked off the kelp to fill a punt in minutes, and schools of salmon so thick they could be heard coming as their bodies slapped the water miles away. Today all of that is gone. Six years after we had bought Tangwyn, we were fishing for rock cod when Tara hooked a large ling. I watched in disappointment yet admiration as she removed the hook and carefully returned the fish to the water. “This is the first big ling we've seen in six years,” she said. “We can't kill it.”
Even in the brief time Tangwyn has been part of our lives, we have seen the herring vanish because of the insane fishery permitting the capture of spawning herring for the females' ovaries, which bring a high return in Japan. I call it insane because herring are one of the key prey species for salmon, seals, whales, and other carnivorous fishes, and First Nations have long harvested their eggs without killing the fish. Because the spawning herring form large schools, they become such easy prey that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans actually has had ten-minute openings—seiners are allowed ten minutes to set their nets with the potential to make a year's worth of pay for the crew members. What kind of a delusion is it to think a ten-minute season is a fishery that is sustainable? Years ago, one opening for the herring roe fishery wiped out the large populations around Tangwyn, and they still haven't come back.
Abalone were once abundant throughout the islands in Georgia Strait, but when scuba divers were allowed to “harvest” them, they quickly disappeared and have not come back. In the fifteen years we have gone to Tangwyn, we have found two live abalone—essentially they are extinct, and it is highly doubtful they will ever come back within my children's lifetime.
Geoducks (pronounced “gooey-ducks”), the huge clams whose siphons are highly prized in Asia, are being blasted out of the ocean bottom by divers wielding pressure hoses. The clams are like nuggets of gold but are exploited with almost no idea of their biology or life cycle; they may reach decades if not a century or more in age. I watched in helpless fury as divers spent two days off the shores of Tangwyn pumping geoducks out of the ocean floor. We were delighted to find a small patch of perhaps fifty geoducks at low tide that had been missed by the commercial divers, only to see them trashed by oyster farmers dragging heavy loads of spat-laden shells across them.
Rock cod, which we once took for granted as a dependable meal, have been depleted by commercial fishers, who ship them live to the Asian market. When the DFO announced a quota for sport fishers of one rock cod a day, it was clear the fish should be declared totally off-limits to all fishing until they can replenish themselves.
We tend to think of the oceans as a homogeneous environment from which we can catch creatures that are somehow magically replaced without end. We know that as a rule, the bigger, older animals are far more prolific than younger fish, yet we allow fishers to keep the largest and return the small ones as if somehow this is good management. I believe we should allow fewer fish to be caught, encourage release of large ones, and mandate that fishers stop letting the small ones go until a trophy fish is captured. Once sport fishers have caught their limit of salmon, they often target other fish, like ling and halibut, loading up with hundreds of pounds of fish. They may proudly display halibut more than six and a half feet long and weighing over 165 pounds and release the chickens (under 30 pounds), which is exactly the opposite of what should be done.
Since our purchase of Tangwyn, logging on Quadra has gone on steadily. As we drive from the ferry terminal at Quathiaski Cove and turn onto the road to Heriot Bay, the large swath of forest to our left was clear-cut long before we got there, and the section to our right was cleared a few years ago. The cynical strip of trees left standing beside the road cannot hide the devastation of clear-cutting. Every day, truckloads of trees leave the island; yet one of the ironies of globalization is that at the lumberyard on Quadra, the only lumber sold comes from California.
Another problem is that most of us today live in large cities: we've become urban animals, occupying a human-created environment that is almost devoid of biodiversity. We have a few domesticated plants and animals that we like to have around us, and we tolerate the pests we can't eliminate, but basically we live in a biologically impoverished region wherever we dwell. That means the baseline against which we judge the wildness of nature is so shallow that to us, the Tangwyn of today seems rich and abundant.
And that, it seems to me, is a major challenge we face as humanity explodes in numbers and consumptive demand—our collective memory is so short that we soon forget how things were. We take for granted a small cluster of trees in an empty lot, and then suddenly one day the trees are gone. Soon after, an apartment complex goes up. Within months, we barely remember the trees and open land that were once there. And so it goes all across the planet as we lose links to and reminders of a richer world that has disappeared in the name of economic development.
When I was growing up in Vancouver, Dad would row a boat around Stanley Park in downtown Vancouver, and catch sea-run cutthroat trout. We would jig for halibut off Spanish Banks on the city's waterfront, catch sturgeon in the Fraser River, and ride horses up the Vedder River to catch steelhead and Dolly Varden trout.
My grandchildren have no hope of experiencing the richness I knew as a child. And there is no longer any living memory of passenger pigeons, of prairie lands covered by millions upon millions of bison, which were preyed upon by grizzly bears all the way across to Ontario and down to Texas. And so we continue to celebrate our imprint across the land, taming the wild and reminding ourselves of what once was with the names of suburbs and streets—Oakview Lane, Forest Hills, Arbutus Drive.
When we purchased Tangwyn, the agent took great pains to inform us it could be subdivided into three pieces. “You could sell two and pay for all of it,” he said, as if that were an incentive and option. It wasn't. We are privileged to claim to own what was once First Nations land and would like to see it become a part of a larger entity, the forest. Subdividing it into smaller parcels that would be sold off to be developed further will not do that. Somehow we have to find a way to maintain the integrity of wild areas.
It's not all hopeless if we can transcend the current conceit that what is the latest is the best, that history and the past are mere academic pursuits. We can learn much from lessons of the past; indeed, we can find ways to husband scarce resources and even replenish and expand them by applying ancient methods.
In 1995, a geologist, John Harper, was flying in a plane along the British Columbia coast at low tide when he noticed semicircular structures radiating out from shore at the tide line. He recognized that they were not natural and must have been made by people. He investigated these structures, which have now been found up and down the coast of B.C., and today it is recognized that the original people on the coast created them by placing stones at low tide. Over time, the incoming tide would wash shells, sand, and debris over the rocks and into the semicircle, perfect beds for clams. In fact, these were “clam gardens,” deliberately created so that clams could be harvested on a regular basis.
When Severn began her graduate degree with the noted University of Victoria ethnobotanist Nancy Turner, she learned about clam gardens and met Adam Dick, a Kwakwaka'wakw elder who was traditionally educated and knew about many of the traditions lost by most tribes. Severn was sure the rock structures along the connection between Tangwyn and Heriot Island were not natural and took Adam to look at it. “Oh, yes, that's a loki way,” he said, matter-of-factly. It was indeed a human-made clam garden, and that also explained the midden we had found on the property near the beach.
For centuries, explorers finding new lands occupied by aboriginal peoples have dismissed those peoples as primitive savages lacking the technological evidence of civilization. We are only now realizing that, in fact, thousands of years of observation and thought had created a profound knowledge base that allowed people not only to exploit nature's abundance but also to enhance certain parts of its productivity, from clams to forests.
SEX HAS BEEN a driving force in my life. In today's liberated society, the ideas about sex I grew up with seem quaint at best, naive at worst. Chastity and premarital virginity of prospective brides were still hoped for and highly prized. Where the men were to gain their experience, I have no idea, because certainly paying for sex was not socially acceptable. Puberty hit me like a concrete wall, testosterone hammering through my body and wreaking havoc on my brain when I was about twelve. Only as age has brought relief from the high titer of sex hormones have I been freed of thinking of sex once a minute. Now it's about once every five minutes.
I am delighted to see the role sex plays in the lives of Tara and my daughters; it is part of their lives but doesn't necessarily mean a permanent commitment. It just seems so much healthier to be able to have sex instead of the prolonged and agonizing petting sessions that passed for sex in my youth. When I was a boy, it was widely believed that for many women, if not most, sex was not a pleasure but something to be borne. Frigidity was widely regarded and accepted as most women's lot, a notion I am sure women today would vehemently reject. My generation placed far too much value on the act of sex itself.
As well as being liberated to explore their bodies and sexuality to the fullest, women are breaking down gender barriers as I never dreamed would be possible in my lifetime. My daughter Tamiko decided to play team hockey when she was in her late thirties, and though I never saw her play, she is such an athlete that I'm sure she did very well. I say “did” because she was forced by knee problems to give it up after a few seasons. When I was a young man, we would never have imagined teams of middle-aged women playing ice hockey. I have delighted in cheering on Severn and Sarika as they played a kind of basketball that wasn't practiced in my youth; when I was in high school, girls in “bloomers” were allowed to dribble the ball twice before passing, a completely different game from the rough-and-tumble sport today. My niece, Jill Aoki, was a soccer star, as is my granddaughter, Midori.
As women have been widening their athletic opportunities, academically they have exploded ahead. I well remember my high school graduation in 1954, when perhaps 10 percent of my class went on to university and boys captured most of the prizes and awards. Almost fifty years later, when I attended Severn's and then Sarika's graduation, girls earned most of the awards and held incredible records of community and extracurricular service.
Women now make up more than 60 percent of university undergraduates, more than half of students in graduate studies, medicine, and law schools, and a rapidly increasing number are enrolling in engineering, agriculture, and forestry, areas traditionally male domains. The social ramifications of this huge gender shift will reverberate through society for decades, I am sure.
Troy and me in the hull of the Klondike, a sternwheeler boat in Whitehorse, Yukon, that Troy was helping to restore
I wonder, however, about the boys who are not winning the awards they once did and who are not going on to university, but not because I think they should be represented fifty-fifty. Personal experience tells me that women mature socially and intellectually much sooner than boys. I know I was brain-damaged by testosterone and figure I'm just starting to catch up to women, except that senility threatens to intrude any minute. My son, as much because I was his father as anything else, did not complete university and graduated instead from Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design in Vancouver. He has become an excellent carpenter and, more recently, an accomplished boatbuilder, and I am very proud of what he has become. Yet I worry as I watch him inform others, almost apologetically, that he never completed university.
Has university become the standard by which we measure a person's worth? If so, it is a mistake. I have as much regard for Troy's talent as a carpenter and boatbuilder as I have for any academic with a bachelor's degree or even a PhD. And every time my car breaks down or my sewer gets plugged, I am very grateful to and admiring of the tradespeople who come to my rescue.
The declining proportion of men in academia may, as the Fraser Institute suggests, reflect discriminatory standards, although I doubt it. I believe we have the opportunity to get our priorities and values right. Yes, we need academically trained people, as we need violinists, artists, and so many other talents. In a multicultural society such as Canada's, diversity has become our great strength, and we have to find ways to honor that diversity, especially as gender barriers are removed in most occupations.
One serious challenge of this gender shift is the conflict between a woman's professional ambitions and the biological imperatives of her body. The decline in fertility after the age of thirty is quite dramatic and often leads to heroic medical interventions, such as in vitro fertilization for older women. Could we develop ways for women to have it both ways, to pursue a career while also having children?
My wonderful secretary, Shirley Macaulay, worked for me for more than twenty years until she was forced to retire by the university. I despaired of finding someone who could replace her as both efficient secretary and friend. When Shirley and I finally interviewed Evelyn de la Giroday, we both agreed she would be an ideal replacement, younger, experienced, and willing to be firm if necessary. I was very disappointed to learn that Ev was pregnant and that she wanted to spend quite a while with her baby before returning to work. “What about bringing the baby to the office, where you could nurse her and still work?” I asked.
Ev was a bit dubious, but we agreed to try it out. After Ruthie was born, we set up a playpen in my office at the University of British Columbia while Ev worked in the room adjacent. It worked very well. The baby slept a lot, and besides, I was out of the office most of the time anyway. Evelyn could feed or change the baby in the privacy of my office and still carry out her duties. What surprised me was the protest raised by faculty and students. Ruthie very seldom cried loudly enough to be heard outside my office, but people became aware there was a baby around, and rather than being intrigued by the experiment, academics were indignant at what they felt was an inappropriate presence in their hallowed halls. Fortunately the arrangement worked for long enough for Ev to be happy to find a sitter to take care of Ruth at home, and Ev worked for me for years after.
BEING A PARENT IS the most important thing I have done in life, and I have always been completely committed to my children, though not in the same way my father was. Through my childhood memories, it seems to me my father devoted a huge amount of his time to me. Whether at work or play, he included me on his trips, which were important parts of my formative years, and he spent hours listening to my childish prattle and questions, trying to respond and answer as fully as he could. I have failed to emulate that with my children.
After my first marriage had ended, I endeavored to be with the children every day I was in Vancouver and was aided by Joane's generosity in allowing me unrestricted access to them. But often my mind was distracted, not totally focused on them but off somewhere else. I was too selfish to give myself over to being Dad 100 percent, and I regret that, not only for the children's sake but also for my own. I was just unable to give myself totally to the moment and fully enjoy them.
Joane was my first love, and though we have met less and less often over the years, she has always had my greatest respect and gratitude for the years we did spend together and for never using the children as a weapon to punish me for my shortcomings. They had been conceived in love. When our marriage ended, we didn't negotiate conditions for the amount of money I would pay her in alimony because, as she told the stunned lawyer, “I trust Dave.” I have always tried to live up to that faith. I supported Joane so that she could be a full-time mother, a job she did wonderfully.
Laura, Tamiko, and Troy
When I told Joane seven years after our separation that my remarriage was going to be a financial strain, without a word of protest she told me she could resume her career now that Laura, our youngest, was in school. Well trained as a lab technician at Ryerson Institute of Technology in Toronto and experienced with the electron microscope at the University of Chicago, Joane was soon running the lab for Pat and Edith McGeer, the famous neurobiology team at UBC.
Tamiko went away to McGill University in Montreal and studied biology. She hoped to improve her French while she was there but was disappointed at how easy it was to continue speaking English. At McGill, Tamiko fell in love with Eduardo Campos, a Chilean Canadian who was enrolled in engineering and was a computer whiz. They married after graduation and decided to have a footloose life, working for periods and saving enough to travel to different parts of the world. They had decided they would forgo a family for a more gypsylike life.
But Eduardo's Latin American parents felt it was a mistake, and I did too. When Tamiko approached thirty, she began to reassess the decision, and in 1990 she gave birth to Tamo, my first grandson, and three years later to Midori, my first and (so far) only granddaughter. Tamiko has become one of those supermoms, holding down a job as a chromosome analyst in a hospital while caring for two supercharged children who have grown to be star athletes. Eduardo has used his fluency in Spanish and English to take jobs working in South America and spends a lot of time away from home. In many ways, Tami is repeating the role Tara has played in our home, multitasking because of the absence of her partner much of the time.
Tamo and Midori were born when Sarika was still a child, so suddenly I had a young daughter and grandchildren when I was spending a lot of time away. It has been unfair to my grandchildren that I have not had the time with them I wished for. I loved attending basketball games to cheer Sev and Sarika when they played in high school but have seldom been in town when Tamo and Midori have had hockey, soccer, snowboarding, and football competitions.
Grandchildren are such a delight because the relationship is so different from the relationship with one's children. Every human relationship—between lovers, parents, or children—has moments of frustration, anger, and resentment. It's inevitable, because we are human beings with fallibilities and needs that may conflict with those of others. But in a loving relationship, we work these conflicts out, and the benefits and joys more than offset those awkward or trying moments.
With grandchildren, however, there isn't the chafing that can result from living together day in and day out, so every get-together is a celebration and fun. We can do all those things with grandchildren that we carefully avoided as parents, like buying candy or extravagant toys, then drop them back with their parents to pick up the pieces. It is sheer joy and no responsibility. And because they don't live with us, grandchildren don't see all the flaws in us that their parents know so well—so they can just worship us for what they think we are. It's great.
When it became clear that we had the financial support to make the television series based on my book The Sacred Balance, Amanda McConnell had the brilliant idea of including Tamo, both to represent me as a child and as a reminder that the next generation had to be included in our perspective. Although I had taken Tamo when he was younger to experience seaweed camp in Gitga'at territory, I was nervous about spending so much time with him alone. “What do I do to keep him entertained?” I wondered. As an enticement on our first shoot, I met him in Florida and took him to Universal Studios, where we shared some incredible rides and had a delightful three days together. He was a wonderful companion and performer throughout the filming.
Laura chose to attend Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, where she majored in psychology. I was delighted when she fell in love with and later married Peter Cook, a fellow cartoonist on the school paper and also a psychology major. Peter made Laura laugh and drew her out as a personality. Jonathan, their son, is a beautiful child who was found to have suffered oxygen deprivation at birth and has cerebral palsy, a debilitating problem of varying severity, depending on the area of the brain that is damaged. Jonathan has severe problems, will probably never walk, and though blind, he apparently has developed an alternate neural pathway that enables him to recognize symbols and patterns and actually to read.
What has been so impressive and humbling to me has been the parenting of this heroic young couple, Laura and Peter. They are magnificent parents, pouring love and energy into developing Jonathan's capabilities to the maximum. As my grandson has constrained their world and activities, success and joy have come from struggle and incremental achievements. I have often pondered how strong I would be were I faced with a severely disabled child, whether I would be up to the job. By their actions, Laura and Peter demonstrate the good and the potential that I hope are in all of us when adversity intervenes.
Son-in-law Peter Cook with Laura and my grandson Jonathan
Troy spent many years trying to figure out his relationship with me, but he stayed very close to my father, moving in with him for several years. As we have become close again (thank goodness for e-mail), I wonder where he's going in a life still evolving. Like many younger men today, he has chosen not to follow the high-pressure, competitive path that was the model of a “successful” male when I was younger. And as a result, in so many ways, he has led a more varied, interesting life than I have.
Severn and Sarika are out of the nest but still strongly attached to the family. It is wonderful to have them spend weeks at Tangwyn with boyfriends in tow. Horizons for the girls seem limitless compared with what was expected for Tara's generation of women.
After graduating from Yale University in 2001, Severn traveled for two years and gave inspirational speeches to adult and youth groups across North America. She then decided to go back to graduate school to study ethnobotany and is now working with Nancy Turner at the University of Victoria; through Sev, Tara and I are vicariously learning about the exciting discoveries of aboriginal gardening along the west coast.
Although as children of a faculty member my children could have attended UBC without paying tuition, I had informed all of them I would pay for their postsecondary school education, but they would have to take it outside B.C. because I believe being away from home is half of what this experience is about.
I had urged Sarika to take one of the acceptances she received from Mount Holyoke College and Smith College in Massachusetts, the two women's colleges near my alma mater, Amherst. But in the end she decided against an all-female school and went to the University of California at Berkeley to study marine biology. Now, through her, I enjoy learning about fish that have so long been important in my life. Tara and I have offered to be her research assistants any time.
All of my children have become vibrant, interesting human beings, all of them committed environmentalists and contributors to society. If my children and their children know anything, I hope it is that they have my unconditional love and can always depend on that.
WHAT IS THE MEANING of life? Although I'm an elder, I haven't come close to answering that question. The 1960s were all about enjoying the moment. I remember students having a confrontation with faculty at UBC and one of the leaders who was challenging professors, marks, and classes saying life is about “fun” and university was irrelevant because it wasn't fun. For me, life has been and continues to be about work. I find it impossible to live in the present and to simply relish the joy of the moment. Life for me seems to be all about responsibility and the need to fulfill obligations. It hasn't been fair to Tara, or my children or grandchildren, but a sense of duty and being busy has taken me away from them, even when I am physically with them.
I have been a pushover for certain kinds of requests for help—from underdogs, like a woman in Woodstock who had struggled for years to galvanize concern about local environmental issues, so I helped her by going and giving a speech that raised money and support for her. I hate it when I hear stories of bullies, like the owner of a marine aquarium in the Niagara region who took a small group of people to court for handing out leaflets urging people to consider the plight of the captive killer whales. I gave a speech to a sold-out crowd and helped the defendants raise tens of thousands of dollars for legal fees to fight their case. I keep trying to help when appeals come from isolated First Nations communities fighting high suicide rates among youth, problems of contaminated water, or arrogant authorities like provincial hydroelectricity corporations.
But all of these do-good efforts take me away from the family and home, because most of the time I end up visiting and speaking on weekends. It has been utterly selfish for me to put these activities ahead of time spent with family and certainly a conceit to think I can be the one to make a difference.
My devotion to work has also resulted in an almost obsessive need to be punctual. The one thing that creates tension between Tara and me is our totally different approaches to time. She is motivated by a desire to get as much out of every minute as she can, and that means not wasting time by leaving and arriving early, so she pushes things to the very last minute. In contrast, I like to leave lots of leeway for unexpected holdups and am much happier arriving early and waiting. I practically go bonkers when Tara is late. She claims I once allowed so much time for traffic and the unexpected when we left for a movie in West Vancouver that we arrived two hours early. But that is ridiculous and must be untrue. It is true, however, that I am “anal,” as my daughters constantly remind me.
Family gathering in June 2005. Left to right, front row: Sarika, me, Jonathan (grandson), Marcia, Richard Aoki (Marcia's husband), and his grandson, Malevai. Back row: Severn, Tara, Peter Cook (son-in-law), Laura, Delroy Barrett, Jill Aoki (niece), and Makoto.
My friends and even my family believe it will be impossible for me to retire, but I don't agree. Retirement to me does not mean not doing anything interesting and meaningful and just waiting for death. There have been many things I've wanted to do, but I have never been able to devote the time and attention that are needed to do them fully and well. For example, I would love to try my hand at painting, and when I told this to my sister Aiko, who was an artist, she sent me all of the necessary equipment, including a how-to-get-started book, but I've never even removed the wrapping. Many years ago, when I expressed regret that I had never learned to read music or play an instrument, Joane bought a beautiful recorder for me, but I never touched that either.
To follow these pursuits seriously, I couldn't just put in an hour a day or every other day; I want to be able to focus on them without distractions of time or other commitments. Maybe it's just a rationalization for doing nothing, but to me, retirement means having the time to do a few of the things I want to do—paint, learn Spanish, do some carving, study geology—before I pass on and the atoms in my body are returned to the natural world from which they came.
Continuing the fishing tradition: Sarika and Severn with a ling cod
HUMAN BEINGS BEAR THAT terrible burden that self-awareness has inflicted on us—the knowledge that we, like all other creatures on earth, will die. That's what religions attempt to provide solace for, the unbearable thought of our disappearance forever. Belief in a life after death is one way to bear this truth, although it pains me to see people who seem to care little about this life because they believe they will live forever after they leave it. It even seems that blowing oneself up is preferable to a life fully lived if the promise is seventy virgins in paradise (over eternity, those virgins won't satisfy very long). I have been an atheist all my adult life, although as a teenager, I desperately wanted to believe in a god.
I don't like to even think of death because it makes me very uncomfortable, not because of fear about the process of dying, although any form of dying other than from instant death in an accident or from old age strikes me as a crummy way to go. No, what I don't like is the idea that this guy looking back at me in the mirror, this person locked into my skull full of memories that make him who he is, this fellow who has known pain, joy, thoughts, having existed for such a brief flash in all of eternity, is going to vanish forever at his death. Forever is such a long time, and seventy, eighty, ninety, even a hundred years is such a tiny interval in all of time.
As an atheist, I have no illusions about my life and death; they are insignificant in cosmic terms. That's why I have turned down requests to name schools after me, to let my name stand as a candidate for the presidency of a university, and to run for chancellor of another university. I don't have time to try to pad my curriculum vitae or take a position that is merely honorific.
Mom and Dad on their 50th wedding anniversary (March 21, 1984), only two months before Mom's death
I attended a potlatch, a ceremonial gathering, for Haida Chief Watson Price's hundredth birthday. As I pondered the significance of his birthday, I found it overwhelming to think of the world he was born into, a world without planes, refrigerators, television, computers, or even cars. He grew up in the tradition of his people, which had its roots thousands of years ago. And in remembering the stories and lessons of his grandparents, he represented a living memory going back to the early 1800s. For most of us, we will be remembered far more briefly. In the end, as we reflect on the meaning of our lives and our legacy to the future, what more could we ask for than to be remembered with affection and respect by a few people who will survive a decade or two further, by our children and grandchildren? I hope when it's my time to die, I do so with the dignity of my father.
Parents-in-law Harry and Freddy Cullis on her 86th birthday
After my mother died, Dad met a woman named Fumiko Gondo, who had come from Japan to live with her daughter, Naoko, who worked in Vancouver. Fumiko was a Korean who grew up in Japan, and she did not speak English. She and Dad began to take walks together, and Dad enjoyed the opportunity to brush up on his Japanese. Eventually they started spending all their time together, and Dad even gave away Naoko when she married in Japan.
Fumiko was a lovely woman, and she and Dad were a great pair. In the early 1990s when Dad developed a cancerous tumor in his abdominal cavity, Fumiko was devastated. Although he had no pain, he lost his appetite and began to lose weight and strength, and it became clear he was dying. Dad had always said he had no great fear of death. “I've had a great life and I have no regrets,” he would say.
Fumiko boiled large quantities of rice over and over to produce a thick gel of rice concentrate, which Japanese consider extremely nutritive with medicinal properties. As I encouraged him, Dad would doggedly try to get a few spoonfuls down but often gagged with the effort. Finally, a neighbor who was a doctor told me that at this stage of his cancer Dad would not die of starvation, so we shouldn't worry about feeding him if he couldn't eat. It was a huge relief.
Christmas 2003. Left to right, front row: Severn, Huckleberry, Tara, Eduardo Campos (Tamiko's husband), and Tamo (my grandson). Back row: Tamiko, Midori (my granddaughter), and Sarika.
I moved in with Dad to be with him in his final weeks of life. He was still alert and interested in what was happening in the family. Each night, Tara and the girls would come over, and they sometimes brought slides of one of our trips, often ones we had taken with Dad and Mom. He would greet Tara with, “Well, what adventure have you got for me tonight?”
In the last week, my sisters arrived, and we reminisced about our lives. What struck me was that at no point did we complain about how hard life had been or all the things we had missed out on. Instead, we laughed and cried over stories about family, friends, and neighbors and the things we had done together that had enriched our lives. There was no boasting about possessions or wealth or accomplishments, only human relationships and shared experiences, which are what life is all about.
Dad's great achievement each day was to get out of bed and walk to the bathroom, where he would try to have a bowel movement. He had grown so painfully thin that the skin around his buttocks hung in sheets, and he was so weak that getting to the bathroom and back became quite a feat. Sometimes, in the effort to get his legs off the bed and onto the floor, he would leak a bit, causing him huge embarrassment. We bought rubber mats to go under the sheets, and I finally suggested diapers would solve everything. He was adamant that he would not wear them. Finally, when he had had a particularly messy accident, I called Tara and asked her to get some diapers for Dad. He overheard me and again objected weakly that he wouldn't wear them. Within hours, he slipped into a coma, and his breathing became more erratic and finally stopped. I still think the thought of being made to wear diapers was the final indignity, and he simply checked out, a peaceful death at eighty-five.
As he was dying, I wrote Dad's obituary and he fine-tuned it. “Don't say ‘passed away,' ” he said. “Say ‘he died'.” Here's what the obituary said:
Obituary, May 8, 1994
Carr Kaoru Suzuki died peacefully on May 8th. He was eighty-five. His ashes will be spread on the winds of Quadra Island. He found great strength in the Japanese tradition of nature-worship. Shortly before he died, he said: “I will return to nature where I came from. I will be part of the fish, the trees, the birds—that's my reincarnation. I have had a rich and full life and have no regrets. I will live on in your memories of me and through my grandchildren.”
Dad had become interested in Shinto near the end of his life, and his Shinto beliefs fit well with the First Nations sense of connection with nature. Certainly if the laws of physics apply to our bodies, we are made up of the earth through the air, water, and food we ingest, and when we die, the atoms that comprise our bodies don't vanish but are eventually recycled back through the biosphere. So we return to nature, which gave us life in the first place, and as Dad's obituary said, we will still be everywhere. I like that idea, although it doesn't satisfy—as religion does—that egotistic desire to continue on in some conscious state.
Years after Dad died, an interviewer, knowing how important Dad had been to me, asked whether his death was one of the most painful moments of my life. I had to answer no. How could it be? I miss him and Mom tremendously and think of them every day, but Dad had a rich, full life, had been lucid until hours before his death, and had no pain or fear of death.
THE SENTIMENTS INCLUDED IN Dad's obituary are what I hope will be included in mine. I have had a rich and full life. I've selfishly acted on my priorities and impulses, often when I should have spent some of that time on those I love. I have hurt others, including my own family, but not deliberately out of meanness, and I hope that my life can be summed up as a positive addition to the human family.
Perhaps one or two programs I've done on television or radio will be played again after I'm dead, perhaps a book or two I've written will be read. That would be nice. But the one true legacy of any value is my children and, through them, my grandchildren. My grandchildren may remember something they learned from me or shared with me and, if I'm lucky, they may even pass that snippet on to their grandchildren. So at most, I might be remembered for four generations. My mother was the most decent, self-effacing person I've ever known; it hurts me to realize that when my sisters and I die, she will disappear from memory quickly in the fragments of memory among my children. Why, then, would I wish for any more than she did? My father made a point of leaving trees as gifts, a gesture that ensures that so long as those plants flourish, he will be there in some way.
My favorite photo of Dad, in repose at Windy Bay, Haida Gwaii
This is a sad time to depart from this life. I have witnessed the disappearance and destruction of so much of the natural world that I loved. Extinction of a species is natural in the evolutionary scheme of life on Earth—99.9999 percent of all species that have ever existed are extinct. But we are an infant species, arriving very recently, perhaps 150,000 years ago in the plains of Africa, and yet now the once unthinkable, the coming extinction of our own species, is actually conceivable. Our trajectory to dominance of the planet has been spectacular, but we have not fully comprehended the price of that success. It has been my lot to be a Cassandra or Chicken Little, warning about imminent disaster, but it gives me no satisfaction at all to think my concerns may be validated by my grandchildren's generation.
My grandchildren are my stake in the near future, and it is my most fervent hope that they might say one day, “Grandpa was part of a great movement that helped turn things around for us.” I also hope that they might remember my most valuable lesson and be able to say, “Grandpa taught us how to catch and clean a fish. Let's go catch one for dinner.”
The notorious fig leaf shot for the show “Phallacies”
for The Nature of Things with David Suzuki