A Story Joe Biden Simply Cannot Match...

By: Justin Trudeau  

Published on Fri Oct 17 2014

 

In November 1998, I spent a week as a substitute teacher at Pinetree Secondary School in Coquitlam, about a half-hour’s drive east of Vancouver. The class had been a good group of kids, and by week’s end I was sorry to leave them. After saying my goodbyes on Friday the 13th, I drove back to my apartment, had dinner, and went to bed. I fell to sleep unaware that earlier that day, I had lost my little brother Michel.

My telephone rang at 5 the next morning. It was my mother calling to say there had been an accident, and I knew from the tone of her voice that it involved one of my brothers. I discovered that the cliché phrases were all based in reality: I went numb, my heart sank, and my blood ran cold all at the same time. “We don’t know for sure, because they still haven’t found him,” my mother said. “But the RCMP just told us that Michel was caught in an avalanche up at Kokanee.”

Michel had been doing what he loved most when he died, backcountry skiing with friends in the Southern Interior of British Columbia. While I had been standing at a blackboard, an avalanche had swept my brother and one of his buddies into Kokanee Lake. They had been traversing the steep incline above the lake. His pal Andy managed to swim to shore, but Michel was just too far out. It had taken his other friends hours to dig themselves out and contact the RCMP. Meanwhile, I had had a normal day, as had the rest of my family back east, as yet blissfully unaware of what had happened.

Part of me was certain that Michel was still alive. I just couldn’t conceive of a world in which he wasn’t.

I felt a spasm of guilt. What was Michel doing out on that glacier? Why hadn’t I, as his older brother, found some way to protect him? We lived in the same province. I should have visited him more, called him more, watched over him more, done something to keep him from danger.

 ...

I had spoken to him on Monday of the week he died, a telephone call I made partly out of guilt. I had been kicking myself for not calling on his birthday in early October when a friend reminded me that, when it comes to family, it’s never too late to connect. She was right, of course, and I called him later that very day. We had a good talk about many things, the usual back-and-forth chatter between siblings. The subject that I remember most clearly was his plan to spend three days later in the week up on Kokanee Glacier.

“It’s early in the season,” he said, “so we have to be careful.”

I replied in the assertive tone of a concerned parent or older sibling: “Yes, you must be especially careful at this point in the season.” He burst out laughing. He knew that I knew little about avalanche dangers and the steps that need to be taken to avoid them. I knew only that mountain skiing in that region of B.C. always brought the risk of avalanches. I learned so much more when, after Michel’s death, I became a director of the Canadian Avalanche Foundation and pushed for increased funding to support avalanche awareness.

When word of Michel’s disappearance spread later that day, the national news media flooded Rossland, eager to get a quote from anyone who knew Michel. All the comments were the same — he was a happy-go-lucky young guy they knew only as Mike, popular with everyone who met him, a bon vivant type with a quick smile. They were all surprised to learn that this well-liked fellow who had no pretensions and intensely loved exploring the wilderness on skis was the son of a former prime minister.

Michel had built so much of his life around the snow and the air and the mountains and the people around him. He was a free spirit, enamoured of the aboriginal culture that flourishes in Canada’s most beautiful places, a guy utterly at peace with himself in a way that had so far eluded both Sacha and me.

After booking an early flight to Montreal, I called my father to let him know I was coming and to ask if he had any news. My father had never been given to hopeful self-delusion, and he wasn’t now. “No,” he told me sadly, “and there won’t be any news because Michel is gone. The only question now is whether or not they find the body.”

Michel had ventured to Kokanee because the area held all the attractions he valued in life: a remote wilderness location, stunning scenery, challenging skiing, and the kind of stillness that is so rare in our hectic world. Skiing on the glacier above the shore of Kokanee Lake on a perfect sunny day was close to paradise for Miche. Kokanee Lake itself is an alpine jewel about a kilometre long, four hundred metres wide and very deep, surrounded by cliffs and precipitous rock slides. I understand why Michel would be drawn to it and how he probably weighed the risk of an early-season thaw, despite his laughter at my concern. The danger was not really an impediment. If he wanted badly enough to challenge his skill and satisfy his need for adventure, he would have gone under almost any circumstances. And he did.

He had probably long before come to terms with the risks faced by adventurers in the rugged parts of Canada where he most felt at home. A few years before his death, Michel had been idly watching a TV documentary about burial rites in Asia when he stated, matter-of-factly, “When it’s my turn, just leave me down at the bottom of the mountain where I lie.”

Kokanee Lake was at the bottom of the mountain, and the early-season avalanche knocked him off the path and into the depths of the lake. Had it been later in the year, the ice would have been frozen, and he and his buddies would have simply watched from the safety of the track in the centre of the lake as the small slide came down. His comment proved prescient: divers would never find his body, and he is there to this day.

Michel had carved his own route through life. While Sacha and I attended McGill, close to Dad, Michel chose to head east, to Dalhousie University in Halifax, where he studied microbiology. From there he went west for a life in which he wouldn’t have to think about the expectations others might have of him.

...

I still miss him. I will always miss him. Michel was just 23 when he died, but he had already found his calm zone, a private place that eludes many of us throughout our lives. 

If Michel were alive today, I believe he would be the father of teenage children, and that Sophie and I and our kids would visit him and his family each Christmas. Perhaps Michel would have launched his own ski tourism operation; he loved the sport, and I believe he had a knack for business. In his spare time, he would have found a way to bring out his creativity through painting or writing. Whatever he chose to do, I know he would have been happy doing it. That was his gift.

...

The Sydney Olympics were on TV in September of 2000 when my father died, and to this day, the mere memory of seeing the Canadian flag at half-mast in the Olympic Athletes’ Village the day after still causes me to blink back tears. IOC vice-president Dick Pound said on air that his friend Pierre Trudeau “hadn’t been old long,” a phrase that perfectly summed up the end of my father’s life. 

Dad had remained a great outdoorsman well into his mature years, able to overcome almost any obstacle he faced. In his seventies he ripped his knee by stepping into a hole while on a vacation in the Caribbean; within a few years of the surgery, he was back skiing the black diamond trails at Whistler. One of the jokes among our family was that whenever Dad went to the movies he insisted on getting his senior citizen’s discount. It was laughable to view him as a traditional senior citizen; he was one of the most robust people I ever knew. Until, very suddenly, he wasn’t.

...

Of all the memories I have of my father and of our relationship, none is warmer and more poignant than what happened a year before he died, when he came to visit me while I was teaching at West Point Grey Academy in Vancouver. It was a quiet Friday lunchtime, and he enjoyed meeting my teaching colleagues and touring the school with me. It felt good to show him my home classroom and share what I was doing with my professional life.

As we were about to leave the building, we heard the scurry of running feet approaching from behind. We both turned to see one of my students, almost out of breath from chasing after us. As she approached, suddenly nervous, she said, “Mr. Trudeau . . .”

I had seen this sort of scene unfold thousands of times. Everywhere I had gone with my father, star-struck children and adults alike approached him to seek his autograph or shake his hand or ask if he would pose for a picture with them. I would always stand back smiling silently while my father politely indulged the request, and I stood back now.

But this young woman, possibly born the very year my father had taken his famous walk in the snow, didn’t even glance at him. Instead she addressed me. “Mr. Trudeau, I just wanted to let you know that I’ll be late for French class this afternoon because I have to help out in the gym.” I nodded and thanked her; she turned and trotted away without another word.

I felt a little embarrassed by the encounter. This student was the child of immigrants, part of the wave of newcomers who had come to this country and made a success of themselves thanks in part to the open-minded policies my father had introduced as prime minister. Now, he had been treated like some anonymous bystander, and I cringed a little before turning to Dad, unsure what to say.

To my delight, he was wearing a broad smile. After many years of receiving recognition and gratitude for so much that he had done, he hardly needed one more gesture of acknowledgement from a young Canadian. Instead, he had taken fatherly pride in seeing his son maintaining our family’s legacy of service to Canada, this time as a teacher of young people. Now I, not Pierre Elliott, was “Mr. Trudeau” to a new generation of kids, and he was proud of me for that. It was a lovely warm moment for both of us to share.

And it was one of the last. In the spring of 2000, as I was finishing my school year at West Point Grey Academy, Sacha called to tell me our father was dying. He had been beset with Parkinson’s disease and had already survived a bout of pneumonia. He will get past this somehow, I assured myself. But while he was tough, my father was not indestructible. Sacha revealed that Dad had been diagnosed with prostate cancer some time ago and had decided not to pursue treatment. The disease now seemed to be entering its terminal phase.

“What the hell?” I almost shouted through the telephone. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Sacha explained that it had been Dad’s orders to keep me in the dark. My father knew I would drop everything I was doing in Vancouver and return to Montreal the moment I heard about his condition. He didn’t want to me to quit on my students before the school year was over. I know my father had been trying to be considerate, but I was angry anyway. Some irrational part of me thought that perhaps I could have fixed the unfixable if I had known about it earlier. When I settled down, I packed my bags and once again caught a long, sad flight to Montreal, where I would spend the summer with my father, reading him his favourite plays by Shakespeare, Racine, and Corneille, and just sitting quietly with him.

Michel’s death had been sudden and shocking. My father’s passing happened gradually, week by week, with Sach and me by his side. By the end of September, on a quiet Friday afternoon, it was time, and he let go.

 ...

 Canada lost Pierre Elliott Trudeau in the autumn of 2000. Sacha, Sarah, and I lost our dad. He prepared us well for that eventuality, but you’re never really ready to lose a parent. Nobody is. It’s one of the biggest changes life presents. Parents are the centre of a person’s solar system, even as an adult. My dad had a stronger gravitational pull than most, so his absence was bound to leave a deep and lasting void. 

...

I felt my father’s absence acutely. It was sad and profound, but freeing at the same time. I said in my eulogy for him that it was “up to us, all of us” to embody the values he stood for, now that he was no longer with us. Looking back, that advice was for myself as much as for anyone else . . ."

Excerpted from Common Ground by Justin Trudeau. Published in the English language in Canada by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Copyright 2014 by Justin Trudeau. All rights reserved.