By David Dyck
“He grew up without my influence and I grew up without his.”
These words from Richard Wagamese have been echoing in my head ever since I heard them 6 weeks ago. Wagamese, conducting a radio interview about his latest novel, Medicine Walk, was describing how the themes of the book intersected with his own life. His novel traces the journey undertaken by Franklin and Eldon Starlight, son and father, as the former accompanies the latter on his final journey before dying. The father has requested that the son do so even though the father has failed to be present – to be a father – throughout all of the son’s life. Their walk proves both hard and healing.
The author’s own life has some close parallels. Raised in northwestern Ontario, Wagamese grew up disconnected from his own family, moving instead from foster home to foster home. Feeling what he calls the “kinetic connections” of his friends and their families – a connection he lacked – while visiting in their homes was exquisitely painful. The pain eventually found it’s way to the surface in alcoholism and rage and – still later – resulted in the mother of his two sons finally deciding that she had no choice but to protect her boys from his instability.
Wagamese fully and humbly accepts her decision now, even as the impacts of it all continue to roll out and echo in his life. He still has little relationship to his boys and, although this may some day change, for now it just hurts like hell. It’s a loss he grieves, one senses, daily. It was his older son, the valedictorian of his high-school class with a full university scholarship for this Fall, that Wagamese was talking about when he uttered that phrase that caught my breath:
“He grew up without my influence and I grew up without his.”
For I too am the father of two boys, aged 8 and 9. And, although I’d never put it that way, Wagamese’s wisdom rang true. There is a mutual influence going on. We do and are growing each other up.
Vivid moments from the summer of 2015 came to mind. My 8-year-old convincing me (barely!) to put my phone away and instead go for a walk to watch the sun set on Hecla island. An impromptu, skinny-dipping session followed by a time of grace, sitting quietly in our damp jeans, just the two of us on the long stony beach, a moment of quiet connection – a moment I never could have predicted or earned. A moment that occurred because we were together.
A late night walk at the Modern Corn & Apple Festival with my 9-year-old a month later, in which – while discussing the tragedy of Jones’ Town – he explained to me the problem with religions “talking too much about obedience,” before adding emphatically: “real life has conflict!” I had never thought about it in exactly that way before. No really, I hadn’t. Another unexpected gift. Because we were together.
So simple. For sons and dads to grow each other, for all of us to shape and re-shape each other, we’ve got to be together.
But Richard Wagamese, like so many of his Indigenous brothers and sisters, was denied this most basic ingredient of bonding. Residential schools took that very first premise of family, of parenting and children-ing, away from our First Peoples. For multiple generations, the man couldn’t father his son and the boy couldn’t son his father.
And so, the medicine walk.
A time for truth-telling, confrontation, pain and anger but also compassion, care, connection and, yes, healing. A story-sharing journey of quaking, crying, holding, and dying to what was. So that something new has a chance to be born.
And now we need another kind of medicine walk.
A walk with our families, in our community centres, our schools, our places of worship, and, yes, our workplaces too. A walk with our governing, policing, teaching, and healing professionals. A walk with our leaders, elders, ministers, artists, and musicians. A walk with neighbours and friends – yes from next door – but also from across the city and province, with those who are yet still estranged from us.
Those of us whose people originate from other lands must walk now towards and with our Indigenous brothers and sisters, to hear and share stories, to feel pain and risk anger, and to risk also compassion and connection rather staying safe and distant. So that we can grow up with the blessing of each other’s influence.
I don’t know where that walk will lead and I know it’s going to be scary and I don’t know even exactly who should lead or how I will fit in to the throng but I am ready, I think, to take the first steps. Or at least I want to be ready…
Let’s walk.