When I was young, long, long ago, there was a magazine called Fate. It was one of the only ones of its kind at that time, and dealt with “True accounts of the strange and unknown”, things like aliens & flying saucers, sasquatches, ancient astronomy, spirit possession, miracle healing, and all those things that go bump in the night when nobody’s listening. Now I was brought up in a let’s say non-believing household, and though I have always been fascinated by those things, I have always thought of them as more related to psychology and the infinite ability of the human mind to delude itself. As far as I can see, there is no place for those things in the universe I know. And yet…

Fate Magazine had a regular feature called My Proof of Survival, where readers would send in their own encounters with the shades of departed friends and relations. Here is mine.

In 1972, when I was 19, my father had recently been hired as professor of education at McGill University in Montreal. And one morning he was doing his exercises “One two, touch your toes” when he suddenly said to my mother, “Barb,” he said. “You better call the ambulance. I think I’m having a heart attack.” and he collapsed on the bed. So she called the ambulance, but despite the best efforts of the attendants, he died en route to the hospital.

He told me about it afterwards: watching as they put him on the bed in the hospital, the doctors desperately trying to bring him back to life. And he looked up, way up, and he saw, not the hospital ceiling, but that classic vision of the dead and dying: the tunnel of light, stretching off into the distance far above him, and all the old people who had gone before him playing the old familiar hymns on the old family piano and saying “Come on, come on” and he started floating up and into that tunnel and he felt so peaceful when BAM! he was back in his body again, in excruciating pain and cursing the doctors who had applied the electric shocks that revived him.

But he finally accepted his second chance at life; in fact it gave him an excellent excuse whenever someone wanted him to do something he didn’t want to do, he would just put his hand to his chest and say, “Regrets, my heart!”

He was there for some weeks, and before he went home they planted a pacemaker in him, which would restart that heart if it ever stopped again. After that he became more, not religious really, but maybe spiritual. He went on to become head of the Northern Institute at McGill and spent much of his time flying to remote aboriginal communities, working with native teachers to develop and deliver educational programs in their own languages. He also travelled far and wide outside Canada: studied Siberian education in the USSR, spent a year at Cambridge as visiting scholar, had an institute named after him in Peru, quite well known all around.

Anyway I got my own Master’s of Education in 1984, at the same faculty at McGill. There was a ceremony in May of that year, which he would have attended had he not been off on one of his many Northern adventures.

And two years after that, in 1986, at Iqaluit on Baffin Island, the pacemaker failed during the night, and they didn’t have the facilities to restart it. So he died for real that time, and is now buried in the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St Lawrence. But that’s another story.

So 4 years after that, in 1990, McGill decided that, due to all his good works, they would name an auditorium in the education building after him. I was living in Toronto at the time, but came down to Montreal for the dedication. My wife Roma and I spent the night at my mother’s house, and the next morning I was in the back room looking for something to read, to pass the time before the ceremony. And there on the shelf was a book called Calculus. Now neither he nor I had ever had much interest in that topic, but I pulled it down anyway and opened it at random, and stuck in that page there was a note, written by my father and addressed to me, and dated when I would have received my master’s degree. It’s in rather bad shape now, but I have finally laminated it and it should survive a while longer. Here it is:

May 4, 1984
Nino (that’s what my family called me),
How proud we are of you – happy M.Ed. – wish I was here to be on the stage and wink at you, next time for sure!
Hope the ceremony is brief and brilliant – (they seldom are either but maybe this time….)
Much love dear Ni and to your beautiful Roma.
See you one of these days – somewhere.
Much love
Daddy

And that afternoon the family went to the dedication of the Jack Cram auditorium. I don’t remember if the ceremony was either brief or brilliant, but there on the wall was a big photo of himself, winking down at the crowd!