April 10, 2022
April 10, 2022
The year since Matthew's death has passed quickly. I look at my little statuette* of him, at the small keepsake urn holding some of his ashes and at the many hundreds of photos of him. None of these can fill the hole he leaves behind. Wherever he is or isn't today, I still talk to him, angry that he took such poor care of his health and kept his poor health a secret. But posthumous criticism is pointless. Matthew lived as he wanted to live - larger than life and large in our lives. He was our family's lodestone, magnetic to us as we followed his phenomenal exploits, and magnetically attractive to those whom he met in his large world, no matter their station or standing in life. Matthew instinctively knew how to make friends - with a few words in their own languages, a joke or two, and by showing that he was interested in learning about them. He got to know the world from the grassroots up. And it made him amazingly, sophisticatedly knowledgable about the recent life and times of the countries where he lived and the people and places he visited. But for all the time he spent abroad from 1971 onward, Matthew was a Canadian deeply proud of the Canada he had known growing up. July 1st, he insisted, was Dominion Day, not Canada Day. And so on. He was full of such idiosyncrasies and we loved him all the more for them. Given our parents' overseas part during the Second World War, he was very proud of them and consequently took a deep interest in Canada's present day armed forces, its personnel and operations. Northwestern Ontario was the region he loved best - Port Arthur, where he was born, and Sioux Lookout, our father's home town. But he loved the whole country, even unto the extreme far north. And he had crisscrossed it many many times. The centre of his universe however was our family. There was no length he wouldn't go to in his generosity, especially to our mother, Barbara, but also to his brothers, his nieces and nephews and more recently four great nephews. We'll none of us forget his bombastic but loveable shout - "Who's your favourite uncle?" It was an assertion, not a question. Matthew was their favourite uncle, no question about it.
* These statuettes were gifts to participants at Moses Znaimer's ideacity conferences.
* These statuettes were gifts to participants at Moses Znaimer's ideacity conferences.