I’d also like to thank the people at the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, especially Frank Rubini, who was the person who recruited me to the Heart and Stroke Foundation. He persuaded me that writing this book would be a great idea, in the belief that people would read about my experience and understand more about Canada’s fourth largest killer. He also felt it would be an invaluable resource for stroke survivors and their families. With his determination and optimism, Frank has been with me and my family every step of the way in making this book a reality. He has also spent many a day and night travelling the country with me on national media tours and public awareness campaigns to make Canadians aware of the signs and symptoms of stroke. I know that our work has helped to save lives across the country. Thanks also to Diane Black, who bridged the gap between HSFC and Random House Canada in producing the book. I was convinced that by telling my story of recovery from stroke, I might help someone else who could be ignoring some very significant signs or symptoms— just like I had! All of these people I’ve just mentioned and many others are responsible for allowing me to continue living a full and rewarding life.
“Amazing Grace” is my favourite hymn. I think after you read this book, you’ll understand why. I feel like I’ve been given a second chance at life, and I don’t want to waste a second of it. I really do enjoy every day I have on this earth now. I try not to take myself too seriously, nor do I take any of the good things I’ve been given for granted. Most of all, I believe you can’t go wrong in life if you just try your best, whatever it is you choose to do and whatever the level of your abilities. I’ve always believed that and have tried to pass it on to my own kids as well as all those kids I’ve coached over the years. You can go a long way with that attitude, even when the deck seems stacked against you. It is a wonderful life, if you decide to make it that way. After all the hard times I and my family have been through as a result of my stroke, I can still wholeheartedly say that. Every day is full of surprises, and I genuinely look forward to every one. Ten years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to say that. If what I offer, in telling my story here, is a message of hope for even one person struggling with similar difficulties, or any kind of disability at all, I will feel that the effort has been worthwhile.
chapter one
A COUNTRY BOY
Home for me when I was growing up was a little white farmhouse on the banks of the Nith River, in a rural community called Canning, not too far from my current home in Brantford, Ontario. Even today, when I think of home, my mind fills with memories of that old house by the river. It would be true to say it remains at the heart of our family’s story, and that we all think of it as a special place. My daughter, Kim, lives there with her young family today. She swears the ghost of my mother, Mary Gretzky, watches over the house still. Knowing my mother, I believe that.
The Gretzky farm wasn’t very big, just thirty-three acres, but it was typical of the family farms in the area at the time. The house was built in 1831—in fact, it was once the town’s one and only hotel—when Canning was a prosperous and growing community and everyone was hoping that the train would eventually come through. Instead, the tracks went to nearby Paris, and Canning became a quiet, rural settlement instead of a bustling town.
Like everyone else in the area, we grew our own fruit and vegetables and were self-sufficient when it came to feeding ourselves. My mother was a great cook, and I remember eating very well— good, old-country, Polish food. Her perogies—pronounced pera-ha in our house—were second to none (and in her honour, Wayne has put them on the menu at his restaurant in Toronto). My father, who was from Russia, made great wine. Having a glass of wine with your meal is part and parcel of growing up in a European culture. His remedy for a cold, and a good remedy it is, was to heat up some wine and drink it with tea. Add lemon and sugar, that’s it. Cure your cold, absolutely!
We had chickens, ducks, cows and pigs. We sold milk from the cows, raised our own feed and had our own eggs. We also ate fish regularly from the river, mostly pike and bass. Bass were the best. I loved fishing. I’d go in the morning and wouldn’t come back until late at night. I’d row up and down the river in an old boat. My mother would clean and cook the fish we brought home, and they made up the most delicious meals I can remember. Back then, you could eat as much fish as you wanted out of the river. I carried my love of fishing into adulthood and have spent many a peaceful time with buddies of mine out there casting. I don’t do it as much now, but I used to go every weekend. I loved taking the kids out, nieces and nephews included, and teaching them how to fish, too.
We also occasionally hunted and trapped on our property— just small game, like rabbits or muskrat—but I didn’t continue with the hunting. My brother Albert tells me he never touched a gun after an incident that happened when we were young teenagers. We were prowling the woods out back of the farm when he accidentally took a shot that narrowly missed me. I had no idea what a close call it was until he told me himself. I was very thankful, as I’m sure the rabbit who got away that day was, too.
We had an old-fashioned, rural life. Helping us out on the farm was a big old plowhorse named Bob. We were all very fond of that horse, and it was a sad day when he died after choking on a stalk of corn. Everybody will tell you how good that horse was. So gentle. He would stand there on the front lawn, and my little sister, Ellen, would walk between his legs. My mother would tell the rest of us not to run or we’d scare the horse and he’d step on our baby sister. But Bob never hurt Ellen or anyone else.
On a regular day, we had our chores to do before we went to school. There were cows to milk, and the hay had to be put down for them. We had to make sure all the animals were fed. During harvest time, most of the local kids would leave school to work in the fields. On our farm, we’d pick cucumbers from dawn till dusk. The whole family pitched in, and you never questioned that the work had to be done. When you live on a farm and the fields are full of vegetables in need of picking, you just have to do it or the crop rots—and my parents would never have allowed that kind of waste. Then we would take Bob all the way from Canning to Paris, hitched up to a buggy filled with cucumbers. We’d transport bags and bags of them down to the processing plant. That was our way of life. I didn’t know it was work until I got to high school and met kids who didn’t live on farms.
That was only fifty years ago, but when I tell my kids and grandkids what life was like back then, I know they have trouble imagining it. It was another world. No TV, no computer games, no Pokémon, no pizza delivered to the door, no designer T-shirts or running shoes. Sometimes it’s hard for me to believe how different it was back then, too! We didn’t have much of anything in the way of material possessions, just the basics.
Like many of the men in the area, my father worked for years at Penman’s, the textile factory in nearby Paris, and his wages never reached fifty dollars a week. If we needed something, he’d work overtime. As my sister Jennie likes to say, our mother could take a dollar and squeeze it until it made two. She had no choice. It was a matter of survival. I remember bringing little peeping chicks in from the barn to the kitchen to keep them warm, because somehow they had hatched in the middle of winter—it’s not supposed to happen, but it does. We kept these chicks in the kitchen, so they wouldn’t freeze to death in the barn. We didn’t want to lose them. That’s how it was. It was that simple. Nobody thought anything of it.
By today’s standards, it might seem that we were poor, but we didn’t feel poor. Everyone in the community lived the same way. We had what we needed in the way of food, clothing and shelter, and we weren’t aware of any other way of living. As new immigrants to Canada, my parents were just happy to have a small plot of land to call their own and a safe place where they could raise their children in peace.
My father, Tony Gretzky, had gone to Chicago from Russia before he came to Canada. His family had been landowners in the old country, supporters of the czar. When anyone asked my father if he was Russian, he’d say, �
�Nyet. Belarus,” meaning, White Russian, the upper class. In the early years of the twentieth century, when the Russian Revolution was brewing, many White Russians living in the Ukraine saw the writing on the wall, and my grandfather was among those who decided his family should get out before it became dangerous. That was a wise move! My father ended up in the United States. When the First World War broke out and he was going to join the U.S. Army, someone said to him, “You should join the Canadian army, they treat you better.” So that’s what he did. He served overseas and returned to Canada afterwards. He was extremely proud of having fought for this country and was a rank-and-file member of the Paris Legion. Right into his old age, when he was very frail, he insisted on putting on his uniform and attending Remembrance Day ceremonies every year. “I have to,” he’d say, “I have to.” I don’t think he missed a single one while he could still walk. He strongly believed it was his duty to honour and never forget his fallen comrades. We’re very proud of Tony Gretzky ourselves. Photographs of him from his war years are prominently displayed on our walls, and we’ve kept his war medals.
My dad—we called him Tato—was a very calm man, gracious, the kind of person who never met a stranger. And very proud, especially when it came to his house. He felt he was as good as anybody. You could talk to him about anything. I’d say my mother was the practical one, while my father was more of a thinker and dreamer. If it weren’t for my mother, I don’t know that the farm would have run quite as efficiently as it did. My father did a lot of work, but she really ran the place.
Mary, my mother, came to Canada from Poland in 1928, and that’s when my parents met in Toronto. They moved to the farm in Canning in 1931. They spoke Ukrainian at home, and that was my first language. Obviously, it’s imprinted very deeply in me, because right after I had my stroke, that’s what I was speaking when I first regained consciousness. According to my brother Albert, who was one of the few people who could understand what the heck I was saying, it was as though, in my mind, I was transported back to my early years on the farm. Apparently I kept asking whether the chickens had been fed. (You can take the boy out of the country …)
There were seven children in our family. I was number five, after my half-sister, Olga (who was the child of my father’s first marriage and came over from Russia with him, without her mother), Edward, Sophie and Jennie. Albert came after me and then the youngest, Ellen, who was born with Down’s syndrome. Al tells me I was my mother’s favourite. In fact, he recalls feeling jealous of me when we were kids!
ALBERT GRETZKY: He was Mama’s pet. I don’t know whether Mother knew something we didn’t back then. For her, when he was still a baby, he could walk on water. Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean that in a nice way, now. I didn’t think so at the time. But we’ve overcome that. When we grew up to be adults we understood, you know, a parent’s a parent, and all parents have favourites.
Mother made great pies, just incredible. Apple, pear, peach, you name it. An abundance. But if there was raisin pie and that’s all there was left, for my brother, who didn’t like raisin pie, well, she would make one special, so he didn’t have to eat it. The rest of us had to eat it, but he got peach or cherry, whatever.
I do admit that my mother treated me very well, that we had a great bond. I’ve lost a lot of memories as a result of my stroke, but one from childhood that remains completely vivid is walking by my mother’s side—I must have been five or six—holding her hand, as she took me to the one-room schoolhouse a mile up the road for the first day of school. I remember her telling me very firmly and repeatedly not to be scared. And walking beside her like that, I wasn’t.
I have the utmost admiration and respect for what my mother went through to raise her family, all the hard work she did every day of her life. I never asked her if this story is true, but my understanding is that she gave birth to at least one of her children in the house and then was back in the field working, the same day. She was a strong woman who did what she had to to get by and didn’t complain about her lot in life. She was a devout Roman Catholic and her moral code ruled in our little farmhouse on the river. She was the disciplinarian in the family, very strict with us and very clear about the standards of behaviour we had to meet. To this day, I can never walk through a door before a lady, because I would get a cuff across the head from my mother if I ever showed such disrespect. To her, it was essential that we prove ourselves to be upstanding and equal members of the community. Like so many immigrants, she must have struggled with the sense of being an outsider when she arrived in Canada. In the early years, she couldn’t speak English, though she eventually learned it from all of us and got to the point where she could speak it, read the paper and watch TV, understanding everything. I remember when Mama turned eighty-four. She had a quick wit, and when a reporter asked her, “Well Mrs. Gretzky, how does it feel to be eighty-four?” she said, “I don’t know, I’ve never been eighty-four before.” I thought that was just a fantastic answer. She’d come a long way, being able to deliver a response like that. In the beginning, when my father was at work and us kids were at school, she’d hide if someone came knocking at the door, because she couldn’t speak English. I think she felt intimidated by our English-speaking Canadian neighbours, although many were immigrants just like us. There was a mix of ethnic groups: Dutch, German, Hungarian, Slovakian, Ukrainian, everything.
As far as my mother was concerned, her kids were just as good as anyone else and we deserved every opportunity to make something of ourselves. In that way, she really encouraged us, as did my dad, to work hard and do our best in whatever pursuits we chose. This huge commitment she had to her family, her forceful personality and her strong belief system had an impact on all of us, I think, and our own kids, too. That’s why it doesn’t surprise me when my daughter, Kim, who went to live in the house with my mother and Ellen for several years before my mother died in 1988, tells me she’s sure her grandmother’s ghost is still there.
My mother used to sit in a rocking chair in the corner of the kitchen, reading the newspaper—Kim swears that when she walks in there sometimes, she can hear paper rattling. One time, Kim put a kettle on the stove and turned on the burner, then left the kitchen for a couple of minutes. When she got back, the burner had been turned off. There was no one else in the house, and Kim is not old enough to be forgetful like me. When she told me this, I said, “You know, your grandmother just hated it when anyone would put the stove on and leave the room.”
Finally, Kim has witnessed some very strange behaviour in one of her dogs. My mother couldn’t stand to see dogs in the house, but Kim allows hers inside. Once, when her dog went in what had been my mother’s bedroom, he seemed agitated and avoided the side of the bed she used to sleep on, as though someone was still there! People have asked Kim whether she feels scared, and she says, “Why would I be scared? It’s Grandma. She’s just looking after us, the way she always did.”
I learned to be protective of my sister Ellen from an early age. All of my siblings did. It’s an old saying, and unfortunately true: kids can be cruel. We accepted Ellen as she was, but people’s attitudes towards those with mental and physical disabilities were so different back then. There was a lot of misunderstanding, a sense of shame that was attached to a family with a child like Ellen, though I don’t remember ever feeling that. Families with Down’s syndrome children had to either take care of them as best they could, or sign them away to an institution forever, where they’d be looked after by strangers. My mother certainly wasn’t going to allow that to happen. It simply wouldn’t have entered her mind. But she never really understood or accepted that Ellen was the way she was from before birth, either. Ellen fell and hit her head as a baby, and my mother was convinced that that fall caused her to be the way she was.
We did the best we could. I remember thinking it would be a good idea for Ellen to attend the one-room schoolhouse along with the rest of us. Mrs. Dafoe, the teacher, was a wonderful, smiling, redheaded woman, very kind, whose hu
sband started one of the first tobacco farms in the area. She was an absolute angel. I persuaded her to let Ellen come, and for a few years, she did. I’d usually walk Ellen to school, and Albert would walk her home. I did have to stand up for her sometimes and defend her against the kids’ teasing. I would always do that.
I try to imagine how difficult this was: to let Ellen go out into the world, in public, for everybody to see, this child who wasn’t “right.” That was really big. You have to remember, we’re talking about a community of people from the “old country,” with old-country ways and beliefs that we would find strange today.
On Family, Hockey and Healing Page 2