by David Suzuki
When Nana and Severn went hiking in the Annapurna circuit in Nepal in 2003, they met the father of one of their guides and were stunned to learn he was only in his forties. Life in Nepal is difficult, and to live more than forty years qualifies a person as an elder there. It’s the same in many First Nations communities, where poverty, alcohol abuse, diabetes, and racism exact a heavy toll, and where average life expectancy can be twenty years less than in the rest of society. There are elders who may be in their forties and who look old.
Like every other aspect of our lives, aging has a genetic component—so yes, long-lived fruit flies or vinegar worms can be selected out and bred so that their offspring will have long lives. Some people have lineages that suggest genes may be partly responsible for long lives. One or two genes may be directly involved in early-onset dementia, certain cancers, and heart diseases, and biotechnology may have a role to play in preventing those diseases. But those who think that longevity may be increased by genetic engineering should remember that for most people, the last years of a long life are often plagued by health and social problems. Surely the challenge is not to prolong a poor quality of life but to improve the quality of those last years.
When I was in my teens, I thought anyone over thirty was really old, and I saw that perspective perpetuated by your parents when they were teenagers. Now that I am an old man, I think, “Gee, that sixty-five-year-old looks pretty good,” while I know that you, my grandchildren, think, “Wow, look at that old person!” It’s all in your perspective. I still think I’m a relatively young man, but when I look in the mirror in the morning, I am shocked at the old face looking back at me. When I look at pictures of some of the celebrities you all know very well and remark, “Hey, she’s gorgeous,” it’s the echoes of memories and feelings from my young man’s brain that respond. And you react with, “Grandpa, that’s disgusting!”
I am appalled at the time, expertise, and money spent trying to help people who are aging “stay young.” Do not think that cosmetic surgery can somehow miraculously stave off the aging process; it deals with the most trivial part of aging, our external appearance, and I am dumb-founded that so much of medicine is now devoted not to the treatment of illness or life-threatening problems, but to physical appearance. In a time when so many people around the world do not have access to even the most minimal medical care, it is disgusting to think of the money made and skills wasted on cosmetic surgery.
Acceptance of aging is part of getting older; some call it wisdom. And when we accept what we are, then we define ourselves and no longer care how others see us. Believe me, that is totally liberating and gives power to an elder who is speaking.
Your grandmothers, Joane and Tara, were beautiful young women, and it was a tremendous privilege to win their approval and spend a part of my life with each of them as their husband. Today, they would not be called beautiful in the way that women in their twenties and thirties are, but to me, they radiate a beauty. When I look at them, I don’t see them in that sexually charged (and therefore totally distorted) way I did when I was a young man. When I was a teenager and testosterone was high, almost any woman looked attractive. Today I look at Joane and Tara through the lens of our shared experiences, and that’s what their beauty is to me. To see them as a stranger might, I have to shake my head and deliberately think, “If I were meeting them for the first time, how would they look?” It’s the same with your mothers, my daughters. When I see them, I think they are beautiful, and they always will be because they are the sum of memories from their birth onward, and how can that be anything but beautiful?
I still haven’t broached the question of how we deal with death itself. When I was a boy, death was more familiar. In my childhood, diseases like leukemia, smallpox, and polio were feared. You have lived through a time when those big killers have been greatly controlled by drugs and vaccines, while the real problems of malnutrition and poverty are not as obvious in Canada as in poorer countries. Now death is something far less familiar for most of us. The first dead person I saw was when we were living in camps in the Slocan Valley during World War ii. I must have been about seven or eight. It was summer and I was walking to the beach to go swimming in Slocan Lake when I heard a woman shrieking, “Takebo! Takebo!” in a terrible way I had never heard before. She was running toward the beach, so I followed her. There on the sand was the body of a boy covered in a blanket, surrounded by a crowd. It was the woman’s son. I squeezed past people’s legs to get a glimpse. All I could see was the blanket and a wet leg protruding from under it. I did not feel sadness or horror that he had drowned but rather was curious to see a dead person for the first time. What made the biggest impression was the sight of a grasshopper that had jumped onto the boy’s wet leg. Somehow it seemed so incongruous that an insect would intrude in that moment.
The most difficult situation to handle is when young people die. And on reservations we have seen so many people die far too young. There is an epidemic of premature death among First Nations, whether through car accidents, diabetes, heart attack, or suicide. To me, the suicides are most horrifying. If someone in their thirties or forties doesn’t or can’t take care of themselves properly and dies of alcoholism or of heart attack through obesity, we resign ourselves to that early death. But when kids in their teens and early twenties deliberately die by their own hands, that is scandalous. Youth are the future. They have to have hope and the feeling that they have everything to live for. And yes, it is scandalous to see the murders of so many indigenous women, whose deaths are ignored, covered up, or rationalized as their own fault; there should be a Royal Commission of Inquiry to investigate them. But suicide is another matter. I cannot bear the thought of the desperation of youth who deliberately take their own lives out of a sense of hopelessness so profound that they have no reason to go on and prefer to die. All of us should be outraged that dealing with First Nations suicides is not one of the highest priorities of our government and our society.
One of the most painful deaths I’ve experienced was when Shivaji—Ashish and Kajul Duttagupta’s child—was hit by a car. Nana and I had met Ashish, a young Drosophila (fruit-fly) geneticist at the University of Calcutta, when we were travelling the world in 1972. I had contacted Drosophila geneticists in each country we were passing through, asking if it was possible to visit the lab and give a talk on my own work. Ashish was one of the ones who took me up on it, and Nana and I were both absolutely smitten with him.
Ashish and I were the same age, and he had grown up in the part of Bengal that became West Pakistan after partition in 1947. As Hindus, his family had to leave there to move to what would become the province of Bengal in India, and as the lines of Muslims and Hindus passed each other, violence broke out between them and thousands were slaughtered on both sides. Ashish told me he witnessed so many killings and helped cremate so many bodies that he was sick at heart. He used to tell me that the good news was that more than half his life was over.
Because of all the hatred and suffering he had witnessed, Ashish did not want to bring a child into such a world, but Kajul suffered terribly, because in India not having a child is an awful fate for a woman. She would come home every day in tears because of the taunting she received as a childless woman and begged Ashish to relent. So he did, and they had one child, Shivaji, or Ronnie, as they called him. And what a boy he was. You know, if you ask primary-school teachers about special kids, often they will describe someone who is bright, gets along so well with everybody, and is helpful in every way. Those kids come along once in a generation, and they stand out. Shivaji was one of them.
Twice I was able to get funding for Ashish to come and work in my lab for a year. Each time, the people in the lab adored him, because he was so interested in everything going on, so helpful and cooperative, so open and guileless. Ashish and his family stayed in a basement apartment of my parents’ house, and he called my parents Mommy and Daddy. My parents in turn loved Ashish and Kajul and adored their son. Shivaji
was very popular with students and teachers and loved school. Every day, Kajul would walk with Shivaji to the school, but one day, he was standing on her right, waiting for cars to go by, when he suddenly darted out into the street. A car coming from the left struck him. I think he was killed instantly, but paramedics started his heart and rushed him to hospital.
I was way up in northern Alberta in a community called Slave Lake, judging a science fair, when Nana called to say Shivaji had been hit by a car. I rushed back to Vancouver as quickly as plane connections could get me there, and when I arrived, I had never seen anyone in such a distraught state as Ashish was. I had thought that coming from a teeming nation where death was such a familiar part of modern history, Ashish and Kajul might be better able to deal with death. But Ashish was absolutely devastated. He called me his guru, and when I walked in, he dropped to his knees, held my hands, and looked up at me with a face contorted with grief and despair and begged, “Guru, please give me one reason why I should go on living. All that ever mattered to me is gone.” And I couldn’t give him an answer, because he had lost the most precious thing in the world to him. I was there when a doctor turned off the machine that was pumping air into Shivaji’s body, and it took an agonizing eternity before his heart finally stopped beating.
Ashish insisted on observing the ritual of washing and wrapping his son’s body before cremation. I cannot imagine how terrible that must have been for him. At the crematorium, we had to hold him up, and when the casket arrived and was put on rollers, he collapsed in grief. Kajul grieved silently. Some said she shouldn’t keep it in, but I know she felt that Shivaji’s death was her fault, and it tormented her.
I have visited Ashish and Kajul in Calcutta, and they came back to Vancouver once to visit the places where Shivaji played and was hit. They have set up a scholarship at the school in his name, but they have never recovered from the loss. Years later, I was able to give Ashish a reason for living after Shivaji’s death. He had become an ardent campaigner to stop the corruption in university that rewarded children of wealthy people; I told him that when he lost Shivaji, death held no fear for him, and that gave him the power to wade so fearlessly into battles with the university. I doubt that this gave him much comfort, however.
I was present when both of my parents and Nana’s dad died. Actually, I was in Toronto filming The Nature of Things when Tara called to say Mom had suffered a massive heart attack, her heart had been started again, and she was in the hospital. I remember saying to the staff at the show, “I think my mother has died.” When I got home to Vancouver, my sisters were there at the hospital, and we all stayed in the room with Mom until she stopped breathing six days later.
Mom had been suffering from dementia for years, though she never failed to recognize us, could conduct a coherent conversation, and still enjoyed life. She had had a meal with Dad, then had gone to a movie, and was walking arm in arm with him when she simply dropped dead of a heart attack. As Dad said, “She had a good death.” The problem was that when the ambulance pulled up, the paramedics were obligated to administer resuscitation immediately. They didn’t know that Mom had dementia or that her heart had stopped for close to ten minutes or that she would be in a vegetative state if she were revived. So they got her heart going and took her to the hospital, where she never regained consciousness. But my sisters and Dad and I were able to spend that week in hospital both mourning and celebrating that unassuming, hardworking woman who had spent her life taking care of us. She was a good woman, and she had been rewarded with a good death.
Dad mourned her loss for about a year by drinking to excess. But he pulled out of it, I think as much out of love for Severn and Sarika, whom he adored and lavished with attention every day. He lived for ten years after Mom died and found new love with Fumiko Gondo, an immigrant from Japan of Korean ancestry. They met through a shared experience of arthritis. Dad’s death was a shock to Fumiko, because she had thought he was so strong that she could keep him alive with food she brought him. I think that when she died a few years later, it was partly from a broken heart. He had treated her so well.
As you know, Dad was my great teacher and mentor. In 1994 he was dying, so I moved in to care for him the last month of his life. And it was a joyous time. He wasn’t in pain, he wasn’t afraid of death, and he kept saying, “David, I die a rich man,” which was puzzling because he had little money and Tara and I were subsidizing him.
Over the weeks I cared for him, we laughed and cried, we talked and talked, but he never once mentioned a closetful of fancy clothes, a big car, or the house he owned in London, Ontario—that’s just stuff. We talked about what mattered most to him, and it was all about family, friends, neighbours, and the things we did together. That was my father’s wealth, and in those, he was truly a rich man.
When any of us is on our deathbed and reflects on the things that make us proud and happy, I am sure it will not be power or stuff, money or fame; it will be about people and the kind of world and values we leave behind. I hope that at the end of my life, I will be like Dad—in no pain, with no fear of death, and with a mind that is still active. I want you all to be there, not so you can grieve for me, but so I can tell you I did the best I could for your future. I’m just one person, and I couldn’t expect to save the future, but I’m like the hummingbird in the South American indigenous story, the one who carried a drop of water in its beak to put on a forest fire. He did this over and over even though all the other animals laughed at him and said it wouldn’t make any difference. He kept trying because, as he said, “I’m doing the best I can.” I love you all. You have made my life so worthwhile. Thank you.
{thirteen}
TAMO
DEAR TAMO, MY FIRST GRANDCHILD,
I am so proud that you recently participated in the protest against the Kinder Morgan pipeline in British Columbia. You did what I would have done myself were it not a risk to my position as host of The Nature of Things. After you were arrested (and later cleared of all charges) for civil disobedience, your mom asked me to write a letter of support to a judge. It was never used, but here is the gist of what I wrote:
The world is on a collision course with the things that keep us alive and healthy—the air, water, soil, and variety of life. Corporations, especially those with head offices in some other part of the country or the world, care little for the interests of local ecosystems or communities except insofar as they interfere with the drive to maximize profit for shareholders. They have no obligation to protect local ecosystems or communities. Their sole goal is to make as much money as they can get away with.
You are fighting for the world that will be left to your generation in the future. I believe that what Kinder Morgan and companies like it are doing is what your aunt Severn calls an “intergenerational crime,” but there are no legal precedents to pursue criminal charges on that basis.
Before corporations had become so powerful, every generation aspired to leave a better future to their children. That is not on the corporate agenda. There are few legal avenues to protest what I believe is the criminal activity of corporations like Kinder Morgan, so citizens like you are being forced to participate in civil disobedience.
You are taking an active role in the struggle for human rights, social justice, and environmental protection. And you have done this without attempting to ride on or hide under my coattails. You are a role model for young people today.
That is some of what I wrote on your behalf.
When you were born, Auntie Sarika was still a child and Auntie Severn was a young teenager, so you had heavy competition to get me to pay attention, but you have done that. You have used your skills in social media and snowboarding to attract kids to your website, Beyond Boarding, with videos of your boarding stunts, and then you give them information about environmental issues. And through your adventures in Costa Rica and South America you have shown that it’s fun and rewarding to help other people and creatures. When you tackled the problems of the North
ern Gateway pipeline and the tar sands, you took young people on a fun adventure—travelling in your vegetable-oil-burning bus, hiking up mountains covered with virgin snow, and meeting fascinating characters along the way. Watching the film you made of this adventure, I could see why young people would get hooked. And you ended up in Tahltan country—the Sacred Headwaters—where you learned so much by living with the blockaders and helping to get their story out on social media.
How wonderful that your mom and dad—Tamiko and Eduardo—were avid outdoorspeople and instilled in you a love of nature. They even took you winter camping, something I never did when your mom was a child.
When I was a teenager back in the 1950s, dating a white girl was still a scary thing. Japanese people had been vilified as perpetrators of a “sneak attack” on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and all through World War ii, they were portrayed as slant-eyed, bucktoothed fanatics prepared to die for the emperor. I thought I looked just like the caricatures in the posters and grew up feeling self-conscious about my small eyes. Although I yearned to, I never dated a white girl in high school; even in college, I scanned the freshman books for Asian girls at the all-women Smith and Mount Holyoke colleges each year.
I am astonished and gratified that race is not the barrier to dating it once was. Your father, a Chilean Canadian, gave us a greater interest in what was going on in South America, and today I believe it is countries on that continent—Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia, Uruguay, Venezuela, and Cuba—where significant change is happening. Ecuador and Bolivia have actually enshrined Pachamama (Mother Earth) in their constitutions!