When we both moved on to university, our paths diverged. Trevor did his first degree at Ottawa University before graduate work in criminology. I went to Carleton for English and remained there for my M.A. as did my fiancée, soon to be my wife. “Why do you want to get married?” I recall Trevor asking me. “Your life will not be your own! You won’t be able to afford to travel. Your cost of living will increase. What is the point? I want my independence!” Over the next fifty-five years he would from time to time harp on the benefits of a single life, and remained a lifelong bachelor. Yet his casual friendship never faltered. He would make sporadic trips from time to time from Kingston where he now lived, and regale me with details of his many travels across North America, first by bus, then by train, which became his passion. He was to make at least a dozen trips by rail across Canada, befriending all he met, and visiting his many acquaintances in cities across this vast land. Soon he graduated to aircraft, and travelled by air to London, Paris, Berlin, and points east and south, luxuriating in his first-class accommodation– “a real bed!” he told us, scoffing at the cramped seats that the rest of us had to put up with in the economy section– and reminding me of how free he was, unlike his many other friends, all of whom had settled, inexplicably, he appeared to think, for the wearisome and worrisome settled life of matrimony. He did well at work, and visited Eleanor, now a family physician from Natashquan in a remote part of Quebec, who had returned home to minister to patients there, and Katarina Witt, the former East German Olympic skater from “Karl-Marx Stadt” (now Chemnitz), whom he had met during a Canadian tour some time before. He was always only a phone call away when we needed travel advice, or help with some intractable problem he could help to solve, as he invariably did. In later years he would often begin his phone calls to us with a denunciation of government incompetence or carelessness. He was usually correct.
Despite a certain abruptness of manner characteristic of his impatience with dithering, Trevor was the soul of generosity, bequeathing most of his childhood toys to my younger brothers, and then to our children. One of these gifts, a Pro Hockey game made of long-lasting metal and featuring only players from the first six original NHL teams, has been, and still is, the favourite of our visiting children and grandchildren. He was generous with his time for junior colleagues at work as well, wishing he could have given all his saved sick leave to a single parent who was often away from work. He was a hero to a neighbour, an ageing widow a few doors away, who called him in the small hours once because her basement was flooding. “She didn’t even know how to turn her water off! Didn’t even know where the shut-off was,” he told us once in barely-concealed wonder. I did not tell him then that I didn’t know where ours was, either, but soon took steps to find out. He took early retirement and devoted himself to worthy causes; making deliveries for Meals on Wheels for years was one such. We followed his example and did likewise in Ottawa, until my knee made it difficult to continue. In retirement, his expertise was often called upon by former colleagues still at work. They contacted him for advice frequently.
I often wondered about his mother, whom he never referred to. Had there been a separation or a divorce? We were only to find out belatedly two years ago. As we had not heard from him for some time, we called him in Kingston, but there was never an answer. My wife Louise had the foresight to check the obituaries only to discover he had died of kidney failure after being offered dialysis and refusing it during an emergency hospital visit. A few days after his admission, in his early seventies, he had left us quietly. We had missed his funeral by a month or more. We subsequently learned from his friends that his ashes were to be interred at an Ottawa cemetery, and we went there then, to discover that he was to be buried beside his parents, whom I had always assumed had lived in Montreal. The Ottawa connection remains a mystery, but we were told that his mother had been killed in Montreal when Trevor was a child. A runaway truck’s brakes failed, and it had run into the back of the family’s Austin Westminster. Trevor had kept this sorrow to himself for the rest of his life. This just goes to show how little we know of the private lives and sufferings of others. May he rest in peace, after a life lived as he had wished it lived, on his own terms.
