1960 when I leaned over my dad’s coffin at Everest Funeral Home in what is now Thunder Bay and kissed his waxen forehead, dried my tears, and became the man of the family at age seventeen.
Now in August 1980 on the St. Mary’s riverbank in Sault Ste. Marie, my mother dead in the hospital behind me, I was destined to return to the Everest Funeral Home and all its agonizing memories. My mother had willed it. She had made me promise to bring her back home to Thunder Bay, Everest, and her final resting place in Dad’s grave at St. Andrew’s Cemetery.
So two days after her death, I fulfilled the promise and stood in the sunshine near the heart of downtown Thunder Bay, emotions exploding inside my chest, tears rimming my eyes. The viewing parlour inside Everest Funeral Home was dim and close, the air sickeningly sweet with the smell of dying flowers. When I saw her in the coffin, I bolted back outside. It wasn’t so much the coffin, or the atmosphere in which it sat. I had been to Everest many times before. Poling family dead all went to Everest, then made the short trip across the street to St. Andrew’s Roman Catholic Church, then up the hill to the cemetery. As a child, adolescent, and adult, I had kneeled at coffins there to touch the stiff hands of four grandparents and, most horribly, the younglooking man with a full head of black hair. My father died on us when he was forty-four, and when he did, I knew that nothing else in life could ever hurt as much.
Everest itself did not scare me. I was there as promised. I brought my mother home from the place where she had fled when my father died. She had made me promise to ignore the feelings of her second husband and to take her body out of Sault Ste. Marie, the Soo or Sault for short, and bring her to Thunder Bay to be buried beside Dad. She knew this request would hurt Bill Brooks, the Algoma Steel foreman she married after moving to the Soo to escape the misfortunes that had fallen on us. She had been adamant, on her deathbed and in her will written at Christmas 1978, soon after she discovered her bladder cancer: “In the event of my death I am to be brought home to Thunder Bay and buried with my beloved husband Ray Poling. No ifs, ands or buts. That’s the way I want it.”
The will indicated that she knew she was relegating Bill Brooks to be a bystanding mourner at her funeral, with the added hurt of knowing she had married him out of necessity.
She wrote, “Sometimes circumstances force one to do things that we do not care to do. I know, Jim, you did not approve but in my case it was a necessity so my kids could live and eat the way they were accustomed. I love you all dearly and just feel badly I was unable to share my home and feelings openly. But then I’m sure you understand.”
I was not sure that I did understand. I never took to Bill Brooks, but then how many young men accept the new husbands of their widowed mothers? Bill would arrive at Everest soon for the wake, and I felt sorry that he had to come to this strange place in a strange city to see his wife buried with her first husband.
The body of my mother, Veronica, had arrived earlier in the day in a hearse, another bizarre twist she had thrown into her funeral arrangements. She had insisted that I promise to have her driven from the Soo to Thunder Bay, called Port Arthur and Fort William when she moved to the Soo. She feared flying as much as she feared the water and could not tolerate the thought of being on an airplane, even as a corpse. So I hired a hearse to drive her body seven hundred kilometres on a two-lane highway around the rocky shore of Lake Superior. The ride must have been rough because when they opened the coffin for the viewing, there was a dark red bruise at the corner of her mouth.
Seeing her bruised face was the final drop of water falling into a glass filled to the rim. My sorrow overflowed and I turned on my heels and hurried outside. Emotions washed over me like the waves beating against the stone breakwater in Thunder Bay harbour. To hold them back, I lifted my head and stared at the cars whizzing by on the street where maroon and yellow streetcars once clattered and clanged their way to and from downtown. In the old days, people hopped on and off the cars as they pleased. Those not in a hurry, or not too tired, walked the sidewalks, pausing occasionally to exchange greetings and news with a friend or neighbour.
The only person on foot on this day was an older lady carefully navigating the broad steps of St. Andrew’s Church, a centre of our family life a lifetime ago. Soon I would cross the street and climb those same steps, following slowly and sadly behind a coffin in a family ritual repeated many times in the past.
The distraction of the cars and the lady climbing the church steps were not enough to stop the dam that was about to burst inside me. As the final stress fractures started to let loose the sobbing, pinpoints of red light blipped weakly along Algoma Street, becoming stronger and more urgent as they came closer. They stopped down the street from the rear of St. Andrew’s and I knew they were at St. Joseph’s Hospital. More flashing lights gathered and stopped, congesting the street outside the hospital entrance.
St. Joseph’s had never seen such a traffic jam of emergency lights before. This was no delivery of bumped and bruised victims of a two-car fender-bender. Something big was happening and my reporter instincts yanked me off the edge of an emotional breakdown and told me to find out what it was. I loped across the street and almost ran down a passerby hurrying from the hospital scene. I couldn’t wait to get the details, so I stopped him to ask what the commotion was about.
The man explained breathlessly that an ambulance had brought Terry Fox into the hospital. The news jolted me. What were the chances of me running across Terry Fox, someone who had become an important part of my work as a journalist? I asked what happened. Was he hit by a transport?
Reporters always conjure up the worst scenarios. Terry Fox smacked down by a runaway transport while he ran his Marathon of Hope for cancer was a story too huge to even imagine. The passerby said he didn’t know, but one of the cops thought he was sick again.
I stopped to consider the information. Terry Fox was a skinny kid with ruddy-faced determination and a head of curly hair that looked like steel-wool pot scrubber. He lost a leg to cancer and dreamed of running across Canada from sea to sea to raise money for cancer research. He travelled from his West Coast home to St. John’s, Newfoundland in April and on the twelfth of that month in 1980 dipped his artificial leg into the Atlantic Ocean and started running the roughly 7,500 kilometres back home to the Pacific.
His Marathon of Hope began as the usual oddity in the news. People often biked, marched, or rolled hula hoops along the highways to raise money and attention for one cause or other. The reporters in the towns they passed through paid small attention to them.
Sometime during the spring, the Terry Fox run had grown beyond just another highway sideshow. It appeared organized and determined. By June he had ran all the way into Ontario, and the people of the country’s most populous province began to pay attention. The white T-shirt, running shorts, and artificial leg that he threw forward in a trademark gait, began making the daily news. He became a star in southern Ontario, and as he rounded the top of Lake Superior, people realized that this crazy kid might run all the way across the country on one leg. People gathered at the roadside to cheer him on. Donations piled up like a blizzard pushing snow against a fence. National reporters elbowed aside the locals to get at the story.
I owned part of this story. I was the bureau chief for the Canadian Press (CP) — the national news service — in Vancouver and Terry Fox lived in the Vancouver suburb of Port Coquitlam. I had already began sketching some plans for when he crossed the Prairies, ran through the mountains, and down the slope to the Pacific where he would dip his plastic leg in triumph. This would be a dream news event: a starry-eyed cancer kid completing an incredible journey of hope, courage, and sheer guts.
The only reason I wasn’t back in Vancouver making coverage arrangements for his triumphant return was Veronica’s illness and now her death.
Being in Thunder Bay with Terry Fox in some kind of trouble could be considered, in other circumstances, a stroke of journalistic good fortune. I needed
