Monday, October 18th, 2021 marks a century since my Dad’s birth.

James Evan Love, my Dad, was born a century ago. A century. That still blows my mind.

In 1921, countries and families were still healing from World War I, not to mention the Influenza epidemic. Prohibition was just ending in BC, and Canadian scientists had just discovered insulin. The RCMP had recently been formed from the old Northwest Mounted and Dominion Police forces. Radio had only been in Canada for 20 or 30 years and was largely government-run or experimental (the CBC wouldn’t exist on radio until the mid-thirties).

In Prince Rupert, where my Dad was born, the city was busily upgrading its hydro-electric power and telephone systems as the population grew.

My Dad has been gone since 1989, but it doesn’t always feel that long ago. The passage of time feels less distinct to me the older I get. The farther ahead I get from events, the shorter the distance seems too. Maybe at 55, time has become subjective for me.

People can be contradictory and complex. They can act against their professed ideals, or against their self-interest or self-preservation. We also sometimes think of personal values as being immutable – like unchanging ideals – but people make snap decisions in the heat of the moment, or convince themselves that they can manage a situation that’s well beyond their abilities. The fact is, nobody really knows what’s coming down the road at them.

We tell ourselves all kinds of little fictions and make lots of little guesses just to get through each week. Adults do their best and make all kinds of mistakes.

So in spite of the contradictions in human behaviour and my slightly addled perception of time, there are still a bunch of memories of my Dad that I can still call up on the centenary of his birth, to try and sketch out a little portrait.

The Good Stuff is easy

The good stuff about my Dad is simple and pretty easy to talk about…

My Dad always worked hard. He liked working, solving problems, or being some boss’s go to guy – someone whom the team could depend on. I think he got this sense of duty from his Dad, my Grandpa Love.

Work responsibilities made Dad feel capable and strong. In fact, he seemed to like adventurous, heroic, or dangerous occupations.

As a young man, he’d had a million jobs and adventures. He’d worked in a mining camp, been a welder and a truck driver, and ridden horses and worked as a stable hand. He rode well, and took part in at least one novelty riding contest.

Near the end of WWII, he’d been a Military Policeman and a good marksman with a rifle. After getting out of the army, he’d worked as a firefighter in Victoria, and later re-entered the military, getting his college-level education in radio and electronics in the RCAF.

In mid-life, as an RF Engineer in TV and radio, he climbed radio towers as part of his site maintenance duties. His station manager at CFQC TV in Saskatoon said that he enjoyed getting way up on those transmission towers. It all sounded so adventurous and exciting – heroic, even. He seemed like the Marlboro Man, John Wayne, and the Witchita Lineman.

By the time I was born, my Dad was 45 and had already lived a lot of life. We were his second family, although I wouldn’t be told that until I was about 12 or 13. In a lot of ways, I really didn’t know him, except through the stories he told us. He was my hero while I was a little boy.

Dad was an energetic storyteller, and loved spinning yarns about his glory days. Dad never brought his work home with him – he told the stories that were exciting or that made him look good, but rarely did he share what was really going on. Once in a while, he’d tell us an intense story about ripping around on his motorcycle in the army, or flying in a bomber in the air force.

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One night after he’d been drinking, he told me about retrieving the remains of a friend’s wife after a terrible house fire, when he’d been a fireman in Victoria. The details he told me were gruesome and specific about what happens to a human body under extreme heat. As I got older and reflected on some of Dad’s more troubling adventures, I wondered if he had some PTSD to deal with under the hood. That now seems quite likely. Maybe the more you take from life, the more it takes from you.

From the time I turned eleven or so, Dad became a single parent raising me and my sister. He could cook and he tried to make sure that we ate a hot meal at every dinner. Sometimes it was a nice roast beef, other times it was ground beef with a strange grey gravy, and sometimes it was just boiled hot dogs. My favourite thing that Dad made us was Hamburger Helper – the one with the wide flat noodles and the brown gravy.

Bikes. He bought me and my sister new bikes every few years. How could a kid ever explore and get in trouble in the outside world without a bike?

He was a materialist who understood technology and science. He tried to explain it to me from time to time. It was only years later in college and in my jobs that I’d come to appreciate how sub-atomic particles and the electromagnetic spectrum underlie everything in nature. Working in TRIUMF’s RF Group at UBC was probably Dad’s career high point. It was where real applied physics was done by scientists and technicians from all over the world, and he seemed very proud to be part of it.

After my mother was institutionalized, Dad stayed loyal to her and to his kids, kept working, and kept our household running. Watching Mum’s decline and seeing her leave for a succession of hospitals must have been terribly difficult and heartbreaking for him, but through all our family ups and downs, me and Kim never wanted for food, clothing, or a warm bed.

The Bad Stuff is not so easy

The bad stuff about my Dad is harder to talk about, and best covered in generalities…

My Dad drank every night, and when he got drunk, he could show a very volatile temper. He could get violent. Where my Dad seemed to struggle most was in the worlds of judgment, psychology, and emotions. I don’t think he knew how to put himself in another person’s shoes or how to apologize if he hurt someone. He wasn’t sensitive to others in that way.

Without getting into any specific details, my Dad did a lot of damage to his spouses and to his children, abusing directly and physically, and also leaving psychological scars by not being there, or by not bonding enough with his children.

By the time he was in his fifties, he was a loner, maybe even introverted or depressed. I never saw him socialize or have friends over. Late in his life, towards sixty, he just seemed to alienate more than he could attract. He was mostly going through the motions of maintaining a life, but there wasn’t much joy to be found.

As a person, as a drunk, he was vicious and violent. I’m still remembering and being reminded of his punches, his anger, and the way he created dry-mouthed fear when he raged. He ruined his family by creating fear and distrust, and not owning up to any of it or making any amends. So, for me the bottom line is this: His scale is tipped heavily to the negative. It only takes one punch and no apology to wipe away years of loyalty and goodwill.

He blew his family apart and didn’t do a thing to fix it. His pride and ego stopped him from admitting the possibility of being wrong. In his generation, men were not known to be in touch with their feelings or to admit to feeling defeated. For him, it was all about being “a man”, but it went deeper and darker than that. Through his own actions and through his reactions to events he couldn’t control, he created a huge schism with my sister. Her leaving our home at sixteen was a risk that she had to take for herself, and it was his loss and his failure to bear as a father.

I never once saw him say he was sorry for anything he’d done. His pride and ego would let him be the hero or the victim, but never the perpetrator, and his temper ensured that if his authority were ever threatened, he’d strike fear or he’d strike out. The same ego that gave him all his courage in his adventurous, dangerous occupations could not accept his weaknesses or failings in his personal life.

Those are qualities that are hard to change – internal patterns that are hard to unlearn. Dad only really changed his ego by facing his own fear of death. A heart attack, six strokes and a broken hip will tenderize you and make you face your mortality. His own failing flesh brought his ego into check. As we both got older, he got weaker, and I got stronger.

It’s difficult, yet possible, to admire and love someone and also to fear and hate them at the same time. Your brain tries to put things into little boxes, but the conflicting feelings can still get all muddled up together. All the good and bad events I’d seen or learned about later, and all the ways I felt about my father were all muddled together for a long time. Emotionally, our family ended up feeling like a no-win scenario.

Retirement wasn’t by choice

When I was seventeen, Dad had a heart attack and multiple strokes, and had to take a disability pension, eventually retiring from his job at UBC. In retrospect, I’ve decided that his hard-drinking, smoking, home life stress, and lack of exercise were all at fault. He didn’t take care of himself at all, physically or emotionally.

A couple of years later, with another stroke and recovery at Burnaby Hospital, he could no longer risk walking and breaking his hip again. He was confined to a wheelchair, and went on a waiting list for a long-term care home. I was starting college at that point, and had my own life to live, and so the family was finally completely broken up between the two of us. I never stopped visiting him, but he was no longer the boss of the family.

As loyal as I was to my Dad, he was much easier to live with after I wasn’t living with him anymore. By the time I was nineteen, he’d been beaten into submission by his own failing body – he posed neither a threat nor an authority. He just ended up being a kind of harmless old guy in a care home, slumped in his wheelchair, bruised and a little paralyzed, in what I now call his “toothless tiger” phase.

Strangely, this was a somewhat happier time for him: he was freed from any responsibility, no longer needing to be the greatest of all time, and not in charge of anything or anybody. He could finally just live and be Jim. He read Louis L’Amour western novels, he complained regularly about the care aides and his lack of privacy, or about how much damned fruit and fibre they made him eat (his days seemed to be measured in bowel movements). From all that, it was sometimes hard to tell if he was truly happy, but even if his life was not enough for him, at least he was alive and safe.

I’d visit him weekly, usually on Sunday evenings. Often, he’d finagle a second sandwich from Wally, the head cook, and when evening snacks arrived to his room, we’d eat sandwiches and drink tea together, watch his little colour TV, and talk about his week and mine. Those moments were small Reader’s Digest versions of a warm, livingroom-together family feeling that had been too-often missing back when the family was still living together under one roof.

In the end, his lungs were too weak to recover from a final bout of pneumonia, and he died one night. Everything Dad owned then went into a large plastic bag, and everything he’d once been went into a smaller one. He always liked things to have a purpose, to be useful to someone. So, some of his belongings were donated, some little things stayed with me, and his ashes went on to feed the rose garden at Mountain View Cemetery.

What gets left behind

Dad once told me that energy cannot be created or destroyed – only transformed. He was quoting the the first law of thermodynamics, the Conservation of Energy. In the end, Dad got transformed too, finally at rest in infinity, with all his complexities released and all his contradictions burned away.

I think that we all get recycled. I don’t know what we leave behind except for memories and impressions in the minds of others (unless you’re an architect or a sculptor leaving monuments all over the landscape – those things stick around).

I will try to absorb the best ideals of my father’s life, and take warnings from the unfortunate, ugly truths. For my own sense of closure, maybe Dad can be kind of beatified and cleaned, at least as a symbol if not as a man. On this, I cannot speak for anyone else who knew him – only for myself.

Most of us leave behind only ephemeral traces that can be morphed by psychology, wind, or tears. I hope this little memorial is more than that.

James Evan Love

Oct. 18, 1921 – Nov. 4, 1989