The news of the untimely death of eighteen year old Alex Gervais does strike a chord with me. For those of you who are not glued to the all-important news events of the Centre Of The Universe where I live on the West Coast of Canada let me tell you who this kid is. He was placed in a cheap hotel in Abbotsford (one of the most horrible towns this side of the Rockies. It has been said that if you are bad and you die you will end up in Abbotsford.) by the provincial family and youth services. He was a ward of the province, a survivor of many foster home placements. After four months in this hotel he fell from his fourth floor window, a suspected suicide.
He was not able to look after himself. He did not buy food, or cook and likely ate sporadically and unhealthily. He was lonely and depressed. He had mental health issues and little or no supportive family. What I find particularly notable is that, while eighteen years old when he died, he is always referred to as a child.
I compare myself to this kid for the simple reason that age eighteen was my year of independence. I had no choice but to move out on my own when I finished grade twelve. My mother was in a disastrous relationship with a criminal and my father hated me. I had no option but to test my wings.
Like Alex I was emotionally fragile, with already likely but undiagnosed mental health issues. Like Alex I had very little family support. We were both eighteen. That's where the similarities appear to end. I was not a ward of the government and as far as I was concerned I was no longer a child. I was an adult, a young man. Despite my challenges I was considered mature and responsible for my age. I knew how to cook and had excellent knowledge about good nutrition. I was able to live on a budget. I was curious, fearless and resourceful. I was friendly and outgoing and made friends easily. I was determined to survive.
I also lived in a different time. We were expected, in the Seventies, to grow up fast. It was almost like a competition. Helicopter parenting did not exist and would have been a topic of excoriating scorn. We were not sissified by our parents and being an independent and self-directed hard-ass bad-ass was always considered a point of pride.
I also had the good fortune of positive mentors and role models during my years with the Jesus People and the Christian Charismatics at St. Margaret's Reformed Episcopal Church (later St. Margaret's Community Church). I learned about nutrition and budget vegetarian eating from Big Bird (from my Pantheon of Remarkable People) and from others the importance of living responsibly and proactively. I knew many people, all young enough to have been still in their parents' basements if they were young people today, living in their own rented houses and apartments. I learned by osmosis and by observation.
My first two months of independence were both difficult and inauspicious. A young married couple I knew, leather workers who sold their crafts on the street agreed to let me stay in their communal house. The place could be charitably described as a dump, a rundown house that should have been backhoed out of its misery and it stank of cat shit and baby urine. They had an infant daughter who was not well cared for and a cat whose litter box was seldom changed. I shared a bedroom with a skinny unhealthy looking young man who refused to talk to me. We were situated just on the wrong side of the tracks in the now gentrified Strathcona neighbourhood.
I was seldom there. I had friends everywhere and tended to wander around Vancouver when I wasn't looking for work. I was not on welfare and had next to no pocket money. To this day I really do not know how I survived. I survived. In three weeks I found a job in a leather factory. Eventually I had enough money for a deposit on an apartment.
I lived on this high fine wire of rarefied tension. The imperative urgency of survival kept my thinking in order and I lived moment to moment absorbing everything, perpetually fascinated, perpetually engaged, as though playing a part in a surrealist movie. It was that unbearable lightness of being that is as intolerable as it is exquisite. I knew I would need to land, and land I did. I found an apartment on the top floor of an old house. I was incredibly thin, but somehow hauntingly beautiful, with shoulder length tangled tawny hair bleached by the sun and penetrating turquoise eyes. I was relentlessly curious, at times putting myself in danger if only to gain some new experience. I trusted almost everyone yet always managed to escape or come out on top when backed into a corner. I will never repeat that experience, that time of in your face intoxicating and perpetual walking off the earth sense of experience.
Thank God.
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