Background Check I want to say something about my parents, their families, and my early life before I married. My parents were loving, compassionate, and kind; open to our liberal-toradical ideas; forgiving and lenient to a fault. The fact that I remained undisciplined till later on is entirely my fault and not theirs. My father, Doctor John Alexander Fraser Young, trained in Medicine at Dalhousie University after graduating Mount Allison University. He graduated in medicine in 1932 at the very top of his class, winning the university Gold Medal - the first time any student from the Medical Faculty had achieved this. He practiced in Pictou all his life, except for war service in Brittan and Normandy. He rose to the rank of Major. When I was a client of the Nova Scotia Hospital in Dartmouth, a fellow client, named Cliff, told me that he had been in my father’s regiment. “Oh, Major Young,” he exclaimed to me, “We liked him!” That is the way it was with my father, everyone loved and respected him and admired his skill and intelligence. His intelligence, humor, and compassion are what I remember best about him.
My favorite instance of his humor was the time one of his friends asked him what he would do if a patient died coming out of his office. Without hesitation, he replied, “I’d turn him around and make it look like he was coming in.” A few months before he died, so tragically, having been run over by his own car on Oct 19 1969; he said to me “I am not going to live very long and you are the only reason I’m living.” The night he died, and I said good-by to him as he was leaving to go to his office; something told me to tell him I loved him, “you may never see him again”, this “still small voice” said to me. I never did see him again and I didn’t tell him I loved him. I was so confused because of my illness (bi-polar disorder), which was in full bloom then. However, I never regretted it - for the sole reason that I knew, that with all his love & compassion, he would understand and forgive. He was a truly great and wonderful man and father! The fly in the ointment was that he was so busy that I didn’t see him very much. He found a way around this by taking me on “calls” with him. We would talk in the car as we went about the countryside; the only stipulation being that I remain in the car while he consulted his patients in their homes. (This was, of course, to protect their confidentiality.) As much as I valued this
time; I value more the impetuous to, creatively, find the time to spend with me. My mother, Kathleen (Cassie or Kay) had a poet’s nature. In fact when I found, once, among her papers, a mention of the fact that she had written poetry when she was young, she gently ( always gently) chastised me for rooting into her things, and would explain no further. She was demure, quiet and kind; devoted to my father and her children. She supported me in my writing and my Buddhism, as did my father, although Dad tried to discourage me in pursuing a careen in writing as it was so hard to get by – so I went to Dalhousie hoping to get a bachelor of Education, which I would have done had I not become ill in the final year of my Arts Program. My mother died in 1972. My father’s family were religious - except for the hesitant commitment (to the church maybe, but his commitment to medicine has never been questioned) of my grandfather, Milton; known for his distain of hypocrisy and puffery. I did not know him, as he died when I was in vitro. However he left me two hundred dollars in his will. It was held in trust until I was sixteen, when I bought a used Sunbeam sports car with the four hundred I received (the extra was accrued interest). I loved him for this - and for the legend he left of his medical practice; and for being a man of character and “a character”
too boot. He paid for his medical training by working the cattle boats to and from Europe. I remember my Grandmother as a tall, stern, but kind woman, loving of her children and grandchildren - she favoring the successful or promising children, whereas my mother made us all feel that we were her favorite. My mother, in her mild tolerance and acceptance, won out in the question of how
her children would be raised. My mother’s parents I remember as being very loving also, although they died when I was too young to remember much. However, in my fifties, my grandfather and name sake, Edgar Pope, surfaced in my genes, as I adopted his green thumb, as I had earlier told my mother I would in later life. My cousin, Bill Pope, was an artist who died of cancer. He painted many poignant images of terminal patients which hang in hospitals all over the world. One of these hangs in the Palliative Care Unit of The Aberdeen Hospital. My mother’s sister Belle lived until just this last winter. For a long time, a corpulent woman of a sarcastic vein, whom I came to love very much as I used to visit her in the Odd Fellows Home, an institution which she had a significant role in seeing built, as was brought out in her eulogy.
I want to make special mention of my father’s sisters - two godly maiden Aunts, known far and wide for their sweetness and religious devotion. That I remain a Christian in addition to being a Buddhist is, to a large extent, due to their lasting, beneficial influence and example. One of them Hildred (Hil, to us all {my sister Kath and my two brother Jon & Gerry, and my cousins, Robert, Joan, & Gordon}) was my father’s nurse, fondly remembered for her gentleness and warmth; The other, Pearl
(my grandmother’s name,
Margaret, means “mother-of-Pearl”) was a missionary of enlightened genius, also winner of the Gold Medal at Dalhousie, Her Philosophy Professor said a more brilliant mind had never come through his class. She spent over forty years in China teaching children and preaching. She told me of fleeing the communists on a long march from Northern China, often going over long rail road bridges without railings (with many railway ties missing) which spanned huge ravines. She once escaped, miraculously & narrowly (by a fifteen minute margin) being buried alive by the Communists Chinese. She wrote about this in her autobiography, Here am I, Send Me. These joyous Aunts also tolerated well my interest in Buddhism - my Aunt Pearl saying, “There is nothing in Buddhist Philosophy which I can object to, David”. I remember her as prefacing this statement by saying that Buddhist Philosophy was “beautiful”.
On a return drive home with me from the airport, when we had a chance to compare notes on religion, after I pointed out the beauty of the brown gardens in Durham (outside Pictou) in the evening peculide sunlight, my Aunt Pearl exclaimed, “ I’ll remember this drive as long as I live!” This went directly into my heart. My father’s brother Lloyd died at fourteen, my father recalling him as ‘the smartest’. My Uncle, my father’s brother Clarence, was a Doctor as well - a heart specialist and writer of acclaimed articles on tuberculosis, a disease which struck my father’s family twice. Clarence was my cousin, Dr. Gordon Young’s, father. He had less of an “edge’ than my father but was perhaps more well-rounded. He was good to me after my parents’ death, as were his sisters and his wife Doris - my last surviving elder, and dearly loved by Ruby & I. I do not wish to paint my family as all exemplary. There were embezzlers, philanderers, and substance-abusers. As well as those with mental illness, like myself. But, on both sides of my family, all conquered their difficulties with courage and persistence.
It is this family which I regard (as well as the amazing, continuing support of my wonderful wife, Ruby, and my fine son Shawn and his nuclear family with Emily, my cherished granddaughter) as the big plus in allowing me to endure and eventually overcome my illness, after so many difficult years. It is my hope that something of the blessing of such a heritage with its example of love, service, and tenacity in the face of illness, loneliness, temptation, and challenge; may communicate itself to the reader. Gassho, Kokyo David Edgar Young
Sunday, June 28, 2009