Island Catholic News board member Steve Bentheim died unexpectedly in September. He was 65 years of age. I wrote something about his death in the last edition of ICN, something of a factual nature.
    Now it seems perhaps enough time has passed to attempt a more reflective piece on the significance of his life’s work and struggle. Steve’s death was so sudden and unexpected even though related to a health issue, it has taken a lot of adjustment by his closest friends and associates to absorb the reality of his physical disappearance from our sight. He was a vital personality.

2. MET WEEKLY

   Island Catholic News board member Steve Bentheim died unexpectedly in September. He was 65 years of age. I wrote something about his death in the last edition of ICN, something of a factual nature.
    Now it seems perhaps enough time has passed to attempt a more reflective piece on the significance of his life’s work and struggle. Steve’s death was so sudden and unexpected even though related to a health issue, it has taken a lot of adjustment by his closest friends and associates to absorb the reality of his physical disappearance from our sight. He was a vital personality.

2. MET WEEKLY

    I first met Steve Bentheim through publishers and mutual friends Richard Olafson and Carole Sokoloff. Steve was a regular visitor to their home which served as the office of their publishing firm, Ekstasis Editions. Steve was doing his doctorate in counselling at Uvic in this period, focusing on the pioneer work of Virginia Satir in family counselling.
     I was able to provide him with names of Catholic married couples who he interviewed extensively for his thesis. In the last five years he was employed as a counsellor with the Salvation Army. He also resided at St. Andrew Victoria Housing during the same period so we were near neighbours.
     For five years we met at least weekly for coffee and an informal discussion of what were were getting into personally and professionally. For example he was also an editor, he founded an international website on the work of family therapist Virginia Satir. Due to similar interests and background we shared a sensibility and approach to issues, although specific divergences were apparent such as the difference between a Canadian and an ex- patriot American.
     One of the areas I most appreciated about Steve was his breadth of interest in a variety of religions. Born a Jew of German Russian extraction (his father was a classmate of the psychologist Eric Fromm), he had lived extensively in Hindu ashrams, was an active Christian science practitioner, supported the peace movement, had operated a yoga class business in Kelowna and served on the board of Island Catholic News.
     In that context he served as an able panel responder at ICN sponsored public events. He also had written a play based on the life of Canadian Okanagan Oblate legendary missionary Father Pandosy.

3. UNIQUENESS

     Our convergence had proven propitious for Steve. He had just successfully completed his doctorate in clinical counselling but was between stools in terms of employment, stable housing and relationship situations. I had been living at St. Andrew’s housing in Royal Oak very happily for five years and wondered if he might not think about applying there himself just on the off chance it could be a good fit.
     Not only did it fall in place almost effortlessly, but he found a full time job with the Salvation Army family counselling centre and developed a long term relationship, all within a matter of a few weeks. The stars were certainly lined up, so to speak.
     Not unnaturally, Steven felt our friendship was a new and propitious source of benefits to him, so we became fast friends and remained so until the end despite certain eccentricities and normal strains that came to bear especially after he became mysteriously ill in the last years of his life.
     As a young man, Steve was trained in Jewish schools and took pride in his own rabbinical training experience. Later he came under the influence of the American Guru Richard Alpert, also known as Ram Dass and always considered himself primarily of Hindu orientation. Of multifaith orientation, Steve was constantly working on new project ideas to further religious unity in the direction of his primary passion, global peace.
     Steve Bentheim’s uniqueness in my experience seemed his outstanding quality. He had that aggressive enthusiasm which I have noted in American ex-patriots in Canada. As one of them said to me once, they seem to feel Canada is just America a little further north.
 It was an unfortunate juxtaposition in some ways as I have always tended to exaggerate the differences in sensibility between Canadians and our Southern neighbour. Steve was very well intentioned, without a trace of the usual American hubris and I should have been more patient with his quirks, such as they were, I am sure.
     As a result I seemed to spend a lot of time with Steve making distinctions which I was never confident he acknowledged. He was very clever and intelligent and had a friendly sort of extroversion that served him well socially.

4. LAST YEARS

     As I mentioned, when we first met he was at a key turning point in his life and through an accident of time we became close friends just as he began a successful new chapter in his journey. I always felt he had a tendency of flattering to deceive, as the English expression says. In my view our relationship was cemented due to the propitious nature of the times, with far less intentionality that he attributed to it. But Steve was a personalist above all.
     In the last years things took a strange turn. He started imagining odd activities he assumed I was part of. He was sure I had a key to his apartment and wondered aloud if I was allowing people in there when he was not at home.
     I found this a little shocking, but also amusing on some level and made the mistake of joking and exaggerating the suggestion, saying how I was surprised he had found out my little secret and yes I had been indiscriminately selling copies to the highest bidder all over town.
     On one level, he knew my sense of humour but it did little to allay his fear. As I said I should have been more sensitive but at the same time I was trying to draw a line in the sand with this sort of thing.
     We had this psychological manner of bantering and I was assuming that due to the almost intimate way he had gotten into the housing complex through my so called auspices, it was part of that disproportionate attribution I have mentioned and I was not prepared to have it go any further in that backpedalling sort of direction.
     Of course in the end it had to be recognized it was the onslaught of his brain tumour complications. That episode was actually minor in comparison to what he put through some other people of our common acquaintance. The strain became so great and frankly weird that the ensuing alienation almost cost him his life prematurely.
     Steve got to the point where he could barely move without incident, falling down stairs he had previously taken in a leap, the inability to rise from his sofa, get out of a car, etc.
     His alienated friends did not know if it was some extension of his attention getting ploys we had experienced before and he became isolated at a critical time when he especially needed help.
 In the end the ambulance attendants had to be let in to take him for an emergency operation in the nick of time. Unfortunately he only lived another eighteen months due in part it seems to his denial of the need for proper follow-up and  sensible decision making.
     But again he deliberately distanced himself from those who could have been the most assistance. Such are the difficulties of this type of  illness.