Patrick Jamieson, Victoria

I recently went to Winnipeg for a week to celebrate a family occasion. Rather an odd title to give to the funeral of a former brother-in-law, but it turned out to be more multi-dimensional than might have been expected.

My sister Rita married Terry Morris in 1976. I was living in the east at the time, so just showed up for the wedding. At the Catholic parish St. Peter and Paul on Portage Avenue, it was a beautiful ceremony including a moving selection of music.

My just younger sister Rita was a professional dance teacher and Terry was an entertainment booking agent. Winnipeg has a lively entertainment culture. Terry had been a comic and boxer in his younger years and he was able to earn a very good living by booking acts throughout the prairies based from Winnipeg.

One of the more amusing anecdotes arising from his career which started in the late 1950s, was that he had turned down a folk singer named Neil Young who approached him to be his agent. Terry gave him an audition and decided he had a lousy voice and couldn’t really sing so turned him down. Two months before Terry died I asked him the same question about regrets in this matter and he said Neil Young still couldn’t sing. There is more than a hint about Terry’s character in this.

As implied he was twenty years older than my sister when they married and he was key to the development of her dance studio Royal Dance Conservatory which lasted 35 years. But the marriage was more short lived. It proved something of a mismatch for the 24-year-old beauty and ten years later it was over.

2.

My mother often confided that she wondered if she shouldn’t have stepped in at the beginning. Her mother upon meeting Terry simply declared he’s too old, “he’s too old for her.” Granny Harris proved right in her English working class wisdom. But Terry was prepared to become a Catholic, taking instruction from the Jesuits at St. Ignatius parish, so my parents felt this was a good sign.

The truth was that Terry fell in love with the whole family. He and my father were great pals from the word go. Both had an eternal boyishness about them, my mother had a great fondness for the good hearted fellow. Granny Harris’s expression was ‘Terry you’re full of prunes.’

The Jamieson magic worked for Terry. He and I stayed good friends after the dissolution, as well as my father, of course. My mother, as indicated, had the Catholic tendency to revisit previous moral decisions with a critical self-scrutiny. Two of my brothers stayed friends with Terry while some other members including Rita took a dimmer view of his rounder tendencies.

As a youngster Terry had been put in a boys school for abandoned children, which led to the usual difficult followup places and scenes. He had found he was successful with settling arguments with his fists, and this tendency didn’t immediately drop away once he joined a more benign climate of lower middle class Catholic families and their ken.

Terry wrote his own obituary which included these lines: “My childhood years I spent as a ward of the Jewish Orphanage and Knowles School for Boys. The superintendent of Knowles, Jack Hawkins, was a man who had a unique understanding of children, and he was like a father to me, and the 90 other residents who loved him.”

“After I left the orphanage, I was employed in a variety of jobs – a choker in the logging camps of B.C., a roughneck in the oil wells in Alberta. A bit of a rounder, a boxer and a performer.”

I think I recognized his type quite quickly and certainly knew better than to give him any lip, or really try to win an argument. At least one of my brothers learned the hard way that it was time around Terry to quit the usual intellectual family fencing.

I must say I had never met so competitive a person as Terry Morris. Or such a bad loser. He once threw a whole set of golf clubs in the creek after a bad shot.

Of course when a divorce happens in a family there is an expectation to take sides on the question. Let’s just say that in this situation, it ended as a draw.

3.

This would have been fine and ways would be parted but Winnipeg is more like a small town in its sensibility. Something transformative happened to Terry in that decade as a Jamieson son-in-law. We only realized it as time went on. The clearest sign may have been that while he had been married twice before the one to Rita, after their divorce he settled into a forty-year union with his next partner, Glynis, a spiritually mature woman who told me that there was never really a difficult moment between them.

It was Glynis, also twenty years his junior, who wanted a religious funeral when Terry died in April at age 92. The celebrant for the service at Cropo’s, a major funeral home in the city, she selected was Rita’s current husband Randy Cameron, a Catholic deacon and Benedictine Oblate. Due to the compatible personalities of Glynis and Randy, ironically Rita and Terry had been socializing as couples the last couple of decades.

So, this was the situation I was arriving into on August 15th for the August 17th funeral. Rita picked me up at the airport. The smoke in the air from the northern forest fires was tangible. She and I had a great catch-up as we drove to Bellamy’s Restaurant for supper with Glynis and Randy, doing last minute preparation work for the service.

I had been staying with Terry and Glynis quite regularly when in Winnipeg for major family events like my father’s 90th birthday, so she and I are good friends. We had lunch the next day at McNally Robinson’s bookstore Prairie Ink café.

Despite the fact she had been nursing Terry from his last decade, Glynis hadn’t expected his final hospital visit to be his last and was grieving grievously as a result. She had been told by a counsellor that it was more like grieving a child than a marriage partner. Again Terry’s eternal boyishness came into play.

Glynis said that they had had so much fun together, she never wanted it to end.

4.

The next day was the funeral at the palatial Cropo funeral parlour on the east end of Main Street. Randy was the officiant. Rita and I sat together in a front pew. I was glad to be at her side to make it easier for her to attend somewhat comfortably what could have felt an awkward situation. An ironical thing started to unfold.

The decade that Rita and Terry had been together 1976-86 was Terry’s most successful period. He helped many acts get established into permanent careers. By his mid fifties when their marriage broke up, Terry was fully established and edging toward normal retirement age. So the acts and entertainers that were arriving at the funeral gravitated toward Rita as the wife they knew better from their key years. One fellow who sang at their wedding, drove all the way from Kansas City to attend.

On the other hand, as I whispered to Rita half way through the service, she was like the ghost on the room. Except for her husband Randy’s mention of her name, she was discreetly entirely omitted from mention in the program, the slide show and the program had no images nor mention of those ten key years in Terry’s life. My father and I had two photo images with Terry at a get together at the Fort Garry Hotel but his wife of ten years was only present invisibly.

Despite all that, her effect on his life was paramount in the program as speaker after speaker spoke of Terry as a Good Shepherd figure in their life, as an honest broker in an often sleazy business atmosphere etc.

I had always felt Terry’s spiritual aspirations and nature in our friendship, although I could often see him wrestling with demons. One example of his spiritual nature was the instruction to become a Catholic. The first Jesuit to instruct him Father McGillvary had gained his total respect, but the priest left to marry in the early Seventies and his replacement was a different matter. This one a Father McDougall Terry felt was a complete phoney, which shocked me a little at the time.

Sure enough earlier this year when the Canadian Jesuits published their list of sex abusers, there was the same priest’s name. Terry spiritual discernment had been accurate.

5.

My interpretation behind this long winded tale was how the workings of grace in a family can have beautiful and long term effects. Terry could feel the love of acceptance by our family and it proved transformative in a difficult context for a struggling individual. Catholicism is defined by its principles of community, mediation and sacramental symbols as the vehicles of transformative grace. Over the fifty years of our acquaintanceship and close friendship with Terry Morris one can discern the threads of the occasion of grace he proved both within his own experience and the life of the Jamieson family and his future union with wife Glynis.