If you’re like me, you have more negative role models than positive ones.
You see somebody berating a server, or going off his nut in traffic, or getting in a Twitter war, or puffing up with self-righteous indignation, and you tell yourself “don’t be that guy.”
But then there was David Graham.
He drove out from Ontario 20 years ago, a rowing shell lashed to the roof of his car (he had come achingly close to qualifying for the 1984 Olympics), to become principal of Metchosin’s Westmont Montessori School.
Red-haired, bursting with energy, close to 40 but looking closer to 14, he greeted each day like it was the front gate to Disneyland. His smile didn’t appear to have an off switch. Neither did he. My first thought was: “Is he for real?”
Yes, he was. All the time. Smart, funny, kind and unrelentingly supportive of his students, building them up with a barrage of superlatives — “amazing,” “fantastic,” “awesome” — that would make cynics (OK, me) roll their eyes were he not both genuine and the living embodiment of the values he espoused.
It also helped that he had a cheerfully seditious sense of humour. (Knowing my loathing of the team, he once gave me a Toronto Maple Leafs cap, which I didn’t burn only because it came from him.)
The Graham house — David, Jill, their three boys — always felt a bit like a riot without the tear gas. Non-stop joyful pandemonium, kids and dogs tripping over ball-hockey nets and canoes, somebody always late for something, the result of trying to stuff 10 pounds of life into a five-pound bag.
“Let’s go exploring,” read the final panel of David’s favourite Calvin and Hobbes cartoon and, sure enough, opportunities for new adventures rarely went unseized — including a move to Glenlyon Norfolk School, where he became principal of the middle school in 2005.
Given all that unbridled vitality, it seemed shockingly, appallingly unjust when he died of brain cancer in 2009 at age 47.
There were two memorial services, one in Ontario and one attended by close to 1,000 people in Victoria. At the latter, Simon Bruce-Lockhart, then head of Glenlyon Norfolk, summed David up perfectly. We are all modest some of the time, positive some of the time, happy, energetic, guileless and selfless some of the time, he said, but David was those things all of the time.
“David was an extraordinary man because his virtues went clear through him — they were him day in and day out. What is episodic in us is just who he was. … You couldn’t be in David’s company without being reminded of your better self, and you couldn’t leave his company without having been inspired to call upon that better self a little more often.”
Why bring this up now? Because Bruce-Lockhart spoke again this week, this time at the dedication of the newly named and refurbished David Graham Learning Commons at GNS. Imagine that, having an influence so strong that they name a library after you 12 years after you’re gone.
Bruce-Lockhart reminded the outdoor gathering that by the end, a stroke had robbed David of his ability to speak. Still, he could manage five phrases.
“Thank you.”
“We’re so lucky.”
“I love you.”
“Yummy.”
“Wow.”
It’s the last one that sticks with Bruce-Lockhart now. “‘Wow’ is about a sense for wonder and awe that we too often let rust beneath the tyranny of the immediate,” he said. “‘Wow’ is the gift of being appreciative of the richness of potential around us.”
It’s funny who we remember, what we remember about them and for how long. Someone at this week’s dedication quoted David’s sister as saying some people have a light so bright that it keeps shining even when they’re no longer here.
David and Jill’s sons, Patrick, Cameron and Chris, all spoke. Chris remembered his dad telling him that over time, people will forget a lot of the details about you — the goals you scored, your accomplishments. “But they will never forget the way you treated them.”
It’s something to think of: who we choose as our measuring sticks, what kind of people we aspire to be and what it is about us that we hope people will remember, once all the stuff that doesn’t really matter is gone.
