more a love story than a eulogy

background: my mom's mother died when she was 13 and her dad remarried not long after to our current grandmother. When we were kids grandpa and grandma built a house, secluded on a mountain in Chilliwack. We have grown up seeing them only once or twice a year, which is why his death didn't feel like a great loss initially. At the funeral, hearing what an amazing grandparent he was to my step-cousins (who are wonderful, by the way) was hard. Grandpa was an amazing storyteller and it grieves me to think that I didn't get to hear more than a few of his tales.


My favourite memory of him is a photograph—one that existed long before I did. It’s seen some wear and tear over the years—now wrinkled, with those retro white ridged edges, like a stamp on a postcard from a happy memory. It depicts my grandfather as a young man, on the shore of Lake Skaha in the Okanagan. He’s lifting his two youngest children, one in each hand—they’re not babies, mind you, but robust school children. They’re all smiling, and if Grandpa is straining to lift 60 pounds on each arm, you’d never know it.

Like this one, most of my memories of Grandpa evolved out of photos and stories I’ve heard from my mother. From that distant vantage point, this is what I came to understand about him:

Allan Buzza was a man’s man. Incredibly strong, moral, hard-working. As kids we would pass the site of an old Clarke & Buzza store with our friends en route to the beach, and to me it was a bragging point that my grandpa once owned a chain of lumber yards. How rugged! Then I’d throw in the bit about him being an air force pilot and having a tattoo on his forearm. That got ‘em every time.

That was a paradox that I loved about Grandpa: He could navigate a plane by the stars, had enough rebellion in him to get inked, had felt the breath of a man-eating tiger against his back and, if I recall correctly, handled a least one escaped mental patient who wound up in his Coquitlam neighbourhood. And yet he was also everything you don’t expect of a tough guy: a caring father, a gardener, a reader, a tender Godly man and on occasion, a hopeless romantic.

The last time I saw Grandpa he was lying in a hospital bed. That tattoo I so admired was just a pool of mottled ink lost in folds of skin. But his eyes were sharp and so was his mind. Until then he’d always seemed out of my reach—sheltered in a Chilliwack enclave that we never visited. But in the hospital he was mine, for an hour at least. Any question, any story was mine for the asking—and I had a lot of unanswered questions stored up over the years. But he was intuitive as well. No questions were required of me because he said all that I needed him to.

He also told me a love story:

The War had been over for more than a month—Grandpa was already weeks overdue on his promise to be home for Christmas. He had a son, nearly a year old, who he’d never met and a young wife he was anxious to love again. But ships from England were packed to the gills with other soldiers heading home. There was nothing to do but wait.

My grandpa wasn’t an idle man. One day while riding his bike through a seaside town, he met an older man attempting to fell a tree in his yard. Allan stopped, rested his bike against the low stone wall and offered to help. For two weeks he returned every day to chop that behemoth into stove-sized tinder. He shared not only his brawn, but tales of his extensive travels and his love for the Lord. Years later he received a letter from that old man, relaying how meaningful those days of labor were, and how they influenced his own walk with God.

Grandpa’s departure date did arrive, at last. He and his men traversed the Atlantic on the RMS Queen Elizabeth. “Not named for the Queen Elizabeth you think of now,” Grandpa was sure to clarify, “but the one before that.”

He licked his cracked lips and smiled, “And Winston Churchill sailed with us.”

He said it so casually I had to ask for confirmation. It was nearly a week’s sail and, indeed, on each of those mornings at dawn, England’s indomitable leader came out on his deck to admire the horizon and shout greetings to officers on the level below.

Elizabeth was met in New York by hordes of jubilant civilians. “We knew the fuss was meant for the Prime Minister, but that didn’t stop us from enjoying it.” Those ordinary-looking men soaked up the praise, finally feeling like the heroes they were. He paused in his story-telling to catch his breath, and in spite of his frailty, I never have a hard time picturing him in uniform with flawless posture and an assured grin.

The Canadian National railway facilitated the rest of Allan’s journey—making stops in seemingly every town between Halifax and Vancouver. “We had men from each province in our company. As each one stepped off the train we were pretty sure we’d never see each other again.” In other stories I’d heard how Grandpa had faced near death alongside these men—in thick black nights high above the Atlantic and in mean far eastern jungles. These were not insignificant goodbyes, but even as he told of them, it was clear his mind was only concerned with the journey’s end.

Finally, finally, finally, the steamer rolled into Vancouver’s old Pacific Central Station. Military transport was relegated to the lower rails, far below the main commuter platform. Soldiers rushed from the train only to find their journey further prolonged—a hefty flight of stairs remained between them and the objects of all those muddy trench reveries.

“It was a winding staircase that wrapped around and around in a square. We all had heavy kit bags on our shoulders, but we ran up those steps.” He detailed the climb so carefully, I began to understand just how agonizing it must have felt.

Wives and girlfriends, the finest they’ve ever looked, scanned the uniformed stream for the face they loved. “Your grandmother was there. She was wearing a hat, which was the fashion back then. It was covered in flowers…” Grandpa faltered then, determined to hold his composure, but he choked a little as he said, “She was so cute.” An unfamiliar smile emerged, showing his teeth, his real ones mind you, not the perfect enamel most men his age trade up for. It was a slightly embarrassed smile—shy to still be so in love after so much time.

“I don’t know what happened to my bag,” he added, “I must have dropped it at the top of the stairs. I didn’t even notice where it had gone, I only saw her in that flowered hat.” Another pause, this one much longer, accompanied by the tears he’d fought off before, and again those impetuous words tumbled out, “She was so cute.”

In the hospital bed Grandpa worked to compose himself as I suppose he had to that day 60 years ago. They embraced. He told how he picked her up with such enthusiasm that that flowered hat came right off her head and tumbled down the middle of all those many flights of stairs. Another officer was kind enough to climb down and up again to retrieve it—Grandpa was far too engaged and couldn’t bear to leave his bride’s side for even that long.

My grandpa had a remarkable ability to tell the simplest story. Until then he’d never shared the tale of that reunion, but he didn’t stumble over a single detail in the telling, as if he’d recalled it every day since.