Walter

Saskatchewan’s Ukrainian diaspora has blessed our country richly. Walter Terentiuk was of that stock.

Walter never left home without his spiral-bound pocket notebook and a stubby pencil. He’d listen carefully to everything you said, asking insightful questions, and from time to time stop you and take notes. Later, the notes went into his meticulous records, not to keep track of people, but to keep track of ideas. Because for Walter, ideas were everything.

Born to Saskatchewan sodbusters, Walter spoke only his parent’s household Ukrainian until he attended school, where he learned English. And then French, and German, and Russian, and Chinese, and altogether nine languages, many of them self-taught. Walter loved learning more than just about anything, except maybe for his dear Gwen, and his two girls, and travel.

In those hardscrabble early days, there was no going off to university, but the bright young Prairie boy put his wits to use in his first job as the teacher in a one room school. Then he went on to work for the Post Office, first sorting mail on the mail cars on the railways. Eventually he made his way to Ottawa and joined the public service where he quickly made an impression for his insight and bringing Prairie thrift to bear in government.

While holding down his public service day job, Walter pursued his first university degree, and then at forty-eight, his Master’s degree, both in Public Administration. For Walter, the degrees weren’t so much about career as they were about his thirst for learning.

Walter took the earliest possible retirement and traveled the world with Gwen. And when he wasn’t traveling, he was doing what you’d expect any farm boy to do, he was working his woodlot.

When it finally came time to sell the family home and move to a retirement residence, life didn’t slow down, even a bit. Walter quickly found himself in charge of on-site learning, giving tours and lectures and rounding up speakers. And still with the little coil-bound notebook in his shirt pocket, collecting ideas.

In Walter’s room was a large, dark, and stern painting of the Ukrainian poet laureate, Taras Shevchenko (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taras_Shevchenko) (1814-1861). If you asked about it (as I would, just to get him going) he’d launch off into stories of the humble-born rebel, writer, painter, and the father of modern Ukrainian literature. Walter’s hero was a humble man who loved to learn and create, for the very joy and passion of doing so. Just like Walter.

When Walter was in his early nineties, a few years after his life-partner Gwen had passed, the doctors told him that he would gradually begin to lose control of his extremities, and then all of his body, and he would soon enough be trapped within his mind, no longer able to learn, to converse, or to write things down in his little spiral bound notebook.

And so he thought about this, and decided that he didn’t want to live that way. One Saturday morning, with his near family and doctor at his side, Walter said Good-bye. By choice.

I’m pretty sure that only moments later, notebook and stubby pencil in hand, he was interviewing St. Peter.