Good Afternoon. Thank you for coming and celebrating and remembering the life of our father Jan Swaters.
My name is Gordon Swaters. I am the oldest child of Jan and Henriette Swaters.
In terms of our immediate family, me, my sister and brother Margo and Clifford, respectively, our mother Henriette, my wife Charlotte and Clifford’s Partner David, and the five grandchildren Meghan, Ryan, Andrew, and their Partners, and Sean and Sarah mourn Dad’s passing.
I would also like to explicitly acknowledge and thank for coming Dad’s older sister Tante Bep and her daughter Cindy and son Frank and his daughter, who come here from Brockville and Kingston, respectively, as well as our cousin Annette and our mother’s cousin Miep and her daughter, all three of whom came here from Holland. Family in Sweden and Spain also mourn Dad’s passing.
I have spent my professional life lecturing easily to dozens and even hundreds of fellow scientists and students. It has never particularly fazed me and yet here, in this situation, with all of you, the people that loved our father, the emotions run very deep.
I promise to try to hold it together as best as I can.
While my remarks of necessity are personal in nature, I hope to describe some of the general qualities we all found in Dad.
Our father’s life story is remarkable. He was born, in March of 1929, the youngest of three children, in a one-bedroom home on a cobble stone street in the small rural town of Lochem in eastern Holland near the German border. His early childhood was filled with carefree play in their backyard along the banks of a small canal. He basked in the loving adoration from his mother. He used to tell us tales of trapping crows with his Dad and then training them. In fact, my Dad had a life long interest in this kind of thing with a sequence of animals ranging from rabbits, pigeons, tropical birds and fish, and cats and dogs. None of us can forget the sequence of spectacular fresh and salt-water fish aquariums he carefully and diligently maintained along the way.
Our father experienced the tumult of the Second World War directly as a young teenager. This experience led to our father’s life-long aversion to organized politics and ideology. Yet, notwithstanding his distrust of these things there remained within him a strong and quiet commitment to social justice. His quiet commitment to these causes was undoubtedly a consequence of the fact that he couldn’t get a word in edgewise when our Mother and me got into it!
He had a calm and reserved but effective way of teaching the lessons of social justice. Once, when I was in elementary school – and this was the time of the civil rights marches in the States and I was struggling to understand racial discrimination - I had just learned the out-of-Africa theory of human evolution and thus that Europeans traced their evolution back to Africa, I developed the childishly naïve theory that Caucasians evolved from Negroes. I told our Dad this theory and he patiently explained to me the dangers of where such thinking could lead. Needless to say, I quickly re-evaluated my thinking on this.
After the war and after he came of age he was drafted, as was normal in those times, into the Dutch Navy where he became a Petty Officer where he was trained and served as a medical laboratory technician. Our Dad was very proud of his military service. It was during this time that he met the Casse family and met and fell in love with our Mother.
In the early 1950’s first our Dad and then our Mom immigrated to Canada. Clearly, their attraction for each other was as strong as I was born about 9 months to the day after they got married in June of 1953! I am forever grateful to our parents for having the courage to come to Canada and giving me the opportunity to achieve my dreams in a land free of the shackles of the old world.
Living in Canada as a new immigrant, with limited skill in English, in the 1950’s with young children had its challenges. Our father would tell us of working in a lumberyard for 15 cents an hour or cleaning floors in the Bank of Montreal in the evenings to make ends meet. His big break came when he got a job in the Brockville General Hospital as a medical laboratory technician. He truly loved this job. The problem was that it didn’t pay enough (this being in the era before public healthcare and unionization) to support his expanding young family and thus came the transition to working at DuPont Canada for about 15 years as a chemical technician rising to a Foreman. Through the example of our parents, we learned that through hard work and perseverance one could achieve one’s goals.
We recall these years as a very happy time. Our parents built their first of four new homes and Dad was on the go with work, renovating basements, gardening, keeping animals, tropical fish and just keeping very busy with one project or another around the house. Our father very much enjoyed the outdoors. In those moments between chores he used to love sitting in the back yard and sun tan. His idea of sun tan lotion was either SPF negative, yes, I mean negative, 50 or a spray bottle filled with water. He truly enjoyed the sun and getting as tanned as was humanly possible.
As a family we all enjoy the water, a trait that lives on in the grandchildren, and there were many delightful evenings and weekends spent swimming, playing and BBQing at Brown’s Bay on the Saint Lawrence River. Later, when our parents built their home on Fenton Drive in Port Elgin, it was a family tradition to swim and play “off the rocks” as we said on every summer day possible.
Returning earlier, a new chapter opened up in our Dad’s life when in the early 1970s DuPont Canada rationalized its laboratories in Canada. Today corporate restructuring is an every day event. Nobody thinks anything unusual of it now. In those days it was not so commonplace. Our Dad left DuPont and started a new job as chemical technician for Ontario Hydro at the Heavy Water Plant at the Bruce Nuclear Power Development. He worked there for about 25 years. In the process the family moved to Port Elgin. I know that I enjoyed my time in Port Elgin and I was very happy we came here. The friends that my parents made seemed to be not that much older than me and seemed to enjoy life to its maximum. It was great and it was a blast. Our Dad (and Mom too) enthusiastically embraced this new lifestyle. Later, Dad was very pleased to see that his daughter’s kids developed their own deep appreciation of this wonderful town and its charms.
Our Dad retired 22 years ago. For most of that time he remained active. Although a shy man by inclination he enjoyed a glass of good red wine and the company of his family and friends. The themed costumed dinners that he, mom and their friends used to organize were moments of distinguished delight to our Dad. He enjoyed reminiscing about those evenings.
I won’t delve into the many health challenges throughout his life. I will say, however, that throughout those challenges, as acute as they could be and as chronic as they were, he continued to embrace life and maintained a positive outlook. We are all thankful that his passing was peaceful, without pain and surrounded by family.
Although not a church-going person, our Dad held definite spiritual views and believed in God and Jesus Christ. As such, our Dad’s passing should be seen as a transition to a new place in eternity.
Finally, let me end by quoting a passage by the German-Austrian existential poet Rainer Rilke. Rilke was mystical poet who wrote on transitional themes bridging the traditional and the modern in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Rilke wrote:
“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks; the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.”
If this is true then we are blessed to have had Jan Swaters as our Dad. For the most important lesson he taught us was the importance of love in a life that is to be lived well.
Thank you.
July 2015
Port Elgin, Ontario