Hello everyone. I am Stephen’s only son, Lewis.
[applause]
I’d like to start by extending a heartfelt thank you to all the incredible speakers today. It’s been so powerful to hear you all touch some of the notes from the many movements of Dad’s life.
We are here on behalf of the family. My mom, Michele Landsberg, Dad’s soulmate, great love, co-conspirator, sounding board, apparently university registrar —
[laughter]
— and everyday interlocutor in a conversation that rounded every friend like a fast-running river for 63 years. Dad’s siblings, Michael Lewis, Janet Solberg, and Nina Libeskind, who have lost their eldest, and I know are in deepest mourning, missing even the occasional episodes they endured of irritable brother syndrome.
To finish the program today, you’re going to hear from Stephen’s kids — me and my sisters, Ilana, who among many other accomplishments, as you heard, co-founded the Stephen Lewis Foundation with Dad; and Jenny, who was the casting director for a little TV show called Heated Rivalry. Uh-huh.
[applause]
I’m a proud brother, sue me.
[laughter]
Many of you know that the final months of Dad’s journey coincided with my campaign for the leadership of Canada’s NDP, our lifelong political home.
[applause]
And for those of you watching from around the world, it is a miracle to be able to tell you that the last thing he saw with open eyes in this life was our victory in that race and the passing of the political torch.
[applause]
But what we three get to share with you today is something entirely different. Something that others saw very little of: Stephen Lewis as a dad. The private guy in his office at home, with a ballgame, a thriller, or a rom-com on the TV as he worked away night and day. Yes, in his latter days, he was a rom-com super fan. Notting Hill at least 17 times. He loved licorice all sorts. In an earlier era, he smoked cigars. Swisher Sweets or Old Ports — the cheapest, sweetest, and foulest cigars to be found on this blessed earth.
[laughter]
You could always tell when Dad was typing in there by the shaking of the foundations. He was a two-finger typist who pounded out texts as if it were the system itself he was trying to shatter rather than just an innocent intermediary keyboard.
Dad adored music. As a child, he was a piano prodigy, and though he never kept it up, in his 70s he could still do a credible job of the histrionic opening to a Rachmaninoff piano sonata — hair flying, notes pouring from his stubby digits, nails gnawed off decades earlier. He had a theatrical penchant for the grand gesture on a personal scale. We’d be celebrating a birthday or a special occasion and bemoaning his absence on yet another work trip when suddenly he’d be walking through the door, suit bag slung nonchalantly over his shoulder, having found an impossible connecting flight overnight to arrive just before the candles were lit on the cake.
When Ilana was three, she asked for a llama for her birthday. “A nice soft stuffy llama?” Mom said. “No, a real llama,” Ilana insisted. Months later, Dad was in Montreal for a speech — it was always for a speech — and he saw a classified ad. After Expo 67, they were selling the animals from the Biosphere exhibit. He rented a very long truck. There’s a current family debate; it may have even been an 18-wheeler. No idea how to drive it. He showed up at home with a raccoon, two sea turtles, and a full-grown llama. Naomi did not believe this story for about 20 years. Photographic evidence was produced. It is a true story.
Dad was fanatically loyal and supernaturally supportive. He shared feedback for every one of Mom’s columns, the draft columns, for five decades, no matter where he was or what time zone. Mom still has the number for the fax machine at the Addis Ababa Hilton.
He was a person of unshakable principle, in whom the personal and the political were but hemispheres of the same inner globe. In 1965, he bought a cottage and sold it a few years later for exactly what he had originally paid. He didn’t believe in real estate speculation.
[applause]
For his entire life, he paid as much income tax as he possibly could. Yeah.
[applause]
Which is no mean feat for a guy who practiced deficit financing on the personal household level. He regarded entirely legal deductions as somehow suspect. These were not performances. He was just clear and constant to the point of belligerence when it came to his own moral code.
I wish I had time to share every wild story. He could dry-start off a dock on water skis, do a round of the lake, step out of the skis, and back onto the dock — a cigar clutched between his teeth the whole time, remaining fully lit.
[laughter]
But more than anything, I want to share something that you all already know. A quality he had that more than any other taught me what it means to be a good person. It was his generosity of spirit. He helped people like he breathed. And this impulse was deeply democratic. It sought no advantage, nothing in exchange. He had a second sight for the light in people — the spark of purpose, idealism, commitment — and he considered it his responsibility to help however he could, to blow on those embers, extend his own networks, advocate. I think he probably boosted hundreds of careers. Why? Because he could. Because he was anchored in the world by the iron cable of his own sense of justice.
He moved through life in a state of rage at unfairness — “the depredations of capitalism,” he would say — and a simultaneous passion for human fulfillment, for the right of every person to live a dignified life, find their place, and have a chance to contribute. His was a socialism of the heart.
He had plenty of flaws, of course, but today only one of them matters: he never wrote it all down. So in the absence of the memoir we always begged for, and in fevered anticipation of those 22 hours David Suzuki’s sitting on, I leave it to you all. Please keep telling the stories about him that you know. That’s where he lives now.
[applause]