David Suzuki - David Suzuki

Troy spent many years trying to figure out his relationship with me, but he stayed very close to my father, moving in with him for several years. As we have become close again (thank goodness for e-mail), I wonder where he's going in a life still evolving. Like many younger men today, he has chosen not to follow the high-pressure, competitive path that was the model of a “successful” male when I was younger. And as a result, in so many ways, he has led a more varied, interesting life than I have.

Severn and Sarika are out of the nest but still strongly attached to the family. It is wonderful to have them spend weeks at Tangwyn with boyfriends in tow. Horizons for the girls seem limitless compared with what was expected for Tara's generation of women.

After graduating from Yale University in 2001, Severn traveled for two years and gave inspirational speeches to adult and youth groups across North America. She then decided to go back to graduate school to study ethnobotany and is now working with Nancy Turner at the University of Victoria; through Sev, Tara and I are vicariously learning about the exciting discoveries of aboriginal gardening along the west coast.

Although as children of a faculty member my children could have attended UBC without paying tuition, I had informed all of them I would pay for their postsecondary school education, but they would have to take it outside B.C. because I believe being away from home is half of what this experience is about.

I had urged Sarika to take one of the acceptances she received from Mount Holyoke College and Smith College in Massachusetts, the two women's colleges near my alma mater, Amherst. But in the end she decided against an all-female school and went to the University of California at Berkeley to study marine biology. Now, through her, I enjoy learning about fish that have so long been important in my life. Tara and I have offered to be her research assistants any time.

All of my children have become vibrant, interesting human beings, all of them committed environmentalists and contributors to society. If my children and their children know anything, I hope it is that they have my unconditional love and can always depend on that.

WHAT IS THE MEANING of life? Although I'm an elder, I haven't come close to answering that question. The 1960s were all about enjoying the moment. I remember students having a confrontation with faculty at UBC and one of the leaders who was challenging professors, marks, and classes saying life is about “fun” and university was irrelevant because it wasn't fun. For me, life has been and continues to be about work . I find it impossible to live in the present and to simply relish the joy of the moment. Life for me seems to be all about responsibility and the need to fulfill obligations. It hasn't been fair to Tara, or my children or grandchildren, but a sense of duty and being busy has taken me away from them, even when I am physically with them.

I have been a pushover for certain kinds of requests for help — from underdogs, like a woman in Woodstock who had struggled for years to galvanize concern about local environmental issues, so I helped her by going and giving a speech that raised money and support for her. I hate it when I hear stories of bullies, like the owner of a marine aquarium in the Niagara region who took a small group of people to court for handing out leaflets urging people to consider the plight of the captive killer whales. I gave a speech to a sold-out crowd and helped the defendants raise tens of thousands of dollars for legal fees to fight their case. I keep trying to help when appeals come from isolated First Nations communities fighting high suicide rates among youth, problems of contaminated water, or arrogant authorities like provincial hydroelectricity corporations.

But all of these do-good efforts take me away from the family and home, because most of the time I end up visiting and speaking on weekends. It has been utterly selfish for me to put these activities ahead of time spent with family and certainly a conceit to think I can be the one to make a difference.

My devotion to work has also resulted in an almost obsessive need to be punctual. The one thing that creates tension between Tara and me is our totally different approaches to time. She is motivated by a desire to get as much out of every minute as she can, and that means not wasting time by leaving and arriving early, so she pushes things to the very last minute. In contrast, I like to leave lots of leeway for unexpected holdups and am much happier arriving early and waiting. I practically go bonkers when Tara is late. She claims I once allowed so much time for traffic and the unexpected when we left for a movie in West Vancouver that we arrived two hours early. But that is ridiculous and must be untrue. It is true, however, that I am “anal,” as my daughters constantly remind me.

My friends and even my family believe it will be impossible for me to retire, but I don't agree. Retirement to me does not mean not doing anything interesting and meaningful and just waiting for death. There have been many things I've wanted to do, but I have never been able to devote the time and attention that are needed to do them fully and well. For example, I would love to try my hand at painting, and when I told this to my sister Aiko, who was an artist, she sent me all of the necessary equipment, including a how-to-get-started book, but I've never even removed the wrapping. Many years ago, when I expressed regret that I had never learned to read music or play an instrument, Joane bought a beautiful recorder for me, but I never touched that either.

To follow these pursuits seriously, I couldn't just put in an hour a day or every other day; I want to be able to focus on them without distractions of time or other commitments. Maybe it's just a rationalization for doing nothing, but to me, retirement means having the time to do a few of the things I want to do — paint, learn Spanish, do some carving, study geology — before I pass on and the atoms in my body are returned to the natural world from which they came.

HUMAN BEINGS BEAR THAT terrible burden that self-awareness has inflicted on us — the knowledge that we, like all other creatures on earth, will die. That's what religions attempt to provide solace for, the unbearable thought of our disappearance forever. Belief in a life after death is one way to bear this truth, although it pains me to see people who seem to care little about this life because they believe they will live forever after they leave it. It even seems that blowing oneself up is preferable to a life fully lived if the promise is seventy virgins in paradise (over eternity, those virgins won't satisfy very long). I have been an atheist all my adult life, although as a teenager, I desperately wanted to believe in a god.

I don't like to even think of death because it makes me very uncomfortable, not because of fear about the process of dying, although any form of dying other than from instant death in an accident or from old age strikes me as a crummy way to go. No, what I don't like is the idea that this guy looking back at me in the mirror, this person locked into my skull full of memories that make him who he is, this fellow who has known pain, joy, thoughts, having existed for such a brief flash in all of eternity, is going to vanish forever at his death. Forever is such a long time, and seventy, eighty, ninety, even a hundred years is such a tiny interval in all of time.