SAM’S SPIRIT LIVES ON
Memorial event sends kids to camp
To his mother, Sam Lazarus is forever 25.
It’s the age Janet Torge’s younger son was when he died from malaria in early 2004 in Ghana, where he was working as a volunteer teacher in a daycare centre.
“That was his life: He had 25 years,” she said.
“He stays 25. It’s too weird to try to figure out how old he would be, what he would be doing. I just don’t go there. That was a decision I made during my mourning period.
“In my mind, he died at the top of his game. He was loving Africa. He really liked the kids. He would go off on trips on the weekends when he wasn’t working and to soccer games, where he was the only white face in the stadium. It was such a good move for him.”
Her son had been in Africa since November 2003, and his frequent emails were “packed with the excitement of a 25-year-old discovering new worlds and ways of living,” Torge wrote in Dear Sam: Grieving the Death of My Son (iUniverse, 2007, 128 pp). Her affecting memoir of losing Sam and mourning him takes the form of letters to him and his imagined replies.
He had found the daycare. As he’d told his mother: “I want to travel, I want to have more experiences. I want to work with kids who have more hurdles that they have to get over, like me.’”
Life was not easy for him, said Torge, a freelance documentary film producer. Learning disabilities made school difficult, for one. He suffered from seizures. And
frustrations and failures abounded in the form of unrewarding jobs and aborted projects.
He chose to keep these disappointments to himself and “spent a lot of time being normal around other kids. He was very popular. People were drawn to him.”
And yet, “he never felt like he was part of a group, which was crazy, because he was,” said Torge, 71.
At his memorial, held in a filled-to-the-rafters Rialto Theatre, “I said, ‘Sam, look at this crowd.’ ”
Her son was happy at Katimavik, a national youth volunteer service program where he worked with young people from abusive families, with young people who had trouble integrating.
“He felt he fit right in” and bonded with kids who “understood hard times,” Torge said.
Lazarus found joy, too, at camp and spent happy summers at Camp YMCA Kanawana as a camper, a counsellor and a leader. After he died, the family established the Sam Lazarus Fund at the Y and a trophy named for him is given at the season’s final banquet to the counsellor who exhibits the most leadership and concern for campers — “the most Sam-like qualities,” as Torge put it.
And every year family, friends and the Kanawana community gather for a hockey tournament and street festival known as the Sam Jam. The event has raised more than $330,000 over the years for the Sam Lazarus Fund and helped to send more than 120 kids to camp: These days they are mainly young asylum seekers, orphaned or here without their parents. The 15th edition of the Sam Jam is Saturday.
Lazarus continues to be a presence up at the St-Sauveur camp, where T-shirts from every Sam Jam hang in the dining hall rafters. His older brother Riel goes up to camp with his buddies to talk about him.
This summer, Riel’s seven-yearold daughter was a first-time camper. Torge and Riel talk about Sam a lot.
“We have our jokes about him,” she said. “When I talk about him, he is no longer in the shadows. He is back in my life.”
But even in the shadows, “I have a connection with him that’s always there: It’s not that I think of him all the time — but I have pictures at various places around the house and I run into him from time to time.”
Riel and his family live in the flat upstairs.
“For me, that’s really important,” said Torge. She comes from a large and close family and, in Montreal, “his is the only family I have.”
Having another child, she said, was a saving grace. Had Sam been an only child, losing him “might have taken me over the edge.”