Gord Downie’s long shadow
Late, beloved Tragically Hip singer’s brothers deal with grief as they unveil documentary Friday including never-before-seen footage of his final, driven year
Vinay Menon Gord Downie seems to be at the table with us. I can see him in the eyes of his brothers, Patrick and Mike. I can hear his voice, his dream of reconciliation, when tthey explain the work on Indigenous issues that consumed his final months,
work they’ve vowed to continue. But most of all, I can feel Gord in their love and their sorrow.
“Many days, it’s tough getting your head off the pillow,” says Patrick. “And yyou don’t even know why. I guess it takes time. Grief is a weird thing.” Mike glances at his younger brother
and nods: “It’s not a straight line.” It’s Thanksgiving Monday. Patrick and Mike have arrived at Christina’s on the Danforth, looking a little bruised by the past, but also ready to peer into the future. “Keep it going,” Gord often told them, in his final months. “Keep it moving forward.”
Nearly a year ago, on Oct. 17, they lost ttheir brother. In many ways, we all lost their t brother. Though the shocking diagnosis of incurable brain cancer had sparked national mourning months before, the grim bulletin landed like a
thunderbolt on an otherwise quiet Tuesday. Justin Trudeau went before the cameras and fell to pieces. His tears said it all. Gordon Edgar Downie, dead at 53. It didn’t feel real. Maybe it never will. For millions, a Canada without a beloved Gord Downie was as unthinkable as Niagara Falls without the water or the Rockies without the mountains. He was a landmark, wherever he landed. He was an anchor in our psyche.
For more than three decades as the frontman for the Tragically Hip and a solo artist, Gord was not just a rock god for the ages. He was also our poet laureate, a weaver of lore, a raconteur, a drawbridge linking small towns to big cities, a showman, a sage and a rascal, a cultural ambassador, a buzzsaw of creativity and, near the end, a check on our conscience. Gord spent more time thinking about Canada than most prime ministers. And y what he thought about in his final years was Chanie Wenjack. It was Mike who first told him the tragic story: Chanie, a 12-year-old Anishinaabe boy,
tried to escape from the Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential school in Kenora, Ont., in 1966. He set off on a doomed j journey along the railway tracks, attempting to walk 600 kilometres back to his family in Ogoki Post. His body was found a few days later. A small child, overcome with loneliness and despair; had died of starvation and expo- sure in Ontario.
Chanie’s story tormented Gord. It also inspired his most crucial work.
Secret Path started as 10 poems. Downie wrote them in the imagined voice of Chanie. This narrative verse became 10 songs, and then 10 chapters in a graphic novel illustrated by Jeff Lemire. The concept album and book spawned a concert and animated film, broadcast by the CBC.
MENON continued on E7
On Friday at 9 p.m., the third and final documentary related to the project — Finding The Secret Path — will air on the public broadcaster. It includes never-before-seen footage of Downie’s last year. This is must-watch TV that’s also hard to watch.
To take in these achingly tender scenes, knowing the cruel ending, is to be gobsmacked by Gord’s resilience and drive and selflessness. While living out his own heartbreaking story of terminal cancer, he devoted all of his energy to telling Chanie’s heartbreaking story from a half-century ago.
The twin layers of anguish are like two mirrors facing one another. They give Secret Path a reflective coating that is haunting.
“There was a serious emotional heaviness,” says Patrick, born four years after Gord. “There’s a story of one boy trying to walk home … And then there is this guy who is dying as well, who is up there performing. It’s parallel stories happening right in front of you.”
Sitting in the middle of a dimly lit restaurant, the uptempo Greek pop thumping through the speakers is at odds with the sombre conversation. I wonder how the brothers, who executive produced the documentary, balanced helping Gord complete the project while also sheltering him from the ravages of a merciless disease.
Short answer: there was no stopping him.
In the fall of 2016, when he flew to Ogoki Post in Marten Falls First Nation to meet the Wenjack family, including Chanie’s sisters Pearl and Daisy, he was coming off the Hip’s gruelling farewell tour, two brain surgeries, six weeks of radiation and multiple rounds of chemotherapy.
Yet there he was, garbed in a pink hoodie and jean jacket, clutching his water bottle, moving slowly but decisively. As Patrick notes: “When he zeroes in on something, it’s incredible.”
In Chanie, Gord zeroed in on a forgotten story that told a bigger one, a monstrous tale he believed every Canadian needed to hear. In seeking reconciliation for Indigenous communities — in calling for historic wrongs to be righted — Downie had a revelation: he could use his celebrity to make a difference to both individual lives lost in the shadows and the trajectory of Canada itself.
“He realized that was his Hail Mary for the country,” says Mike.
The work also helped Gord answer a question that nagged him for decades.
As a kid growing up in Kingston, where the three boys shared a bedroom — the brothers also have two sisters — Gord was intense and affable and competitive. He also spent hours contemplating the vast nation beyond his immediate sense of time and place.
“We are more than hockey sticks and doughnuts,” Gord used to say.
Even at a young age, he felt something was amiss in Canada. The country, as he saw it, was a jigsaw puzzle with a gaping hole.
“There was this piece missing,” explains Mike, Gord’s elder by four years. “And with Secret Path, Gordie came to realize the missing piece was Indigenous issues.”
So he hurled his frail body into the cause. He donated his remaining time to others.
As Gord says in the upcoming doc: “If I have any pull or any push at all, this is what I want to do. Nothing else really matters to me.”
The same was clear during the Hip’s final show in Kingston, where he delivered an impromptu speech calling upon the country to do more for Indigenous communities.
“He was not a politician,” says Mike. “He had nothing to gain from it in any way. But for a lot of Canadians, I think that was a key that opened this door … I do feel like the conversation changed just by Gordie reaching a lot of people who are very hard to reach.”
Now the outreach falls on the shoulders of his brothers.
“He left us a huge responsibility with the Downie-Wenjack Fund and his legacy,” says Patrick. “And we take it really seriously.”
The Fund, adds Mike, is “one of the things that has given both of us quite a bit of purpose this year ... it has the ability, I think, of keeping whatever Gord started to keep rolling.”
In addition to the fund and educational efforts — Secret Path is now a teaching tool in thousands of classrooms — Mike and Patrick also manage Gord’s significant legacy, estate and the requests that show no sign of slowing down.
“Gord had a 30-year career with one of the biggest bands in Canadian history,” says Patrick. “And he also had a very serious solo career with a lot other musicians and did a lot of other projects. So there are a lot of pieces to represent.”
None of which is particularly easy when you are grieving.
“This time of year is tough,” says Patrick. “We feel it coming up.”
Gord’s one-year death anniversary will no doubt teleport the brothers back to last year, and all the years before that.
“Now that some of the shock of it is lifting, you find that you really just miss your brother,” says Patrick.
“I still almost daily reach for the phone and go, ‘Oh, I gotta tell Gordie about …’ ”
His words trail off and the three of us blink into the middle distance.
“He’s in your head and your heart all the time.”
“Back in the early days, it was all I could do to not tell the person beside me, ‘That’s my brother,’ when I heard a Hip song,” says Mike. “It could be anywhere.”
It still can. The memories can sneak up and grab them at the most unexpected time. Unlike most of us who’ve experienced loss, neither Mike nor Patrick know when Gord will suddenly appear in the periphery as they march forward.
A Hip song may be playing in the grocery store. Gord’s face may pop out from a magazine page or a T-shirt on a passerby.
Then there are the countless people he touched along the way, people who still want or maybe even need to call or write. “He was so good at weaving these threads of the country,” says Mike. “He was so good at meeting so many people. The stories are insane about him meeting somebody after a show and, 10 years later, he sees them again and remembers their name.”
When we finish the interview, I turn off my tape recorder and we order a round of Thanksgiving drinks. We hoist our glasses and cheers Gord. Outside, the overcast sky looks like a carbon copy of the one in the video for “Ahead By a Century.”
We hug and say our goodbyes in the east end of town that was home to Gord when he lived in Toronto.
It still doesn’t feel real.