Steve Burgess's memoir Who Killed Mom? is no whodunit, no homicide mystery still unsolved all these years later. His eightysomething mother was not murdered by a "somebody." Like many other people her age, she died of disease complicated by old age. It could happen to any of us. But when you're a mature adult like Burgess, when an aging parent dies, you're left considering your own mortality as you quickly realize that you're next to be pushed into the proverbial wood chipper by the next generation.
Burgess is the youngest of five, all born within six years in the 1950s. He quips that his mother played "a new role as a human production line with an output that would shame Henry Ford." Whenever the Vancouver-based Burgess visits Brandon, Man., the dutiful son in his early 50s is a grim witness to his aging parents' decline.
Ottawa-born Bill Burgess and his wife, Joan, raised in rural Saskatchewan, were newlyweds and freshly graduated from Queen's University in Kingston when Bill was assigned to a hardship post: "In 1951 the Reverend Bill Burgess received his first pastoral charge as an ordained minister. Chicago and New York were apparently unavailable. He got Stoughton, a town of roughly half a thousand souls in the southeastern quadrant of Saskatchewan. Stoughton in the 1950s was the picture of a bygone age – the wide main street with its tidy little storefronts, grain elevators, fields of golden wheat, and key parties. … In little Stoughton, five years before the publication of Peyton Place, and with the seventies still a far-off vision of space-age jumpsuits and flying cars, folks were apparently rather ahead of their time."
Young Burgess grew up in Regina and Brandon. His 1970s teenage years relate quality time spent in friends' basements drinking beer, smoking pot and listening to the LP soundtracks of the period, by Deep Purple and Pink Floyd. He also fits the archetypal mould of United Church ministers' children. Since earnest ministers' kids didn't want to be considered a goody two-shoes, they were generally more rebellious than other teens, often well acquainted with drugs and other misdemeanours. Like many 1970s teens, Burgess ran the delinquent-son course, from shoplifting to drunk driving, but lived to tell the tale.
As he reflects back on his prairie childhood, Burgess continues the whodunit theme like TV's Columbo, and playfully searches for perpetrators for his mother's death, including himself. "On the disease front I ran the usual gamut of measles, mumps, chicken pox, and bronchitis, but also went the extra mile by picking up scarlet fever. Who knows how many days the stress subtracted from Mom's lifespan?"
Burgess continues the process of elimination with the connection between his four siblings' young adult shenanigans and his mother's death.
A key suspect and probable perp is his maternal grandmother, Annie Slorance, who was no doting mother or grandmother, shoring up her children and grandchildren's self-esteem. Instead, Grandma Slorance, who immigrated from Scotland with her affable husband, Jock, in the early 1920s, was a disapproving, pursed-lip she-devil who lived far too long. Burgess's uneasy relationship with his dictatorial grandmother – he is not her favourite – is hilarious. He's acutely aware that in a close-knit prairie family, grouches are still included, tolerated and begrudgingly respected at all times. They're family, good or bad.
This is no treacly memoir. Like a Garrison Keillor of the Canadian prairies, Burgess writes funny, unfiltered observations, anecdotes and character descriptions that flow naturally and make for an engaging story of his life to date. His first book is a great effort after almost 20 years in the freelance trenches, a very funny book worthy of a Leacock Medal for Humour. If I could, I'd nominate Burgess and Who Killed Mom? for the 2011 short list. I just hope Burgess has more books on his hard drive to share.
D. Grant Black is a Saskatchewan freelance writer and author of Saskatchewan Book of Musts: The 101 Places Every Saskatchewanian Must See.
Editor's Note: A previous online version of this story referred to Steve Burgess as a "Bill Bryson of the Canadian prairies". This version has been corrected.