Ivan Clifford Williams
Brother, happy man. Born on Feb. 16, 1945, in Windsor, Ont.; died on Oct. 30, 2014, in Fergus, Ont., of heart failure, aged 69.
My brother, Ivan, died in his sleep. Hospitalized for pain, he underwent tests: Kidney failure was imminent. He had been blind from birth, but as he wound down, he told his caretakers that he could finally see – and that everything was beautiful. Left alone for a while, he began to have conversations with ... whom? When asked, he said, "The angels." Staffers listened outside his room; he really was having conversations – with pauses for angelic reply that were thoroughly mysterious.
Ivan was also severely mentally challenged. His afflictions broke my parents' hearts, and his institutionalization cast despair over my family's life. In her final years, haunted by her inability to care for him, my mother visited him every week.
My earliest memories of Ivan are ones of frustration with a brother who couldn't play like other kids. He cried too easily. However, in contrast to the often sullen, uncommunicative people who populate his IQ level (measured at about 35), Ivan was a lot like our gregarious father: He loved life – conversation, music, singing, food, beer – and women.
When he was 7, Ivan was sent to the Orillia Hospital for Retarded Children, and in the early 1960s, to a new home at Southwestern Regional Centre near Cedar Springs – a vast institutional compound on farmland overlooking Lake Erie. It featured training and education programs, a swimming pool, a gymnasium and classrooms.
Then, around 1990, Ontario's Liberal government offered the alternative of group homes, and away he went to a suburban house in Fergus, 90 minutes from Toronto. It was the beginning of a new life for Ivan.
There, he was taught life skills by mostly female staff: He folded towels and learned macramé; he wore colourful ties and was clean-shaven; he was employed for one hour a week (with pay!) in I Love Chocolate, a candy store in Fergus where he learned to recognize the voices of dozens of townsfolk. But community life offered heartbreak, too. Ivan's relationship with a woman with Down syndrome, his constant and devoted companion, ended with her sudden death, and he cried in his room for days.
Although he displayed echolalia – an autism-like repetitive speech pattern – he sometimes uttered stunningly conscious statements, as though an intelligent adult were dreaming inside him, only occasionally able to waken. You couldn't be more blind than Ivan, but toward the end of his life he would tell you the colour of the shirt you were wearing. No one could figure out how he did it.
I wish my parents had lived to see Ivan's later life. He was completely happy, spending his last years surrounded by kindly young women who doted on him. At his memorial, they wore his ties and sang his favourite song, Jesus Loves Me, and many people rose to speak fondly of him. I've never believed in Jesus, angels or karma, but Ivan embodied the mystery of human life as much as anyone I've ever known. I was proud to be his brother.
Douglas Williams is Ivan's younger brother.