One woman’s life in a 100-year Canadian immigration story

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There is no news in this story, no celebrity history. It’s just another obituary of a single individual among the billions who pass through the gates of life on earth and move on to whatever lies beyond. At the same time, however, it’s a story of one woman whose life represents and demonstrates the complex generational transformations that take place in Canada, in this case reaching back almost exactly 100 years.

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Her name was Claudia Marian Krawchuk. Claudia passed away at 8:05 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 22, in an Intensive Care Unit at Toronto General Hospital, three days short of her 79th birthday, her life taken after a 25-year struggle with the accumulating, body-destroying effects of multiple sclerosis.

She died after the ICU staff suddenly informed me that her heart and oxygen readings were falling, and that Claudia was dying. She had been in septic shock for 24 hours, brought on by an infection, unable to speak or respond. I leaned over to kiss her and hold her face in my hands, reminding her of the 58 loving years we had been together. The medical staff was outside the room looking in as I held Claudia, telling her I loved her. I think her eyelids quivered a bit. The nurse who was monitoring the machines swears that her heart beat and other measures improved but then levelled off, slowed down and stopped. Thank God I was there.

Claudia’s battle against the ravages of multiple sclerosis, a neurological brain disorder of unknown cause, was the supreme achievement of her life. She fought and resisted progressive destruction of her body right up until the end, including multiple visits to emergency to fight off the infections that inevitably crept into her body and ultimately took her life.

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She never gave up. In the two weeks prior to her death she managed her power wheelchair (with occasional assistance), insisting that she drive herself into subway stations and through major Toronto intersections to attend the classical music performances that helped keep her spirits alive. On the Tuesday, three days before she passed, she made it to Toronto’s St. Lawrence Centre to take in a Music Toronto performance by world-renowned Canadian pianist Marc-Andre Hamelin.

Despite the progressive destruction of her body, she rarely complained or sought sympathy. One of her nurses for over three decades at Toronto’s Sunnybrook MS Clinic put it well. “I’ll remember Claudia for her perseverance and strength despite living with MS…. I can’t recall a moment where she expressed self-pity or hopelessness — maybe frustration while she navigated the health-care system but even then she remained patient and creative!”

Even as her ability to speak clearly declined, and through multiple visits to emergency rooms, she broke into big smiles and never stopped the process of organizing her life, her music — and her relatively modest investments. Claudia was a chartered accountant, eventually specializing in tax, and a very selective and cautious investor who, a few days before she passed, bought shares in Canadian National Railway, confident that she would be enjoying a long-term climb in value.

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That was Claudia. She lived optimistically with a never-give-up attitude long before MS moved in.

It was also a life that, in an individual way, reflects the story of millions of Canadian families who immigrated to Canada over the centuries — and continue to arrive daily in search of a better life.

Claudia’s story began a century ago in the gold-mining region of northern Ontario, where her parents and grandparents established themselves as immigrants from the troubled political state of Ukraine. At a time today when immigration fuels debate, the story of her family’s arrival in Canada and adaptation to life in a new economic and social environment serves as a reminder of the generational transformations that follow.

Her grandfather on her mother’s side, Jacob Durgensky, arrived in Canada alone from Ukraine in 1914, leaving wife Marianna and his two-year-old daughter, Gabrielle, in Ukraine. Jacob joined hundreds of other Ukrainian immigrants drawn to the communities in northern Ontario. By 1925, he had settled in Kirkland Lake. In 1927, his wife Marianna and 15-year-old Gabrielle left the troubled, pogrom-ridden Ukrainian town of Bratslav to join Jacob in Kirkland Lake.

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While Jacob initially worked as a miner, he seems to have been able to save some money and transform himself into something of an entrepreneur. For a time, he operated a restaurant in Kirkland Lake, but the family soon moved about 25 kilometres east, to Larder Lake (population 2,000), often described as the centre of Canada’s first gold rush. Jacob built a three-storey, wooden building on Main Street and opened the Gold Field Restaurant and Delicatessen on one side of the building and the Gold Field Pool Room and Barber Shop on the other side.

Jacob’s daughter, Gabrielle, met and, in 1936, married Joseph Krawchuk, another Ukrainian who landed in Canada around 1920. Joe and Gabrielle had two children, Ted (born in 1938) and Claudia (1945), who both grew up on the second and third floors of the Gold Field building, although some of the rooms were also rented out to miners who worked in nearby gold mines.

Joe also became a miner at the Kerr-Addison gold mine in nearby Virginiatown. In 1941, during the Second World War, Joe joined the Royal Canadian Corps of Engineers as part of a crew posted to Gibraltar to excavate and tunnel into the Rock of Gibraltar for ammunition storage and transport.

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After Joe returned from the war, Claudia was born. As she grew up, she found music. Somewhere in the Gold Field building was a piano that she used to practise after taking lessons.

At Kirkland Lake High she also briefly took up the clarinet and played in the school orchestra. Her first summer job (aside from lifeguard at Larder Lake’s beach) was as a waitress in a hotel restaurant in Gananoque, Ont., before she began her first year at the University of Toronto’s St. Michael’s College. She frequently went off on her own to attend classical music performances — which may be one of the reasons she failed her first year at the university.

Undeterred, she moved to Ottawa on her own and enrolled at Carleton University, where she eventually graduated with a BA in economics. I met the 21-year-old Claudia in 1966 while I was attending the university’s journalism school. We have been together ever since.

Claudia’s pre-multiple sclerosis career began in Montreal, where she took courses at McGill University and become a chartered accountant — now called a certified public accountant. Exactly why Claudia chose accounting is unknown. In a brief resume drafted some years later, she wrote without explanation that “prior to deciding to pursue studies in economics and finance, I contemplated a career in science and worked as a research technician in genetics and plant breeding in the fruit crops division of the Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa.”

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The CA profession had not been receptive to women. In the 1960s, only five per cent of accountants were women, described as early “pioneers” who slowly broke through the “glass ceiling” as far back as the 1930s. But the 1970s brought a transformation as “late pioneer” women stormed the profession. By 1985 more than 40 per cent of accountants were women.

Claudia’s career as a CA was not a glorious rise to the top, or even the middle. Over 20-plus years, before MS set in, her accounting career took her through auditing, tax and other positions at Price Waterhouse, KPMG Peat Marwick (now KPMG Canada), BDO Dunwoody and Touche Ross. Her corporate employment included Cyanamid Canada, A.E. LePage (now Royal LePage) and Gulf Canada.

Evidence suggests that Claudia’s uncertain career trajectory was influenced by her own personality and attitudes. She was not a political operator who sought to climb corporate ladders. She trusted her own judgments and assessments and would always openly and fearlessly express her opinions.

In hand-written notes from the 1990s Claudia described her three-year experience at the Toronto offices of Gulf Canada, the oil company that would ultimately sell off its retail operations to Petro-Canada and stumble through the decade as oil prices plunged from US$100 to $30 a barrel. She wrote that working in the “contraction environment” of the 1990s at Gulf left her doing “uncreative grunt work where you had no control over the sources or the disposition of what you dealt with.”

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What kind of person, she asked, thrives in a corporate environment? ”Coasters,” wrote Claudia, “people who don’t want to think too much about job content or their contribution but want a steady paycheque.” Then there are the talkers: “It seems in today’s business climate as if much of success depends upon your ability to talk, preferably accompanied by slides.” Then there are the generalists: “Meeting goers. People who no longer do what they are trained to do — maybe then never ever wanted to.”

One can see why Claudia would have had challenges in her professional and corporate career.

With the arrival of multiple sclerosis, she spent the last 20 years bound to a wheelchair. It made the adventurous travel we both loved impossible. In 1970 we quit our jobs to travel for six months in Europe. In 1976 we went for an eight-month adventure to Asia, landing first in Japan for a couple of weeks then on to Hong Kong (China was then locked behind the walls of Communism), Singapore, Indonesia , Malaysia, Thailand, Nepal, India and Iran (where the Shah was still in power).

In a strange way, the limitations of MS opened the path to a more life-affirming and satisfying stage. Classical music became her focus  — not just through attendance at concerts and collecting CDs of her favourite performances, but also participating in the governance of some of Toronto’s chamber musical institutions.

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In the early stages of the disease she worked as a part-time fundraiser/development employee at the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir and as a board member of the small Baroque Music by the Grange concert series. Later she briefly served on the boards of Music Toronto and the Toronto Summer Music Festival.

But her real objective through her struggle with MS was to attend as many performances of classical music, preferably chamber music and individual recitals, as possible. She was selective: not too much Bartok, thank you, and for some reason she disapproved of Dvorak’s “American” quartet. In the two weeks before she passed — and despite her body having been reduced to a barely functioning right arm — she made it to a Benjamin Grosvenor piano recital at the Royal Conservatory of Music’s Koerner Hall, and a two-night performance of Bach sonata and partitas by violinist Leonidas Kavakos.

The music ended with Marc-Andre Hamelin’s recital three nights before she died, two days before her 79th birthday and 100 years since her family arrived in Ontario’s gold-mining towns.

But there will be more to come from the Krawchuk line. Her brother Ted and his wife, Lorna Hilder, have two daughters. Carolyn is an officer with the British Columbia government’s forest Investment program and Meg is a professor and fire ecologist at Oregon State University. Carolyn and Meg have three children, Claudia’s great niece and two great nephews, who are poised to travel the coming decades into a new Made-in-Canada century.

National Post

Terence Corcoran is a columnist with the Financial Post.

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