Recently Adam Rowe my young cousin once removed visited my wife Mac and I in Nanaimo BC. He was travelling from his home in London, England back to school at the University of California Santa Barbara. It was a great visit. He is a fantastic young man, bright, inquisitive and engaging, living life with enthusiasm as only one can at that age. He is the sort of man who arrived quietly and left a loud impression, the sort of visitor who leaves you wanting to compliment his parents on what a great son they have raised and how proud they should be of him. So I did.

It was a quick visit, just twenty-four hours but in that short time Adam kindled something, perhaps a need in me at this stage in my life, a need to connect to my blood, my blood family. Still water runs deep, it is true but I had been blissfully unaware of these thoughts until Adam’s visit. I’ve been trying to think why it was so meaningful. I am English by birth but emigrated with my parents in 1958 to Kelowna, what was then a very small town of twenty thousand people in the hinterland of British Columbia. For my English parents this was ‘not Kansas anymore’. For all of the opportunity and prosperity that lay in wait for our family in this awkward, raw, ambitious country of Canada it must have been a wrenching experience for my mother and father. I am just beginning to understand just how wrenching that must have been. How was I to know? I was a callow eight year old when I arrived and spent the next few decades lapping up all that this magnificent new country could offer, barely looking up save as to see what was coming next. I don’t think I noticed that other than my parents and brother Clive, I had no blood relatives in my life. Not one. Nor did it particularly matter to me. I was too busy just getting on with it. And that’s how it was for the next sixty-five years. I didn’t know enough to know what I was missing.

Adam has reminded me.

His father David Rowe (my first cousin) had travelled to Kelowna nearly thirty years ago with his own father, my Uncle Norman (I appreciate I may be losing you here and you don’t give a tinkers damn about my named relatives but bare with me would you please, I’m just trying to keep it all straight in my own mind). Even with David’s visit I wasn’t left with the awareness that I am wrestling with now. Of course I was in full immersion at that point in my life with family, career, not one moment to myself and certainly no time to reflect on some of the profound questions of life, immortality and family. I was just trying to make sure I was on time for my son’s hockey practice.

After my father died my mother had wanted to travel back to England. I think now, that she harboured a wish to return there to spend her last years but that was not be. As I think about it now I have a feeling she was wanting to be brought back into the fold of the family she had left, to be closer to her blood relatives at the end of her life. Perhaps not, perhaps I am transferring onto her, but I do remember there was something compelling and insistent in her wish to return. And again it was something about which at that myopic, self absorbed stage of my life, I was completely unaware. Even had I been aware I wouldn’t have supported mum returning to England. If it were now, I would.

A large binder labelled ‘Tony’s Family Tree’ sits on a shelf in our garage, patiently waiting for me to open it up. My father had prepared it many years ago and of course I have looked at it, with interest. Passing interest. After Adam’s visit I took it down again. What it does is provide a record of our common bond, our blood relationships, telling the story of our family as it wound its way nearly a thousand years through time and history, populated with blood relationships. It is the human equivalent of searching for the headwaters of a river, searching for where we came from and it is connection one can’t acquire anywhere else. It’s where our blood has flowed.

I’ve come to think as well that my thoughts are a function of ageing and the inevitable questions around mortality or more candidly, immortality. It may be a growing awareness that while I will come and go and soon enough not be remembered, that is not so of my family. At the very least I will have a place in my family tree with all of those others who have travelled through the centuries, joined by blood.

Adam’s visit was powerful for me. I had been looking forward to it for weeks, more than I would normally, were it for example a long lost friend visiting. I was wanting to ensure he met Sophie and Toby, his second cousins who both live on Vancouver Island. And the most important thing of all, I wanted Adam Rowe to meet Rowe Penton, my daughter Sophie’s young daughter. Sophie and her husband Jon had named Rowe after my mother Gloria Rowe, David’s aunt, something that thrills me every time I mention her name. She has a photo of my mum in Rowe’s room and shares warm memories of her. It is as touching today as it was when she told us. When Rowe toddled over to Adam during his visit and climbed up on his lap he held her with the typical twenty year olds ‘oh my word, what do I do with this!?’ look in his eye. It was very funny. But in that moment I felt the draw, the compelling undeniable connection that it is to be a blood relative. The photo we have of Adam and Rowe together is proof of it all.

Other of course than my four children Jono, ‘Niffer, Sophie and Toby and our five grand children Adam is the only blood relative I have spent time with in nearly thirty years. Until his visit I didn’t know what I was missing. **

Now I do.

As a postscript and a delightful one I might add both Mac and I have friended Adam’s mother Eva on social, a connection we would not have made without Adam’s visit and an important one. It does not go unnoticed by me that I have come to this so late. I think women and mother’s understand family, understand blood relationships and their importance long before most men come to it, if they every do.

So a little late I may be. Whatever. I made it.

**And so there it is. A factual error and one in fairness that may have given offense. My cousin Caroline and her husband Greg visited us in Kelowna BC almost twenty years ago. I plead both of my usual defences: wine and seventy-three but I am disappointed to have missed this out. Of all the people not to acknowledge, it is most unfair to miss out Caroline Panter. Every year, from well before the internet Caroline and her cousin Helen Arnold have made a point of staying connected and keeping us in touch with the ‘English’ family. Each Christmas we would receive a ‘treasure chest’ of chit chat about the family, the comings and goings, the births and deaths. If she did take offense at not being mentioned in this blog, she has made no mention. Of course she hasn’t, she’s English. I’ll speak to her directly.

Postscript: Turns out Adam Rowe and Rowe Penton share the same birth date, May 3rd. Just sayin’.