Disposing of a body is harder than one could imagine.
So……
It doesn’t look as if I will be able to donate my brain after my death.
And this kinda saddens me a bit.
I had always envisioned that my brain would serve some useful purpose.
After all I survived: – sexual abuse -mental abuse -physical abuse -neglect
I have lived with and coped with: -CPTSD -Major Depression -Severe Anxiety -The effects of military conversion therapy
The thought of death has never been very far.
Depression runs in my family.
And yet not once have I stuck a needle in my arm or snorted anything up my nose or toked on anything. The last time I had a drink was in July of 2011 and even then I was a very infrequent drinker.
I’ve had to deal with personality issues caused no doubt by the various traumas and abuses.
And yet I’ve somewhat navigated life and ended up with stable employment even if it is not at the level of employment that I could have risen to.
This rise is something that I’ve done on my own with absolutely no help from my father or my family. During all of the times I was unemployed in the early ’90s Richard was of no use. Even when I was on Skid Row in Vancouver and Toronto my father was of no assistance.
I did this all on my own.
You would think that research labs would want to know what it was inside my brain that allowed me to go from basically non-functional and requiring psychiatric institutionalization at age 10 to being the Chief Engineer of a hospital at 47.
Nope.
It’s like the field of depression research is oblivious to confirmation bias. By this I mean that researches are obviously looking for answers where they expect to find them, in the brains of depressed people who have not fared well in life. Or the researches go looking for the answers to drug addiction in the brains of those who were abused and who succumbed to drugs and other forms of self medication. They often use the brains of those who have never suffered from depression in their lives as a reference point. And that’s great if you’re only concerned about the two extremes, but it gives you absolutely no data about those in between the two extremes.
Where my body goes after my death? Don’t know really. So long as it isn’t cremated or buried, I’m cool with that.
Medical school would be nice.
But medical schools like UBC pose a problem in the sense that they only take “whole body” donations for their medical students to dissect. If my brain were to be removed immediately after my death, then UBC wouldn’t take my body.
Conversely, no brain research program would take my brain after it had been removed from my skull by medical students.
Now, of course this is all really silly when you think about it isn’t it?
After I’m dead they could launch by body into space and I wouldn’t have the foggiest clue, would I. What they do with my corpse and my brain after I’m dead and gone is really a matter of trust. But still…….
A tale of two different Access to Information requests.
Released to me in 2011Released to me in 2022
On Tuesday April 12th, 2022 as I sat in my apartment being examined via ZOOM by the defence counsel for the defendant, counsel asked me a question based upon my foster care records from the Alberta Government.
Counsel’s assistant did a screen share and an image similar to this image appeared on my screen:
A bit of a surprise
I had seen this document before. This was the interview of my father by Judith James, a psychologist that had been hired by the Canadian Armed Forces to evaluate my family after our school teachers and our principal complained to the military social worker about the issues my brother and I were having in school immediately after we arrived at CFB Griesbach from CFB Namao.
Confidential – Parent Interview Re: Robert and (my brother) Gill
I met with Richard on Nov. 6 1980 to discuss the level of emotional distress demonstrated by his sons Robert and (my brother). <blank> Richard acknowledged and confirmed many of the family problems cited by Robert and (my brother) <blank>.
What was new to me was the following text:
<blank> appeared concerned about <blank> drinking, suggesting <blank> emotionally abusive towards both children, especially when inebriated. As well, <blank> suggested that <blank> attempts to undermine any closeness between <blank> and <blank> by telling them false stories.
After the meeting was over I searched my copy of my foster care records, but I couldn’t find this paragraph anywhere. I found the page, but the section where this paragraph should have been was redacted.
This paragraph would have been devastating if it had been included in the copy of my foster care records that were released to me in 2011. As it is, I am so emotionally numb and dead now that this paragraph is nothing more than an amusing curiosity.
Let me fill in the blanks to the best of my ability based on some basic assumptions.
<Richard> appeared concerned about < Margaret’s> drinking, suggesting <she was> emotionally abusive towards both children, especially when inebriated. As well, <Richard> suggested that <Margaret> attempts to undermine any closeness between <him> and <his sons> by telling them false stories.
Fuck me Richard you stupid fucking asshole.
Both Richard and my grandmother drank excessively.
When they both got shitfaced, which was often, they’d stay up all night drinking and then spend the next day passed out. After that came the hangover phase. You didn’t want to be around either of these two when they were recovering from a hangover.
And yes, this all occurred on an active Canadian Armed Forces base in the Private Married Quarters on that base. And no, my father wasn’t the only alkie in a Canadian Forces uniform back then.
It was probably a very good thing that Richard was seldom living with us on Canadian Forces Base Namao. I couldn’t really imagine living in a house with these two drinking each other under the table any chance they got.
For Richard to tell Judith James in November of 1980 that he was concerned about his mother’s drinking is fucking hilarious.
As much as Richard despised his mother, he needed his mother to look after my brother and I while he was off playing G.I. Fucking Joe in the Canadian Forces for weeks and months at a time.
There are three DUIs that I clearly remember. One from CFB Shearwater, one from CFB Summerside, and one from CFB Namao.
There were all of the times he’d come home from the base mess three sheets to the fucking wind and he’d wake me and my brother up and keep us up at night to keep him company when he was drinking.
There was the yelling and hollering that he’d do when he was well past the point of intoxicated. When Richard was like this on Summerside and Namao there was absolutely no sleeping for my brother and I.
Grandma would do similar things when she’d get drunk. Luckily she didn’t have a driver’s licence, so we never had to worry about being in the car with her when she was drunk.
It was Richard’s drinking and abusive behaviour that led to my mother leaving and Grandma being brought in to look after my brother and I.
It was Grandma’s drinking that led to my brother and I needing to be babysat by P.S..
They were both alcoholics more in love with the bottle than the children they were supposed to look after.
So all I can say is “FUCK YOU RICHARD!”.
What a pathetic excuse of a man you were.
Blaming your own mother’s alcoholism for the problems your own children were exhibiting when your alcoholism was just as fucking bad.
And when I tell you that there was absolutely no one that my brother or I could tell about the abuse, I mean, there was no body that we could tell. The two adults in our lives were damaged beyond all hope.
Today was the second and final day of my examination by the defence in the matter involving Earl Ray Stevens.
The lawyer for the defence was a pleasant enough chap. “Just doing his job” as they say.
Over the course to the two days my lawyer only really had one objection. And the defence lawyer and I had a quibble about the meaning of a word.
But that was it.
I’ll have to produce further documents for the defence. My lawyer is going to put together a list of the undertakings that were requested of me. The nice thing is that the documents that I have to produce for the defence are scanned and are on my online drive, so sharing these documents is simple. As I said, I never really got into computers, but scanning and archiving is something that I got into. Really has come in handy at work where I took four old file cabinets of documents and manuals and scanned them into the shared drive at work so that they’re available to all plant engineers.
So, I’ve been on escitalopram for seven months now.
It has been both a blessing and a curse.
It looks like escitalopram will be with me for the rest of my life.
The pros are:
Far less depression. It’s not that I am happy. It’s that my emotions are completely blunted. And trust me, blunting is better than nothing.
My anxiety has been turned down. I can still feel the anxiety, but it doesn’t destroy me like it did before.
Disrupted trains of thoughts don’t cause headaches or nausea.
The cons are:
Disturbed sleep patterns.
Day long sleepiness.
Acne the likes of which I haven’t seen since I was a teen.
A general sense of ennui.
Weight gain.
Loss of appetite.
Can’t orgasm, but sex has never been a major deal breaker in my life.
So far, the benefits of escitalopram outweigh the negatives.
No. The escitalopram hasn’t caused increased thoughts of suicide or suicidal ideations.
But it also hasn’t taken away my desire to die.
The one thing that I have realized, and that you’re going to have to realize, is that the 40 years of untreated depression and anxiety have done some long term damage to my brain. And I’m okay with that. Not that the damage was done to my brain, but the fact that my brain is damaged.
40 years is a very long time to go without treatment.
So here I am, riding out the last few years of my life, and writing about it as I go.
By March of 2023 year we should know what the Parliamentary committee will recommend for guidelines for those wishing to apply for Medical Assistance in Dying for Mental Health issues.
After that I’ll have to apply. This will probably consist of convincing 3 psychologists that I am of sound mind in making this choice.
Just recently my N.P. has realized that I am serious. He’s the one who set me up with the escitalopram. I guess that he was hoping that the escitalopram would fix things for me. But it hasn’t. It can’t.
No matter how often my father passed my issues off as being nothing more than my attempts at attracting attention. They weren’t.
Just because my father chose to ignore my issues, and refused to get me timely treatment, doesn’t make his opinion that I was just making things up any more valid than the diagnoses that I had been given early in life.
The fact that my father loved to blame my issues on my mother and her “insane brothers” doesn’t make what I’ve suffered for the last 40 years a trivial matter.
If my father and Captain Totzke had allowed the ticking time bombs of depression, anxiety, and CPTSD to have been diffused all those years ago things would have worked out completely different.
Time machines do not exist. There is no going back into the past to undo things.
Again, to be very clear, wanting to die is nothing new. My wish to die has been with me since CFB Namao.
No one can live through that type of shit and not want to die.
I know of two men who died by suicide as a result of the CFB Namao affair. And as I’ve only met a few people who were affected by the CFB Namao affair, I have no idea how many others have ever tried suicide or have ever succeeded at suicide.
And I know of many more men who have committed suicide later in life, even after they have received “justice” for what they endured.
Bobbie, you just need some hobbies.
No. No I don’t. Hobbies won’t stop the memories of CFB Namao or my treatment at the hands of Captain Terry Totzke from popping up.
Cycling! You love to ride your bicycle. Yes, yes I do love riding my bicycle. However I can’t ride my bicycle 24 hours a day seven days a week.
Electronics! Take a course in electronics. I never really liked electronics. Learning electronics was one way that I thought that I could get closer to my ever distant father. That was a bad strategy.
Cars! You loved cars! You owned a car! Actually I’ve always been terrified of cars. I hate being in cars. I got a membership at the base autoclub on Canadian Forces Base Downsview as I thought that my father and I could spend time together at the base auto club. Again, another one of my very wrong ideas.
I really hated the idea of working on other people’s cars after the night my brother and his buddy Greg brought a 6 cylinder Chevy up to Bob Beckers workshop with the idea that I could make the car run again after Greg and his buddies had pulled all the plugs, the wires, the distributor and other things off the engine.
I forget who all was there. There was my brother, Greg, an older guy in his 40s named Dom, and two older teens that had to be about 19 or 20.
Greg at the time was no small kid. Even though Greg and my brother were both younger than I was, both were physically larger than me in both mass and height. My brother at the time was so large that my father wouldn’t dare raise a hand to him.
Two thing about that night really pissed me off.
The first was that I moved Bob’s van outside so that Greg and his buddies could push the car in. When Bob’s van was outside someone just happened to steal Bob’s mobile phone from the van. Fuck was Bob ever pissed with me. And no, it wasn’t some rando walking by that stole the mobile phone.
The second thing that pissed me off was that even though I told Greg that I hadn’t worked on anything other than 4 cylinder Volkwagen engines, he was going with what my brother had told him, that I could work on anything and that if I didn’t fix his engine it was because I was being selfish and stuck up and a self centred asshole.
Greg and his buddies ended up taking the car away that evening.
Greg and his buddies caught up with me a few days later.
They beat the sweet fucking jesus out of me in the parking lot of the laundromat on Keele street. All I really remember about that night is two of Greg’s friends holding me down while Greg stomped on my head. I could barely walk after. I headed over to Billy Bee donuts on Wilson Ave. The owner of the donut shop wanted me to go to the hospital to get looked at seeing as how my eyes were getting bloodshot.
But yeah, that’s one of the reasons that I will never work on anyone’s car for any reason. And there are similar reasons as to why I don’t fix any thing electronic anymore or why I don’t really do much with computers.
Less than a year now before I start the process of applying for Medical Assistance in Dying.
It’s a weird kinda of sereneness.
Now that I know approximately when the end of my life will be, and that I won’t have to endure being tormented into my senior years with the flashbacks and memories from Canadian Forces Base Namao, I feel relaxed and calm.
And unlike suicide, being that M.A.i.D. is a medical procedure carried out with clinical precision, I don’t have any fears of botching the job and not doing it correctly or even ending up a vegetable for the remaining 30 years of my life.
All of the mental suffering and anguish that I have endured for the last 40 plus years will finally be over.
Captain Terry Totzke will no longer reside in my brain, nor will Captain Father Angus McRae, Peter S., my father Warrant Officer Richard Wayne Gill, or Earl Ray Stevens. Every member of the Canadian Armed Forces that hurt me will be gone from my brain, forever.
My time spent being torn asunder between Alberta Social Services and Captain Terry Totzke will come to an end.
It’s not that Alberta Social Services did anything wrong, Captain Terry Totzke just made sure that I didn’t tell anyone in the civilian world what had occurred on Canadian Forces Base Namao. He tried to portray himself as my friend, the guy who was trying to help me. He, and my father, both portrayed my civilian social workers as being the enemy. People that weren’t to be trusted. People that were trying to hurt me. There was no way that Captain Totzke or his chain of command were going to allow me to tell my civilian social workers about what had transpired on Canadian Forces Base Namao from October 1978 until May of 1980. Especially not with Captain Father Angus McRae having admitted during his Ecclesiastical trial in June of 1980 that he had been molesting children for years. McRae molested 25 children on CFB Namao. How many did he molest on CFS Holberg, or CFB Portage La Prairie, or even CFB Kingston. 50 kids total? 100 kids total?
The Canadian Forces and the Canadian Forces Special Investigations Unit were well aware at the time that McRae was bringing children over to the chapel and giving them beer and wine before escorting them into the bedroom of the rectory to “fool around”. How many kids like me were there that have vague memories of being escorted to the chapel by our babysitter, playing games and watching TV, and then being given a “sickly sweet grape juice” and not remembering anything after that?
Children’s Aid Society of Toronto records. The blacked out info is my father’s name Richard and Rick.
Reading my foster care record from November of 1981 until April of 1983 shows that my father was outright hostile towards Alberta Social Services. No doubt this was encouraged by Captain Terry Totzke.
This is my grandmother that Richard “forgot” to tell the CFNIS about in 2011. I still don’t know if Richard didn’t tell the CFNIS of her by his own decision or if the CFNIS suggested that it would be best if he didn’t mention her as her presence in the PMQ would complicate things for the CFNIS in 2011.Grandma had issues from her time in Indian Residential School when she was a child. This no doubt contributed to her hostile personality.Alberta Social Services Observation of my father Richard Wayne Gill.
So, why wasn’t my father too eager to work with Alberta Social Services considering how emotionally disturbed I was?
Captain Terry Totzke would have already explained to my father, Master Corporal Richard Wayne Gill, that I had obviously been having sex with Peter because I was a homosexual and that I had allowed this to go on for over a year because I was a homosexual.
Section 70 of the 1970 National Defence Act. Sure, my father could have done the right thing, but that would have taken a backbone.
Captain outranks Master Corporal. And the National Defence Act and its section on “Insubordination” would have meant that my father would have paid attention to the words of a captain.
This is why my bedroom door had been taken off both on CFB Griesbach and on CFB Downsview. This is why I wasn’t allowed to participate in sports. Even though it was my father that said that he wasn’t going to allow me to go swimming with my class at the Kinsmen Sports Centre “because there’d be other naked boys in the change room and that I wouldn’t be able to control myself”, I have absolutely no doubt that it was Captain Totzke that told my father to keep me away from other boys. After all it was Captain Totzke, or Terry as I knew him, that had warned me early on that he had the base military police watching me and that if I ever tried to kiss or touch another boy that I’d be sent off to the Alberta Hospital for treatment.
And homosexuality was a major no-no in the Canadian Forces back in the 50s through to the ’90s. The official military policy was that homosexuality was a mental illness. CFAO 19-20 was the official CF policy toward homosexuality.
Yes, CFAO 19-20 would have only applied to persons subject to the Code of Service Discipline. But once you’ve been trained the in military way and trained to enforce military policies you can’t just turn that training on and off at will.
So yes, it will be so nice to finally be free of Captain Totzke and my father.
You have absolutely no idea of what it’s like to navigate through life not knowing why you don’t like sex with women, but you also don’t like sex with men. Everyone assumes I’m gay because I don’t have sex with women. The problem is that I’m not into guys either. I actually find sex and the concept of sex to be disgusting.
I wear dresses, not because I consider myself to be a woman. I wear dresses because they’re comfortable and I believe that pants are stupid considering male anatomy. I also wear dresses I believe because I had been told all of my life that I wasn’t allowed to play on the men’s team because of what I had done on CFB Namao with P.S. and Captain McRae.
When you’re told that your not good enough to play by the rules, you play by your own rules.
To further complicate things, I had been diagnosed as having major depression and severe anxiety. And no doubt I was suffering from what would now be termed “Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder “.
After CFB Namao and CFB Griesbach I learned to live in solitude.
I legally changed my name in 2008 thinking that I could get a fresh start and leave CFB Namao behind.
I honestly do love my chosen name, but it didn’t erase my past as I had hoped.
I’m still Robert Wayne Gill, the 8 year old who was caught getting fucked in the ass by his almost 15 year old babysitter on Canadian Forces Base Namao in May of 1980. I’m still Robert Wayne Gill, the 7 and 8 year old boy that allowed the 14 year old babysitter to molest his younger brother. I’m still Robert Wayne Gill, the 9 to 11 year old boy who received “conversion therapy” at the hands of Canadian Armed Forces officer Captain Terry Totzke. And I’ll be that Robert Wayne Gill until the day I draw my last breath.
Knowing the truth about CFB Namao and the direct connection between my babysitter and Captain McRae doesn’t erase the past. I just made me understand that I have very little control over my life and that other people made some very fucking horrific decisions about my life even before I had a chance to begin living my life.
I’ve had to work so fucking hard in my life just to get to where I am. And I am still so fucking vulnerable it’s not funny. One simple little fucking mistake in life and I fall and I fall hard. There is no safety net for me. There is no inheritance for me to rebound off of. There is absolutely no family for me to be able to depend on.
So I took the path in life that was very carefully navigated.
Every day of my life up to this point I have wondered where I life I could have gone had I been encouraged to finish school, an go on to college or university. Even trade school. Almost every successful tradesman started out on an apprenticeship when they were young and living at home and they didn’t have to worry about paying for the course, or the books, or anything else.
CMAC says that the majority of first time home buyers get help from the Bank of Mom and Dad. So I missed out on that.
It drives me up the wall the number of times that coworkers, or managers, or even outside trades, contractors , and suppliers say to me “Bobbie, you’re wasting your time/talents here, you’ve got the smarts you should be over there doing that and making a fortune”. Fine, sure, you gonna let me move in to your house so that you can pay my bills and feed me while I take the 4 or 5 year full-time program to get the degrees required to pursue that line of work? Didn’t think so.
And after having been what I’ve been though in life, and with my depression and anxiety, I’m not exactly a pleasant person to be around. No, I’m not offensive or unpleasant. But I have no hobbies, and I have no interests. I don’t care about sportsball teams. I don’t care about TV shows. I don’t gossip. I like music, but I keep my interests to myself. I’m an odd fucker that just doesn’t fit in. I have no interest in hearing about your family. I don’t care about your kids. I was never taught the art of small talk. This makes a person very fucking vulnerable.
As I’ve said in other blog entries, I picked up electronics, automotive, and computer skills as a kid in the hopes that it would create some sort of connection between my father and I. But that connection was so damaged that nothing was ever going to fix it.
I haven’t wrenched on a car since I stopped driving back in 1998.
When it comes to electronics or computers at work, I pretend to be abso-fucking-lutely stupid.
Up until recently I had about $1k worth of soldering equipment at home for electronic projects that I always wanted to start on, but never did. There is no passion or drive inside anymore. Any interest that I had in electronics died back in the mid ’90s when I realized that no matter how good I was at troubleshooting and repairing electronics I was never going to be an electronics technician. “We can’t pay you a technicians wage, you’re not certified”. “We can’t hire you for the technician’s position as you don’t have a diploma”. “Sure, you’ve got electronic skills and you beat a licenced technician in a test, but you’re not qualified without a diploma”. Basically what I was hearing all of my life was “You let the babysitter abuse your younger brother, we can’t hire you, it’s your fault”
I had a friend that used to get me to work on motorcycles for him. I told him that I despised doing mechanical or electrical work on motorcycles. But he kept on pushing me as he was certain that I’d get to like repairing motorcycles as I had a natural talent for fixing mechanical and electrical problems. This friendship died about 10 years ago. Yes, I have an unnerving ability to troubleshoot electrical, electronic, and mechanical problems, but it doesn’t mean that this is what I would have liked for a career.
So many possibilities were on my horizon, but the way in which the Canadian Armed Forces reacted to Captain Father Angus McRae stripped away from me any of the possibilities that could have been mine. And that’s the knowledge that I am going to live with until I draw my final breath.
So, I’m where I am, not because I want to be, nor because I deserve to be here. I’m where I am because it pays the bills and keeps me fed.
I have never sought help with my depression or my anxiety primarily because I had no idea that I had depression, or anxiety, or cptsd. I was told that I was acting the way I was and behaving the way I was because I was a homosexual that allowed my younger brother to be molested.
Battling the CFNIS and the Canadian Forces since 2011 sure hasn’t helped matters much.
And to be told recently that my former babysitter P.S., and the man in the sauna both have more legal rights than I do is just one of the many nails the CFNIS have driven into my coffin since 2011.
These are the reasons that I am looking forward to M.A.i.D.
Yes, M.A.i.D. will result in my death, but that’s the price I am more than willing to pay to erase the memories of: My father and his drinking and his anger issues; The fact my mother ran off and left me with my father; Being raised by my grandmother, who had her own issues; Peter S.; The memories of watching Peter S. abuse the other children, including my brother; The 5 visits to the chapel on CFB Namao; The sickly sweet grape juice; The fact that my father sent me on one of these visits with Peter; My involvement with Captain Terry Totzke; Being called a homosexual by both Captain Totzke and my father for what I had “allowed” to happen on CFB Namao; My confusing involvement with Alberta Social Services; Being blamed by my father for “fucking with his military career” and for being the cause of our April ’83 posting to Canadian Forces Base Downsview that “ruined his fucking career”; My involvement with Earl Ray Stevens, a former member of the Canadian Forces and a then current member of the Canadian Corps of Commissionaires;
I’m tired, I’m burnt the fuck out, my brain is fried, and it’s time for me to go.
Sure, I could live until I’m 70 or maybe even 80. But the fuck for?
So that I can remember that Minister Sajjan accused me of trying to scam the Canadian Forces for a quick buck?
So that I can remember MWO Eisenmenger calling me a liar in July of 2011 and accused me of making up the story about Peter S.?
So that I can constantly remember how horrific of a fucking liar my father was?
So that I can remember all of those nights as a kid when I’d cry myself to sleep wishing that I’d be dead in the morning? And the times I tried to make sure that I was dead in the morning.
So that I can remember all of the times Peter would get me to bathe with him so he could stick his fingers in my ass to get me ready for his penis?
So that I can remember all of the times that Peter would hit me, slap me, and kick me if I didn’t perform oral sex on him they way he liked it?
Nope.
Departure time is coming.
I’ve got my ticket.
And nobody is going to stop me from turning my brain off and leaving this shit of a life behind.
I find myself falling through the cracks even more in planning for my death
Well, just found out that the Douglas Brain Bank in Montreal isn’t interested in my brain.
Here I was thinking that someone with a traumatic background, who was diagnosed at a young age with Major Depression and Severe Anxiety, who survived into their 50s without any type of psychiatric help would have been of interest.
Nope.
Apparently you have to live in Quebec to be considered for the donation program and you also have to have been in the care of a mental health professional prior to your death.
So, that rules me out.
The UBC body donation program only accepts cadavers that meet some undisclosed criteria. I’m going out on a limb here, but that will probably be bodies between 20 and 30, toned, muscular, below average BMI.
So, not only is medical science not interested in me while I’m living, but apparently my corpse isn’t worth shit to anyone after my death either.
And I’m beginning to put extra credence on something that Dr. T. my nurse practitioner has warned me about.
I may not actually qualify for M.A.i.D.
Sure, I was diagnosed at a young age with Major Depression and Severe Anxiety after 1-1/2 years of depraved sexual abuse on Canadian Forces Base Namao. Then I had to deal with 2 years of conversion therapy at the hands of the military social worker who was convinced that I was a homosexual because of the abuse. Plus further events of child sexual abuse. And neglect. And torment.
But this matters all for naught.
Being “functional” may prove to be my biggest undoing.
Because I didn’t see any mental health professionals between April of 1983 and the present day I’m obviously not tormented by depression, anxiety, or CPTDS.
Well, I did see mental health professionals , but they were mental health professionals provided by my employer, so they don’t count as I had to be very careful with what I told them so that I didn’t get my sorry ass fired.
Growing up in the military, living on military bases, and my father’s reactions to Captain Terry Totzke and Pat and Wayne taught me that mental health professionals, head shrinkers as he called them, were to be avoided.
My father taught me via slaps, backhands, and belts how to hide my depression and my anxiety. Well, not hide them, just internalize them where they’d eat me alive from inside.
When I grew up on the bases being mentally ill was just one step above being a child molester. In the 1980s you never, under any circumstance, let anyone on base know that you were having mental problems.
And it really doesn’t help that when I go to speak with counsellors, all I get are crystal clutching chakra chanting bobble heads that want to talk about my difficulties without talking about my difficulties.
And without any type of military trauma experience these crystal clutching chakra chanting assholes only make the problems worse.
Children didn’t live on military bases.
Children didn’t serve in the military
Children couldn’t be affected by military mental health issues because they weren’t in the military.
Children weren’t sexually abused in the military because soldiers would protect children.
Military dependents can’t have PTSD or CPTSD from events on base.
Child sexual abuse is a “learning experience” and nothing more than “childhood curiosity” and experimentation.
If something happened, the military police would have done something.
Now, getting military grade trauma counselling is out of the question as I don’t qualify. See, I’m not in the military and the Canadian Forces won’t pay for civilians to receive treatment. And as I’ve said fucking civilian counsellors are the goddamn worst. Sure, they mean good, but trying to bring these fuckers up to speed on what military life was like on the base is a major fucking downer. Too many of these counsellors learnt all they needed to know about military life on base from watching “Major Dad” on TV back in the 1980s.
I hated this fucking TV show.
“Bobbie, you’re being too hard on these people, they’re only trying to help”
Shit or get off the fucking pot.
Give me a fucking solution to my issues or stop fucking talking.
Tell me what to do, do give me some horseshit about “peering inside”
It’s that simple.
Tell me how to stop the fucking flashbacks from back then.
Tell me how to undo the fucking conversion therapy at the hands of Captain Terry Totzke.
Tell me how the fuck to undo 40 fucking years of living with untreated mental fucking illnesses.
Don’t tell me to love the fucking child inside – that’s the fucking quickest turnoff going.
Don’t call me a fucking warrior – I’m not a fucking warrior. I’m someone who had their fucking brain fucked with by people more concerned with keeping fucking secrets than helping me overcome the trauma.
Don’t fucking tell me that I should be happy that I wasn’t a girl because girls have a much harder time in life. I’ve lost count of the number of cocks and fingers I had inside my asshole before I turned 8, so fucking stuff that horseshit. Just because I’m male doesn’t mean that what happened on Canadian Forces Base Namao was any less traumatic or was just fucking “childhood curiosity and experimentation”.
You want to help me?
Help me fucking die.
Let me get my Medical Assistance in Dying so that I don’t have to live with this horseshit.
The time for fixing this crap was back in the early 1980s.
The Canadian Forces shat all over that idea.
So the only way to fix this now is to allow me to die a dignified death.
A death that will be recorded properly in the records as being due to psychological trauma due to childhood sexual abuse on a Canadian Armed Forces base.
Don’t force me to die by suicide where I get written down in some coroner’s ledger as being a suicide due to “unknown circumstances”.
Yes, as fucked up as it is, it still fascinates me.
I am hoping that after I die that my brain is removed and sent off to one of the many institutions in Canada that study human brains to try and decipher mental illness and addictions.
I’ve suffered from major depression and anxiety for the majority of my life. I endured sexual assaults for over 1-1/2 years. I endured what would be tantamount to “conversion therapy”. I endured more sexual assaults before I turned 16. I grew up in a dysfunctional household.
So my brain should be interesting.
What I have always found to be very interesting is that I am not addicted to anything. Nor am I living on the streets.
Where I work, we have various programs to help addicts. One of the things that becomes apparent to me is that addiction and mental illness go hand in hand.
I’d say that most of the clients of these programs started off with mental illness first, found themselves on the streets, and then ended up with addictions.
It’s stunning how many mentally ill people are just discarded by society like trash.
The problem there I think is that unless you’re talking to the chinaware or unless you believe that everyone is a lizard person from the future out to kidnap you no one believes that you’re mentally ill.
My father would often rail on to no end that “my moods could be whatever I wanted them to be” and that “I was just doing this to get his attention”. And there are a lot of people like my father in the world. People who believe that mental illness is a scam, that people who claim to be mentally ill are liars, that people with depression are just weak wimpy cry babies who want to take the easy way out.
But even if you are one of the “lucky ones” with a “real” mental illness, you too are at an elevated risk of being tossed to the street when those close to you get tired of your “drama” and your “bullshit”.
At an early age I found myself with mental illness, diagnosed but untreated mental illness.
I found myself homeless for a number of months for most of 1992 and then the early part of 1994.
For the first few years of my adult life, I was always one or two pay cheques away from losing it all.
Help from home was out of the question, so I knew even better than to ask.
As the days turned into weeks, and the weeks turned into months at the Catholic Charities men’s hostel numerous of my fellow bunk mates would offer drugs. Wasn’t interested. Didn’t want drugs. Didn’t want booze.
I didn’t consider myself superior to my bunk mates. I just wasn’t tied up in making friends with them.
Maybe my inability to make friends actually saved me from a life of addiction. Nobody becomes addicted on their own. There is always an enabler involved.
I was flagged by social services both in Alberta and Ontario as not having the ability to make friends or to associate with others. Also, I really despised being touched. And that is still the way things are to this day. Don’t touch me.
To tell you the truth, I just find it so hard to trust people. I’m not paranoid. I think that after CFB Namao and CFB Griesbach, I just learnt that there was no one there for me, that I was always going to be on my own.
If you ask my brother, he’ll tell you that I was just a stuck up little asshole who thought himself better than anyone else. But that’s not my brother talking. That’s Richard speaking. Richard had a million and one opinions on my mental health issues, none of them helpful.
But yeah, I assure you that I wasn’t “stuck up”.
So was it the inability to form friendships that allowed me to stay off drugs?
My self worth has always been lower than shit, so it’s not that I considered myself too good for drugs.
So there has to be something else going on in my brain. Something that researchers may find of interest.
I haven’t cried since I was about 30. I’m too emotionally numb on the inside to cry anymore.
I used to cry a lot trying to figure out what the fuck was wrong with my brain and why I couldn’t fit in no matter how hard I tried and why I was always susceptible to days on end of feeling completely unmotivated and unable to think.
Employers were always impressed with my technical skills and my dedication to work, but I just lacked the “people skills” to deal with people therefore I was always going to be the guy behind the scenes who just wasn’t presentable to the public.
At the time I didn’t have access to my Foster Care records from the Alberta Government so I had absolutely no idea that I had already been diagnosed with depression and anxiety so bad that I was supposed to have been institutionalized.
I wouldn’t get my hands on those records until August of 2011. Almost 30 years after the fact. 30 years I was allowed to participate in society as some sort of experiment to see if I would succeed or fail.
And no, there was no going to “head shrinkers” or talking to a doctor about my issues. Not after my experiences with Terry and my father and the various psychologists that I had seen while we lived on Canadian Forces Base Griesbach from October 1980 until April 1983.
The fact that Terry and my father would both get me to say lies and bullshit to my civilian counsellors means that I don’t think that I could ever be honest with these people. My emotions and my inner turmoil were always something that I was taught to be ashamed of and to hide behind a wall of lies.
My father had told me during those years that I was making up all of my problems, that I was only “acting up” to get attention.
With no family support, no professional support, no community supports, here I am at 50 years of age.
My brain is fried and burnt out.
I don’t really have anything much to offer other than my brain for research.
The brain is a fascinating organ.
It is who we are. It is what we are.
It’s where our thoughts, our memories, and our dreams live and die.
The more researchers learn about the brain, the more it becomes apparent that it functions similar to a computer in the sense that it has specialized portions of the brain that do specific tasks.
I view my brain as a biological computer with over 250,000 years of innovation behind it. I view myself as the operating system. Unfortunately my operating system was corrupted by various hacks over the years that led to irreparable hardware damage.
Sure, there are patches that could sorta maybe kinda work, but an operating system that is held together by patches is unstable.
That’s one of the reasons I have no issue facing my death. As long as my brain is rendered unconscious and is denied oxygen I won’t experience my death. It will literally be like turning off the power switch on your computer. A power switch that can never be turned back on.
Still, it is very interesting how the brain processes information.
One thing that I’ve always found interesting is that you don’t actually live in the real world. Yes you and your body are present in the real world, but what your consciousness “sees”, “hears”,”tastes”, “touches”, and “smells” is AFTER the various cortexes have processed the information presented to them. What you are experiencing are the outputs of your cortexes. This is why hallucinations and dreams can appear so lifelike and vivid. The brain can’t tell the difference. To it everything is real.
But this apparently is the best way for the brain to function because if your brain had to process the raw information from your senses by itself without the automated processes of the cortexes your brain would become severely overwhelmed.
For instance how the brain processes visual information. One part of the visual cortex looks for shapes, another part isolates written languages or symbols even if we’ve never seen that language or symbol before, another part looks for faces and the emotions on those faces, another part looks for movements, and yet another part uses our stereo vision to calculate distances between objects. Our brains rely on contrast between light and dark for depth perception, even though we see in colour. We perceive all of these processes happening all at once. But they’re being processed by different parts of the visual cortex.
Car makers know that the visual cortex can be easily manipulated to elicit emotions. This is why car makers now spend so much time putting anthropomorphic features on to car and truck grilles and head lights. By making the car or truck appear happy or angry they can sell vehicles to people based upon their primary emotion.
Our hearing has many different sub processes as well. One part of the auditory cortex is listening for speech. One part has something similar to a comb-filter that is designed to be sensitive to certain frequencies. One part seems to love music. Another part gets triggered by rhythm. A different part of the auditory cortex is used to pinpoint the location of a sound in 3-dimensions even though we only have two ears. I was diagnosed at a young age with an auditory memory problem. And it’s true. I have a very hard time remembering things that are verbally told to me in a specific sequence. However I can easily remember written phrases, concepts, and details. This is one of the reasons I don’t do telephone calls unless I absolutely have to.
Then there’s the interconnection between all of these different processes. Your steady eyesight comes because the inner ear also coordinates your eye movement so that as your head moves your eyes are able to move in a direction to counter the movement of your head. Without this communication you eyesight would be very blurry.
Your ability to turn your head in the direction of a sound comes from the ability of your auditory cortex to direct your head muscles and your eye muscles towards the direction of the sound.
Your visual cortex processes you central vision and your peripheral vision in two different process, but presents this to your brain as one image. You visual cortex fills in the blind spot in each of your eyes with made up data so that you don’t see two black spots in your vision. These black spots are where your optic nerve connects to your retina. You can’t see there. Your peripheral vision sucks at detail, but it is really great at detecting motion. Your peripheral vision can direct your eyeballs and your head into the direction of motion.
Your ability to listen to music on headphones without constantly turning your head in every direction is because your auditory system has realized that what you are hearing is not a threat.
Emotions are another interesting part of the brain. Your brain can control its emotions by releasing or not releasing certain chemicals. And it has been discovered that your brain can damage itself if it releases to many of these chemicals for a prolonged period, or doesn’t release enough chemicals for a prolonged period.
Sadly, when these chemicals go out of whack, the brain often isn’t able to bring itself back to “normal” without external help. The longer the brain is without help, the more substantial the damage will be.
So yes, you can suffer actual physical brain damage due to traumatic events such as emotional trauma, psychological trauma, or physical trauma.
The brain is plastic in the sense that it can try to overcome the damage by using different portions of the brain.
I’ve never seen the actual removal of a human brain from the skull during an autopsy, but there are hundreds of autopsy videos available on the net. And I’ve seen quite a few. All you really need to remember is that the body is dead and feels no pain.
Once the skull is removed and then the dura mater is cut open, the brain is ripe for the picking so to say. Gently tilt the brain outwards from the skull, sever the olfactory nerves, the optic nerves, the facial nerves, the auditory nerves, the neck and throat nerves, and the spinal cord, and out pops your brain. Do Not Try This At Home, especially not on yourself.
It’s a good thing that you’re typically dead when this happens otherwise might be a little on the painful side. Plus might also cause a panic attack.
Now, I don’t know what exactly can be learnt from my brain. Probably nothing substantial. But maybe something incremental. And incremental would be far better than nothing, eh?
I would imagine that having a somewhat fresh brain would be beneficial to the researchers.
I would much rather prefer that my brain go to somewhere where it can be of some use rather than just tossed into an unmarked grave, or a crematorium, or a resomation chamber.
Then at least my suffering will be over and something beneficial will have come of my life.
And I’ll be able to say that “I’m going to medical school!”
I really wish that I could donate my skull to whomever I wanted to.
I have a few people in mind that I would love to give my skull to.
And that’s probably for the better. Peering too deep into the black pit of his soul would probably drive anyone insane.
I don’t remember Richard very much from CFB Shearwater. I vaguely remember a motorcycle ride.
I remember some sort of string controlled model airplane that he had.
I remember him walking to work once in the fog.
But that’s it.
I remember him on CFB Summerside, but again, not that much.
I know that Marie drove him to the airfield at the base a couple of times when he had to go away on training exercises.
I remember my grandmother, and Kimberly Wood, and even my mother before she left, but I don’t ever remember Richard except for when he picked me up from the hospital after my bicycle incident in July of 1978.
I remember he almost set the PMQ on fire once when he left the kettle on the stove and he fell asleep. The kettle melted and the handle started burning.
I remember him wanting to build me a wooden go-cart but that came to an end the night he came home drunk and went to the basement.
CFB Namao, he was rarely around. Just like on Summerside, it was his mother raising us, not him. He would occasionally stop in and take my brother and I down to Wetaskiwin to visit his girlfriend Vicki. When Richard started seeing Sue around the summer of 1979 he would occasionally pick my brother and I up and we’d go over and stay at Sue’s place for the weekend.
But again, I didn’t see much of Richard until he moved back in to the house in August / September of 1980. He brought Sue to live with him as well at this point.
I remember thinking after Richard had moved back in with us that my real father had died in a military exercise and that the Canadian Forces had replaced my real father with an imposter hoping that I wouldn’t notice.
He was so very different from what I had remembered before. Also, he was around a lot more now than he had ever been before.
In October of 1980 we were moved 10km down the road from CFB Namao to CFB Griesbach at taxpayer expense .
By the summer of 1981 Grandma had moved off base and moved into her own apartment on 107th Ave and 111th street.
Richard still was going away on training exercises and dumping my brother and I on Sue’s lap.
Things under Richard’s domain were not all that pleasant.
Richard was the ultimate control freak. And as my brother was 7 and I was 10, nothing was ever going to be as perfect as he wanted it.
It got to the point that Richard put my brother and I in the base daycare centre before we’d go to school. Richard would wake us up in the morning, we’d get dressed, have breakfast, and then we’d have to go sit in the day care centre until it was time to go to school.
If you ever want to get tormented and teased and get the shit beaten out of you, try being a 10 year old military dependent living on a military base and going to a day care centre for toddlers on a military base.
After school was just as bad. We weren’t allowed to have keys for the house. So after school we’d have to stand on the front porch of the PMQ and wait. School would get out at 15:00. Richard would get off work at around 16:30. Winter time in Edmonton could get really fucking cold. And no, we could’t go over to other people’s PMQs and wait there. We had to be standing on the porch when he got home.
One winter day my brother decided that he had enough of freezing, so he went and kicked one of the basement windows in and then climbed down into the PMQ. Richard went through the fucking roof. I can’t remember what he did to my brother, but it was my fault for not keeping an eye on my brother and letting my brother do something that he could have hurt himself doing.
“The boys did not seem to show fear” Yeah, that’s always a good thing. Yep. Mr. Gill sure didn’t have any problem disciplining me or my brother. And yes, when Richard made a decision YOU DID NOT question it.
Yeah, it was funny but in a sad funny way how Richard was. Other kids on base could “whine” or “cry” and usually get “their way” with their parents. But when it came to Richard. His decisions were final. And any questioning his decisions were taken as a direct challenge to his authority. And you did not challenge his authority. Period.
Not overly warm.
Yeah, that was Richard. “Not overly warm”.
When I tried to track down my Uncle Doug in 2011 I made contact with his widow Yvonne. She said almost exactly thing this social service worker had to say. Richard could appear to be friendly. And he would help out. But you had to stay out of his way while he was helping or he would explode in anger.
Bob Becker said the same thing. Ed Blaha said the same thing. Almost anyone who met my father would say the same thing.
He was “pleasant”, he “seemed nice”, but he seemed to be troubled by something.
In 2011 he told the CFNIS that I was nothing but trouble in school. But in 1982 he told Alberta Social Services that he wasn’t aware of my brother or I having any trouble in school as the school never tells him anything.
More than likely it was he didn’t want to hear what the schools had to say.
Richard kept my brother and I not out of love but out of a desire to “control the costs”. His friends were always asking him why if having kids was so upsetting to him why he didn’t ship us off to live with our mother. His answer was always that as long as we lived under his roof, he could control the costs, but if we went to live with our mother he’d have to sign his paycheque over to her, and that was not going to happen.
You’ll also notice that it’s not my imagination. It’s right there in black and white. Richard had abdicated his parenting role for my brother and dropped my brother in my lap.
This is how Richard was. Richard wasn’t going to wear my brother. Any issues that my brother had obviously weren’t due to Richard’s complete lack of parenting skills. No, it was painfully obvious that any issues that my brother had were due to me not looking after or raising my brother properly.
Swimming, bowling, hockey, cubs, beavers
When I examined Richard for Federal Court in 2013 he said the reason that my brother and I were never involved in activities after we moved from CFB Griesbach was because I showed no interest.
Again, here I am showing absolutely no interest and it’s obvious that I not getting anything.
Here he is telling social services that we were involved with “swimming, bowling, hockey, cubs, beavers” but that we aren’t involved with these any longer as he “doesn’t feel the boys get enough from them”.
What a fucking load of shit.
When I lived on CFB Namao, Grandma had me in bowling, beavers, swimming, basketball, and hockey. The fees for military dependents on base were minimal, but the parents still had to buy the equipment. My grandmother would use her CPP cheques to pay the fees and buy some of the equipment. She would force Richard to pay for the rest.
Grandma is the one who took me swimming. She’d take me to bowling. She’d take me to basket ball. She’d take me to hockey. She would always coax one of the other fathers to tie up my skates for me as her hands were too arthritic.
The reason why we didn’t do these sports on CFB Griesbach was twofold.
First, the arena, the pool, and the bowling centre were up on CFB Namao. Richard was not going to waste his time driving up to the other base and then waiting around.
And as Richard had told me in the fall of 1982 when Westfield was going on a swimming trip to the Kinsmen Sports Centre for a swimming trip and he refused to sign the permission slip “There will be other naked boys around and you won’t be able to control yourself”.
That’s why there were no more sports activities like swimming, or bowling, or hockey……. Richard didn’t want me becoming aroused around other naked boys like I had done with P.S. on CFB Namao.
Which make it even more painful every time I look at his 2011 statement that he gave to the CFNIS when he professed he knew nothing about the babysitter P.S. from CFB Namao.
Richard made my life a living fucking hell because of what P.S. had done to me and my brother on CFB Namao. Or more specifically, what I had enjoyed doing with the babysitter and what I had allowed the babysitter to do to my younger brother.
Yeah. As a kid I had no fucking idea of what was going on. If I did something wrong I’d get a spanking, or sent to my room without supper, or grounded. And if my brother did something wrong I’d get a spanking, or sent to my room without supper, or grounded. There was absolutely no fucking winning no matter what.
P.S. was twice my age. There was nothing I could do to stop P.S.. But that’s not the way that Richard saw things.
As I said in a previous post. I was Richard’s scapegoat. Anything that went wrong with my brother or with me was obviously my fault. And he needed a scapegoat as he sure as he couldn’t take responsibility.
All I need are horns and a red ribbon in my hair.
When it was his responsibility to look after us, school wasn’t telling him anything, his mother wasn’t telling him anything, social services wasn’t telling him anything, the psychiatrists and psychologists weren’t telling him anything.
When my brother got into to trouble. It wasn’t Richard’s responsibility. Richard couldn’t take responsibility. So the responsibility had to become someone else’s responsibility.
I fully understand this now. Fuck, I fully understood this when I got my social service / foster care paperwork in 2011.
But understanding this does nothing to erase the memories of the beltings, the backhands, the open handed slaps, the shoves to the ground, the hours and hours of frustrated crying not understanding what the fuck it was that I was doing wrong.
From Home Visit in November of 1981
Yeah, this would be an understatement. My brother and I didn’t like each other much. And I don’t think Richard really cared.
I was suffering from major depression and severe anxiety and receiving no treatment for either. I was still dealing with the fallout from CFB Namao. And here I am at age 10 being held responsible to raise a 6 year old who was having his own issues due to CFB Namao and the dysfunctional household that we were living in.
The rivalry between us had become so extreme that the North York Board of Education had to separate us and send us to other school.
In the school year of 1983-1984 my brother and I went to Sheppard Public. We had to be separated. I stayed at Sheppard, my brother went to Downsview Public. This report was written in September of 1984 when I started Gr. 7 at Elia Jr. High.
And Richard gave not the single slightest fuck whatsoever.
Richard was controlling the costs.
Richard wasn’t signing his paycheque over to “that bitch”.
That’s all that mattered to Richard.
“I like responsibility”
It’s not so much that I liked responsibility. I just liked being away from Richard. I liked not being anywhere near Sue. I liked not having to be in their house. I liked the fact that the owner of the pet shop appreciated the work I was doing. I liked the fact that the owner of the store never once yelled at me or hit me. I liked having little animals to play with. I liked being able to buy a hot dog at the Julius stand in the mall or go over and get a cheese burger and fries at the McDonalds in the parking lot. I liked being able to play arcade games at the Wizard’s Castle in the mall.
It’s not that I liked responsibility. It’s that I found somethings that were sorely missing from my life at home. Respect. Trust. Admiration.
I guess that’s one thing that always irked Richard, ’cause he sure mentions it a lot in the social service records. I “admire” my mother. Fuck, this must have made him absolutely sick. After everything that he was doing for me that I still had the audacity to “admire” or “adore” my mother, the women who in his words was a “miserable bitch” that “ran away” and “abandoned” him and left him with her kids to raise.
When Sue first moved in with us she did a few good things. We stopped going to church with Grandma on Sundays. Sue said that if we didn’t want to go to church we didn’t have to. The Dutch have never been very religious. The Netherlands has always been a highly irreligious country.
Sue also put her foot down with Grandma’s drinking and Richard’s drinking. I know that Grandma’s drinking caused a lot of tension between her and Sue.
Sue also said at the start that she was going to get Richard to stop hitting us. In the end Richard’s ability to play the victim and to blame the actual victims got Sue hitting my brother and I. To be very clear, she was never anywhere near as violent as Richard could be.
She was more of the flyswatter type. And she was also good with pinching.
I think the only reason that Sue started hitting my brother and I was out of frustration and inexperience. At the time she would have been in her very early twenties. I had always joked that she was the older sister that I had never asked for.
Her and I were so close in age that one day Sue had me on the ground on my back in the front yard and she was slapping me. The female military police officer that lived in PMQ #69 came over and grabbed Sue and pulled her off of me. The female MP told Sue that if she ever caught her fighting with her little brother that she was going to tell our father. Yeah, the MP thought that Sue was my older sister.
On more than one time Sue referred to me as a “retard”.
And due to my untreated major depression I was prone to fits of crying. On more than one occasion she would tell me that if I didn’t stop crying like a little girl that she was going to take me to Sears and buy me a dress.
I don’t hold any grudges against her.
She was a kid herself back in the early ’80s.
She had fallen in love with a man that had some very major psychological issues.
The man she fell in love with had children that he refused to accept responsibility for.
Both of the kids that she was expected to look after had “secrets” that Richard and the Canadian Armed Forces were doing everything they could to keep hidden. I often wonder what she would have done if she had known that my brother and I had been sexually abused by our babysitter P.S. and at least in my case Captain Father Angus McRae for 1-1/2 years.
The only person that I blame for back then is Richard.
He could have looked after these issues had he been 1/4 of the man he pretended to be.
But to be honest, it wasn’t just Richard that was to blame.
The Canadian Armed Forces also share a lot of the blame.
Men like my father were a dime-a-dozen in the Canadian Forces. Men who couldn’t fit into society anywhere else. They fit into the military. As long as guys like my father were willing to put their lives on the line for the country, the Canadian Forces was more than willing to turn a blind eye to what went on in the PMQ patches. A guy like my father could never have survived out on civvy street. He needed to be amongst other guys like him. Other guys who maybe drank too much, or hit their wives a little too often, or who maybe disciplined their kids a little too frequently.
My father wasn’t the only alky with rage issues and some form of untreated military related psychological trauma.
There were others.
There were many others.
In the end, there is no fixing or undoing the damage that Richard created.
” In the end Senua, it isn’t the gods that cause us so much suffering, but those closest to us.”
In 2013 when I showed my brother our father’s statement that he gave to the CFNIS 2011 my brother wasn’t sure what to say.
My brother said that I needed to give Richard the benefit of doubt. He said that the Canadian Forces or the CFNIS might have “leaned” on Richard to get him to state what he did.
Might be some truth to this. I know that Fred Cunningham was terrified of speaking to the CFNIS in 2016 and would only speak to the CFNIS “off the record” and without notes. Kinda an odd request for a former military police officer. But hey, what do I know?
And it’s true that the CFNIS did have the court martial transcripts and the CFSIU investigation paperwork from the 1980 Captain Father McRae fiasco. And yes, in 2011 the CFNIS, the Provost Marshal, and the JAG obviously realized the liability problem this posed for the Canadian Forces if Richard had identified P.S. as my babysitter. So yes, as my brother said, there was the motive for the CFNIS to “lean” on Richard to get him to say what the CFNIS wanted him to say.
But having my social service records from Nova Scotia, PEI, Alberta, and Toronto I know that Richard had issues. And Richard wasn’t averse to throwing people under the train to make himself look good.
Let’s look at his “Will Say” statement.
Statement taken from my father, Richard Gill, by Master Corporal Christian Cyr and Master Corporal Jodrey on June 9th, 2011 at 13:50.
a) We lived on CFB Namao from August 1978 until October 1980. We lived on CFB Griesbach from October 1980 until April of 1983.
b) Richard had my address. He also had my phone number.
c) This telephone conversation occurred in August of 2006. Richard named the babysitter by himself, pleaded with me to understand that it was his mother that hired the babysitter, that he had nothing to do with it.
d) At various times that we lived on CFB Griesbach and on CFB Downsview, Richard would remind me that my brother was “out of control” because of what I let the babysitter / P.S. do to my younger brother.
e) Yes, I attended the Guthrie school on CFB Namao, and the Major General Griesbach School on CFB Griesbach, but Richard seems to forget to mention that I was transferred to the Westfield program for emotionally disturbed children in June of 1982 when he signed the paperwork admitting me into the Alberta Foster Care system.
g) Due to creative wording, it is made to sound as if Grandma only stayed with us for a very short time on CFB Namao. Grandma lived with us pretty well for the entire time that we lived on CFB Summerside. She was with us from 1977 until 1978. She moved back to Edmonton in the spring of 1978. In July of 1978 Richard received a compassionate posting from Captain Lynda Tyrell at CFB Summerside to move to CFB Namao. Grandma lived with us for the entire time we lived on CFB Namao. Grandma lived with us until the summer of 1981 on CFB Griesbach. Richard would drop us off with Grandma over the weekends from the summer of 1981 until we moved from Edmonton in April of 1983. Richard’s step father, Roy William Anderson didn’t die until 1983.
h) As Richard said to me in August of 2006, “HE” didn’t hire the babysitter. Grandma hired the babysitter. The babysitter molesting my brother and I was grandma’s fault, not his. He warned grandma not to hire the babysitter, but she wouldn’t listen to him. There were times that grandma didn’t have the money to pay the babysitter, so he had too. Also very convenient that he can’t remember the address or the names of the people he’d trust to look after his kids.
g) I actually met one of my childhood friends from CFB Shearwater. She was the daughter of the kindergarten teacher at Hampton Grey Memorial. Jennifer was my main playmate on CFB Shearwater. As it turns out, Jennifer’s mother was the kindergarten teacher. If I had been any trouble at all I would never have been allowed to play with Jennifer. On Summerside Richard was rarely home after I started grade 1.
h) is very interesting. When I examined Richard for Federal Court in 2013, I asked him if he remembered who Captain Terry Totzke was. Richard replied that he had never heard of this name. Captain Totzke is the military social worker that I became involved with on CFB Griesbach just after our arrival. Captain Totzke sent Richard, my brother, and I to a psychiatrist for evaluation. I was found to be terrified of men, I was certain that my father was going to kill me, I didn’t like being touched, and I was found to be well beyond depressed and suffering from anxiety. My father was found to accept no responsibility for his family, blamed others for problems with his family, expected others to solve problems with his family. Captain Totzke was more concerned with the homosexuality that I had exhibited on CFB Namao when I was discovered being buggered by the 15 year old babysitter. Captain Totzke said that I had a mental illness, and that was homosexuality. In November of 1981 our teachers and principal at Major General Griesbach School were so concerned with the inaction of Captain Totzke in regard to my brother and I that they called in Alberta Social Service.
i) I have never called Richard asking for money. It was far easier to squeeze blood from a stone than it was to ask Richard for money. It was also far less humiliating to starve and sleep in homeless shelters than to ask Richard for money. Around 1996ish Richard called me at work and said that my brother was in the Vancouver area and that he wanted me to help my brother with his car. Richard promised me that he’d send me something for my time. Nothing ever came.
My motorcycle, a 2001 Triumph Sprint RS, was written off in an accident that ICBC found the other party to be 100% responsible for. ICBC paid to rebuild the motorcycle and paid for all new riding gear. But, somehow me calling Richard after the accident to let him know that I was okay had somehow become me wanting money.
My car at the time, a 1981 Plymouth Horizon, blew the lower rad hose while I was driving to work one day. I bought a used engine from West Edmonton Pick-a-part. I bought all brand new hosing from Chrysler. I used Art’s garage out on the acreage to swap the engine. All in all this cost me about $500 to do. This was at the point in time when I still had the majority of my $30k from the Canshare Cabling contract job in Ontario.
My brother likes to say that I’m imagining Richard’s hatred of me. But this was far from imagined. Richard is one of those guys that could carry a grudge like Atlas carried the world. I know that it wasn’t my name change that pissed him off. I know it was my involvement P.S. that pissed him off. Apparently I fucked with his military career. I also willing to bet that I just reminded him too much of Marie. Whatever it was, the fucker absolutely despised me.
j) again, no.
k) in 2008 after I had received my paperwork stating that my name change was official and after I had received my new birth certificates, I sent Richard a brief letter stating why I had changed my name and that I was hoping with the name change that I’d be able to get a fresh start in life and leave the whole CFB Namao fiasco behind. He called me and told me to never contact him again.
l) from 1980 onwards Richard would blame me for any behavioural issues with my brother. I let the babysitter molest my brother so therefore my brother’s misbehaviours were my fault. During our time with Captain Terry Totzke, Richard and Totzke would often tell me that if I didn’t like what had occurred on CFB Namao that I wouldn’t have allowed for it to go on for so long. Richard was furious that I had been caught kissing another boy on CFB Griesbach stating that “that shit from Namao has to fucking stop” and that if I ever kissed another boy that he’d break my fucking neck.
I was in kindergarten on CFB Shearwater. Jennifer’s mother, the kindergarten teacher laughed at this. He never sent me to a psychologist in Edmonton. That was Captain Totzke. Richard is noted in the Alberta Social Services paperwork as being very non-compliant with their recommendations. I was not “hyperactive”. I was beyond depressed, beyond despair, and severely anxious. I was terrified of men, and I hated being touched. Richard was the one found by the psychologist hired by the Canadian Forces to be unwilling to take responsibility for his family. Richard was also found to be prone to blaming the problems with his family on others. Alberta Social Services found that Richard would often change his stories from one meeting to the next (he lied) and that he often told people that he perceived to be in positions of authority what he thought they wanted to hear (I wonder if this is what happened here) I dealt with the “Canada’s Wonderland” issue before. This statement is completely laughable. As my brother said, Canada’s Wonderland was Richard’s discount babysitting service. We had no choice if we wanted to go or not.
1978 he received a compassionate posting to CFB Namao. In October of 1980 he was moved from CFB Namao to CFB Griesbach. In April of 1983 he fled the jurisdiction of Alberta so as to avoid my apprehension by Alberta Social Services.
2011 two years previous would have been Richard calling me to tell me to never call him again because of the name change.
Anyways, after I read my father’s statement I was floored. So I took advantage of the Federal Court rules and I sent him a written examination. Even though the Justice wouldn’t allow this to be entered into the proceedings, they’re still a part of my applicants filings and they’ll be on record with the court.
My written examination of Richard
And here are Richard’s answers. Note that the Attorney General of Canada, Department of National Defence, the Minister of National Defence, and the Federal Court of Canada all have copies of these questions and answers, but not a single agency cared.
Richard’s Answers.
1 & 2 – He agrees with everything that is noted in the “Will Say” that I supplied to him. 3 – We were at #11 – 12st from August 1978 until October 1980 4 – We were at 10215 – 138 Ave from October 1980 until April 1983. 5 – Roy Willian Anderson did not pass away until October of 1983 so I have absolutely no idea who passed away in 1980.
6 – Seems to be okay, but Grandma had actually been out to Shearwater numerous times to look after my brother and I when Richard and Marie were having problems. 7 – This is the first and probably only time that Richard has ever publicly admitted that his mother was First Nations. 8-9 – Can’t say whether he knew or not either way. 10 – This is weird. My brother would have been far too young to have been involved in most activities I was involved in. 11- Again this is weird.
Me, with no interest in sports apparently.
12 – Aurther Herman Gill is correct. Even though we lived in Toronto from April 1983 until July of 1990 he never once went to see his father in Oshawa even though we frequently visited Sue’s parents in Oshawa. 13 – This is correct, Uncle Doug would stay with us when he was home from the oil fields. 14 – Doug definitely would not have slept on the couch. Especially when he’d bring women home to spend the night with him. Doug had a cot and a sleeping area set up in the basement of our PMQ. 15 – Makes sense. That’s why Grandma was living with us. Richard was often away on training exercises or staying with girlfriends off base. 16 – 3 & 4 are wrong. Grandma would take the military shuttle bus from Namao to Griesbach and then transfer to the City of Edmonton busses. This is why we needed the services of P.S. in the first place. Grandma would have been recommended P.S. by Captain McRae himself as McRae had driven Grandma to the hospital a couple of times in a military motor pool car. 17 – This is correct. Grandma lived with us 24/7/365. Richard was rarely home. 18 – They knew what my problems were. That’s not why I had to attend the Westfield program. 19 – There were times that we wouldn’t see Richard for months on end. The average length of his training exercises was about 6 to 8 weeks. 20 – ? 21 – ? 22- This is where Richard throws his mother under the bus again like he did in 2006. Now there is a babysitter in the house unlike what he said in 2011, and lo-and-behold his mother hired the babysitter. 23 – August of 1980 according to the Social Service records, but only one month off, so not too bad. 24 – Not even going to try to make sense of this gibberish. 25 – Wow. We went to session after session with Captain Totzke at his office in the base HQ building. At the time I had no idea that he was in the Canadian Forces, but you can bet your bottom dollar that me father knew. 26 – 1 & 2 were notes in my social service records that indicated that Richard wanted very little involvement with his family and blamed the problems with his family on my mother, his mother, the teachers at school. 27 – So apparently I could flip between hyperactive and suicidally depressed. I don’t know about you, but I’m beginning to realize that Richard was a special kinda of “fucked up”. 28 – Kinda correct. Our teachers and our principal were getting frustrated with Captain Totzke’s lack of progress, hence why the call was made to bring Alberta Social Services into the picture. 29 – This was my apprehension. According to the Social Service paperwork Richard blew up because of the decision to remove me from the house and to place me into residential care or foster care. 30 – He’s just being stupid here. According to Captain Totzke when he spoke with my child care worker on January 28th, 1983, my father had just been transferred immediately to Ontario. That’s two days after Alberta Social Services wanted to pull me from the house. After this Richard pulled me from school. At the time he told me that I had been expelled for kissing another boy. In reality he would have pulled me from the school as this school was off base and Social Services could grab me at anytime. As log as I stayed on base, Social Services would need Captain Totzke’s permission to enter on to a Defence Establishment to remove me. 31 – A check with PEI reveals that Richard only made an application to the courts for custody, but that it never went any further, and the courts never awarded him custody. 32- According to my social service paperwork both my father and Captain Totzke promised Alberta Social Services that I was supposed to be placed into the Sick Kids hospital in Toronto for psychiatric care. Sick Kids has no records of me ever having been brought in for an evaluation. 33- Of course he can’t. It’s more of his made up bullshit. 34 – No teacher is going to consider a child not being allowed to go to an amusement park as “child abuse”. Richard sure loved to play the victim, didn’t he? 35 – Alberta Social Services had given the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto a “heads up” that my family was moving to Toronto. 36 – sounds okay except for #3. October 23rd, 1969 was the largest naval peacetime disaster in the history of the Canadian Navy. 11 members of the Canadian Navy died as a result of the explosion of one of the Kootenay’s gearboxes. Richard had previously served on that ship. He personally knew three of the men killed in the engine room. He was with the Sea King squadron that was accompanying the ships that day. He would have been involved with the removal of the dead and injured from the Kootenay. 37 – Richard did’t talk. Richard yelled. Richard bellowed. 38 – Projection much? This is exactly how he was described in the Alberta Social Services paperwork. 39 – No? Fuck me. On our way to the counselling sessions that we did attend, both Richard and Totzke would tell me to be quiet and not to answer Pat and Wayne’s questions as they would twist my words and make it sounds as if I said things that I didn’t say. 40 – This was Richard’s infamous temper tantrum meltdown in which he caused significant damage to the PMQ and required 3 military police officers to restrain him. This domestic appears to have been triggered by Marie’s request for him to sign the divorce papers to allow her to marry Art Wudrich. 41 – No. See the social service paperwork for an explanation of what home life was like. 42 – the result of the IQ test was 136 +/-6 43 – is correct, I’m a grade 8 drop out. 44 – this is incorrect. I moved out of the house in January or February of 1988 just after I had turned 16. 45 – Not bad. 46 – Since September 5th, 2005. 47 – 4th Class Power Engineering. 48 – He named P.S. himself various times between 1980 and 1988. He also named P.S. by himself and without any prodding in August of 2006 when I called him. 49 – Massive house fire, but okay, maybe he didn’t notice the burn marks up the front of the PMQ and the fresh plywood over the windows. 50 – He knew who McRae was. 51 – 52 Seem to be correct. This was a one-room school house apparently. 53 isn’t exactly correct. He only had grade 8. He had to take an upgrading course to join the Navy in 1963. It was through this course that he met Albert Dagenais and this is how he met my mother.
Below are some of the observations about my father made by the psychologist hired by Captain Terry Totzke to evaluate my family. Also are some of the observations made by Alberta Social Services.
Richard Gill has issuesThis is the Richard Gill that I grew up with.
As a kid I learnt an odd behaviour of mine that still sort of continues on to this day.
However, now that I more or less have control over my life I find that I don’t often fall prey to this line of thinking. But it’s still there in the deep dark recesses of my defective brain.
When I was a kid, especially living on Canadian Forces Base Griesbach in Edmonton I had developed a perverse way of dealing with Richard’s stinginess and hatred-by-proxy of Marie.
When it would get close to xmas or my birthday I would secretly start wishing that I wouldn’t get what I had asked for.
And it worked.
Never once did I ever get what I had asked for, and by wishing that I wouldn’t get it I actually felt in control.
Looking back it was obviously a really weird coping mechanism, but it did allow me to cope none the less.
This obviously wasn’t a very healthy coping mechanism.
I would often pretend to not be interested in the latest and greatest thing.
And that would often set me on a collision course with the popular kids who thought that I was just trying to be “smarter than them” or who were convinced that I was just a fucking faggot loser.
At school the kids were into the Blue Jays, the Maple Leafs, the Argonauts, “pro” wrestling was a major thing in southern Ontario back then. The kids at school would have the latest jerseys, or other sports related paraphernalia.
I had nothing like this, I don’t even think my brother had anything contemporary back then.
When we lived in Edmonton from 1978 to 1983 this was practically the top of the Edmonton Oilers dynasty. Richard never once took us to a hockey game.
Our grandmother had actually taken us to some Edmonton Eskimos games with tickets that she’d get from the Bissell Centre for disadvantaged families.
Richard loved the Toronto Maple Leafs.
But in the 7-1/2 years that we lived in Toronto on Canadian Forces Base Downsview not once did we ever go to a hockey game.
And no. There was no watching hockey with Richard. If you wanted to watch hockey with Richard, that was fine, you just had to shut the fuck up and not say a single fucking thing. And don’t ask him stupid fucking questions either.
And it wasn’t like I didn’t play hockey as a kid. On CFB Namao my grandmother had enrolled me in beavers, swimming, hockey, bowling, and basketball.
Me before the fallout of the Captain Father Angus McRae child sex abuse scandal on Canadian Forces Base Namao.
Apparently I never played team sports. There was no team photo for 1979 – 1980 as I was kicked out of hockey as a result of the CFB Namao Child Sexual Abuse Scandal
“But Bobbie, what if your father had no money, he was in the Canadian Forces”.
Sure, the pay was bad in the ’60s and the ’70s. But this was offset by the lowered housing costs of living in the PMQs on base. Also, ranks tended to be very close in pay grade. Privates made one rate, Corporals made another, Master Corporals made another rate, Sergeants made another.
I don’t have access to the historical pay schedules. But even going with the current pay schedule the ranks make basic monthly rates based primarily upon rank, but modified by number of years at that rank level and any special qualifications.
The end result is that my father as a Master Corporal wasn’t making $1k per month while the Master Corporal living next door was making making $2.5k per month.
Where’d his money go?
Not to my brother or I. That was for sure.
I know he had no issue spending money on the latest and greatest knickknack or computer toy for himself.
Was he paying child support on the sly? This honestly wouldn’t surprise me in the least. He did have a habit of skirt chasing.
Was he paying an out-of-court settlement for one of his drinking and driving collisions? Again this is a possibility as his insurance would have been very expensive given the number of collisions that he had over the years.
Other than that I don’t know.
But Bobbie, it’s his money, he can spend it any way that he wants to. You can’t tell him what to spend it on.
That may be true. But he should have worn a condom. Or pulled out. Or even just have asked for oral or a handjob. Would have obviously saved a lot of grief.
You don’t get someone pregnant and then wash your hands of the responsibility claiming that your responsibility ended at conception.
You don’t take your hatred of your former spouse out on your children as if being cruel to your kids was going to make your former spouse realize how much she inconvenienced you by leaving you to look after the children you fathered.
So yeah, birthdays mean nothing to me. And xmas means nothing as well.
I won’t stop you from celebrating.
But hopefully you understand why I don’t celebrate.
And no. Please don’t think that you’re going to “fix me” by inviting me to xmas parties or birthday parties. Nothing makes me feel more awkward and out of place. And it’s so fucking tiring pretending like I fit in or like I’m enjoying myself.
Beeshive 