Eulogy for Sam

Facebook Post: May 3, 2026

This is the eulogy I somehow managed to read at our Gathering for Sam on April 12:

You can probably tell from the photos, but right from the start, Sam was a good-natured, happy baby with huge blue eyes. Ward and I raised him and his older sister, Jenna in our little cedar house on 10 acres in the Blaeberry north of Golden, with dogs and cats and rabbits and the occasional bear roaming in the back yard. Jenna and Sam were two little blond-haired wildlings.

Sam was funny and wild and brave and threw himself headlong into everything. Everything that interested him, that is. A typical ADHD trait. Boredom was dangerous for Sam, so if life ever became dull, he’d liven it up. I’m sure this made him an exciting, fun, unpredictable friend and drew many to him.

From an early age, Sam chose very different lifestyles than the rest of his family. In Golden, he hung out with kids who had snow machines, dirt bikes and guns, instead of mountain bikes, climbing gear and skis. And then after I met his step-dad, Dan, and we moved to North Vancouver, Sam decided the best way to separate himself from our earflap hats and Gortex was to take up golf. He loved that preppy look: the golf t-shirts with the collar, those shoes with the frilly flap, the one glove.

Then at 15 came his first tattoo, the shaved head, the MMA fighting. I couldn’t relate to his lifestyle, but I could relate to being the black sheep. I’d always felt different from my own urban family, being a mountain girl.

Everything and anything that Sam tried, he excelled at. He mountain biked for only a short time, but did the most dangerous, outrageous gaps between containers at Whistler. He took up snowboarding and hucked himself off cliffs, like Air Jordan at Whistler, where he had a whole audience in the lift line. He became an MMA fighter and competed in the ring. He excelled at wrestling. And soccer. Rugby. Football. He burned brightly for short spurts at everything he did.

One thing he couldn’t get enthusiastic about was school. He bragged that he got through high school without reading one book. But in spite of that, when Sam wanted to accomplish something, he did. The bigger the challenge, the better. He became a medic, and also a helicopter pilot. An example of how tough and driven he was, when he was heli-logging out of Squamish, a co-pilot in a Bell 214, he was sick but wanted to hide it, so he puked down the front of his shirt. The pilot finally asked him if he wanted to go down but Sam insisted on finishing the flight.

Sam followed in his father’s footsteps for a while and logged on Vancouver Island. Then he got his first break in the film industry through his step-dad. He ended up doing a bunch of stunt work, and for the past few years, he’s been working as a rigging grip and stunt rigger. Everyone in the industry has told me that Sam was extremely hard working, well-respected, that he took initiative, that he was brilliant, that he learned quickly.

One of Sam’s most enduring and endearing qualities was loyalty. There are so many stories to illustrate this, but a couple stand out. They also show what I went through as his mother. A few years ago, he was on Shuswap Lake on his friend, James’ speedboat with a couple of girls and James went to take a pee off the deck and fell overboard. The girls were almost passed out and no one knew how to stop the boat so Sam jumped in without a lifejacket to save James while the boat kept going. He ended up swimming for a couple of hours across the lake, dragging his drunken friend to safety, and almost drowning himself. It was even on CBC radio.

Another time, which illustrates how boys’ frontal cortexes don’t fully develop until god knows when, Sam’s friend Milan got in a street fight and the police came to arrest him and Sam stood up to them and said, “If you take my friend, you’ll have to take me,” and so they took Sam too, and he spent the night in jail. We picked him up the next morning.

In spite of how tough Sam looked on the outside toward the end, with the weight training and tattoos and steroids, he never lost his softer side. His kindness, his empathy, his loyalty, his big beautiful heart. He poured all his love into his rescue Chow, Neptune, called him Sweetheart, and when the poor dog passed away about 3 years ago, it broke him. His sensitivity may have been what made him need to become so impenetrable.

I’ve lain awake so many nights for the past 13 years, wondering how my boy was, sometimes wondering where he was, often wondering if he was alive. Many times, every cell in my body knew he was in trouble, and later I would find out my intuition was right.

Mental illness stole my boy from me. He was diagnosed with ADHD and bipolar disorder when he was 21, but didn’t want medication. Didn’t even want to accept the diagnosis.

Sam had a magnetic personality. He was a brilliant light. But Sam has always stood on the edge of his life. He was always poised to jump. He once told me the only thing keeping him here was knowing what it would do to me if he left.

My boy, my darling boy, could no longer bear to be alive. The pain for him was too much. It wasn’t a failure of character. It took 34 years of incredible character to live here so successfully, so brilliantly, with all his demons. For me there’s no peace in his leaving. But I’m trying to accept that at least now he’s at peace.