THE COFFIN STORY: Part One

Ivaan was never a man to plan ahead.  He lived in the moment.   So I was a bit surprised, in early 2007, to find him sitting at the computer doing research on coffins.  He explained how impressed he had been by the funeral, many years prior,  of a Bishop of his church, Vladyka Michael. (Vladyka means Bishop in Ukrainian.)  It seems that Vladyka Michael had chosen to be buried in a simple linen shroud and a plain pine casket.  As Ukrainian Orthodox funerals go, this would have been quite "unorthodox".  For a Bishop, it would have been virtually unheard of.    Ivaan decided that when he died, in tribute to Vladyka Michael, whom he admired enormously, he also would be buried in a linen shroud and a plain pine coffin.

Adding to the complexity of his task, Ivaan had decided that his own casket must be kosher and contain absolutely no animal products, metals or synthetics.  He wanted to honour the Biblical edict "ashes to ashes."  After considerable research, Ivaan found what he wanted at a small company, Arkwood Caskets, in Ashland, Oregon.  Arkwood Caskets fit together with dovetail joints and resemble a giant wooden pencil box with a sliding lid. Ivaan placed his order.

Two weeks later, Ivaan suffered his fourth stroke.  It was a serious one and the hospital felt it was time for Ivaan to go into a long term care facility.  I was determined that his wish to return to Toronto Rehabilitation Institute be respected, as I knew Ivaan would go downhill very quickly if placed in a nursing home.  I quickly learned that the best interests and wishes of the patient are not deciding factors in determining where they are transferred from the acute care hospital, and it was a real battle to get the all-powerful social worker's decision reversed.   Fortunately, Toronto Rehab intervened and agreed to take Ivaan for five weeks of rehabilitation, to enable me to sell our home and find wheelchair accessible accommodation for us near his  hospitals.

We were still in the acute care hospital, however, when our friend Myron Dylynsky, who works in real estate, jumped into action and put our house up for sale immediately.  The first day it was listed, a request for a showing was received.  There was no lock box on the house yet, so Myron called the hospital and asked if I could go home and unlock the door for the prospective buyers.  I hurried home.  When I arrived, the telephone was ringing.    As I answered it, I was opening the blinds on the living room window.   It was the hospital social worker on the telephone.  Listening to her, I couldn't comprehend what she was trying to tell me.  The words "end of life situation" meant nothing to me.  As I struggled to understand the reason for her call, I  was also watching a UPS truck pull up in front of our house and unload a large box from the back of the vehicle. Mystified, I watched the delivery men approach our house and knock on the front door.  Again, the social worker reiterated the  phrase "end of life situation" and I suddenly realized what the delivery was.

"Hold the line for a moment", I said to the social worker, "Ivaan's coffin has just arrived."

There was dead silence on the other end of the phone.  Clearly the social worker thought it was my idea of a joke, and ended the call abruptly.

It was, however, no joke when the delivery men set the coffin down on the living room floor, handed me a sheet of paper, said "Sign here", then left.  I tried to move the coffin.   Impossible.  It was really heavy.  I was pondering what to do when the doorbell rang again.   It was the people who had come to see the house.   Three men walked in.  Four pairs of eyes gazed at the coffin on the living room floor.   Silence. Finally, one of the men spoke up.  "Does this come with the house?" he asked.

Their whirlwind tour through the house lasted less than five minutes.  They left, muttering something about Morticia Addams.  Clearly our home had not yet found its new owner.  My brother Dave arrived later that day and slid the coffin neatly under the dining room table.  That's where it remained, undetected,  until the house sold a few days later and we moved.

Over the next few days, I kept Ivaan company in the hospital while doing needlework.  One day, our friend Myron Dylynsky dropped in to Ivaan's hospital room for a visit. "Isn't this a nice domestic scene?" he enthused. "You're sitting here, keeping your husband company, and sewing.  What are you sewing, my dear?"  "His shroud", I replied.

Observing Myron's appalled reaction, I quickly learned to reply, "It's a tablecloth" when anyone inquired about my needlework project.

THE ART OF LOSING THINGS

Whenever a group of people gets together and starts reminiscing about Ivaan, a frequent topic of conversation involves Ivaan's "back room" and how chaotic it was.  Ivaan wasn't a hoarder in the classic sense, but he tended to put things down and hope he'd remember where he'd put them.   He was indiscriminate about what he kept, and so whatever constituted his "back room" at any given time was a complete catastrophe:  rare classic Leica cameras cheek-by-jowl with rolls of film that had expired during the Korean War, plastic junk from the dollar store sharing shelf space with old telephone books, dead batteries and plastic bags with someone's mother's scrap gold, waiting to be turned into wedding rings.  Ivaan's back room was not for the faint of heart.

Usually someone whose memory is heavily tinged with nostalgia will chuckle and say, "Yes, it was a disaster, but Ivaan always knew where everything was."

I love reminiscing about Ivaan, so I'll usually let it go, but the truth is, Ivaan never knew where anything was.  Frequently he spent more time worrying about where he'd left one of his creations than he did in making it in the first place.  He lost things all the time.  He created elaborate scenarios to explain where something was - or wasn't - and he wasn't lying, either:  he would completely convince himself that his imagined explanation was gospel.

The ruby-studded gold heart and chain in the photograph above is a case in point.  In 2006, Ivaan's studio was in a warehouse building two doors away from our house.  The warehouse was huge, and it had to be because it contained Ivaan's entire life:  over 700 cameras,  40 years worth of rubber jewellery moulds, bins full of photographs, bins full of metal, his workbench, power tools, books, memorabilia, much of it on - or under - his gigantic round mahogany table.  This gold heart is one of the most expensive and labour intensive pieces Ivaan ever made.  It's something a female member of the Medici family might wear.  It's spectacular.  And for some reason, Ivaan believed he had left it on the mahogany table, the day some contractors came to install a ventilation system in his studio.

Two days later, Ivaan said to me, in the quiet voice he used when he was really upset, that the contractors had stolen his ruby heart and chain,  which he'd  left on the mahogany table.  I was slightly incredulous, because I knew what was on that table, and if one were to have touched anything, one risked triggering an avalanche that would have buried the hapless contractors alive.  We discussed what to do.  Ivaan felt there was no point in reporting it to the police, or building management, or the ventilation company.  He said he would take the pain of the theft of his masterpiece to his grave.  He was genuinely deeply wounded by the loss.

A year later, I was at home, cleaning out the drawers of Ivaan's dressing table. In the very back of the top right drawer, behind the bow ties, the suspenders, the silk pocket squares, the handkerchiefs, the scarves, the yarmulke, the cufflinks,  tucked away neatly, was the ruby heart: the very same ruby heart and chain that Ivaan said the ventilation contractors had stolen.

I tried to keep my face perfectly solemn as I went to Ivaan and asked, "Remember the ruby heart and chain?"  Ivaan looked at me with a pained expression.  "Don't remind me", he said.  "Remember how those workmen took it off your mahogany table?"  I persisted.  "I will take that memory to my grave", reiterated Ivaan.  "It's so strange, what they did", I continued.  "What's so strange about it?  They stole my masterpiece" cried Ivaan.  "They probably didn't even know what it was, and they stole it."

I savoured my moment of triumph.  Finally I could resist no longer.  "What's so strange isn't that they stole it".  I  said.  "What's strange is that after they stole it, they broke in here and hid it in the back of your dresser drawer."  And I opened my hand and showed him the ruby heart and chain.

"Oh", said Ivaan. Just that one word.  "Oh."

WHEELS

This is a photo of Ivaan with his beloved Cadillac Seville, taken in the summer of 1986. I was planning to write a blog entry about the day the Cadillac caught fire, but yesterday I was telling a friend a story about another set of wheels Ivaan had, and she suggested I post that story instead.

Ivaan suffered his first stroke in 2000, but it wasn't until 2002, when he suffered his second stroke, that we realized a wheelchair was going to become a permanent part of our lives.  Because both of the strokes had affected his vision, and paralyzed his right side, it couldn't be a motorized wheelchair. He'd lost vision in one quadrant of each eye, and so he'd never be able to see reliably enough to propel himself anywhere.

For the first three years we had the wheelchair, Ivaan resented it.  Any time we were out for a walk and ran into anyone we knew, he'd immediately tell them, "I don't really need this wheelchair, you know.  My wife just likes pushing me around."  Yet, we'd really have been stuck without it.  We'd had to give up a lot because of his strokes:  we could no longer participate in  ballroom and Latin dance, which we loved. I had to give up my beloved motorcycle, because if I'd had an accident I wouldn't have been able to look after Ivaan.  We had to accept that caregivers were necessary because I was still working.  It took a lot of adjustment, and it was frightening how fast life was changing.

By 2005, when the third stroke occurred, the  wheelchair felt like a member of the family with incredibly expensive taste.  We wore out our first pair of rear tires ($200) and the wheelchair was constantly being "tweaked" to make it more comfortable and useful;  a new seat cushion was $500, new hand grips, a back rest, heavy duty front wheels, brakes....if the Cadillac had been expensive to maintain, Ivaan's wheelchair was the Cadillac of wheelchairs.

In early 2008, after the fourth stroke, we sold our house and moved to a condo near Ivaan's hospitals.  By the end of 2008, Ivaan's fifth stroke had resulted in his death.  It was just me and the wheelchair.  Now, the wheelchair was so specialized that it really would not have been much use for anyone other than a left brain stroke survivor.  It had a specialized arm rest to support a paralyzed right arm.  Because of all the "tweaking", it was in fabulous condition, and it had been a very expensive chair, so I knew it would be very useful for the right person.

I decided to donate his wheelchair to Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, which was our second home.  Ivaan had been a patient there following the first four of his strokes and we were enormously grateful to the staff for their hard work helping Ivaan rehabilitate after each stroke.

The morning that I'd arranged to bring the wheelchair down to the Rehab for donation, I went over it carefully to ensure it was cleanly scrubbed and everything was tightened and adjusted.  It looked as good as new.  The only thing wrong with it was that Ivaan wasn't in it. It wasn't very difficult to manoeuvre an empty wheelchair down University Avenue, so I arrived at the Rehab pretty quickly, and took it to the office where I'd been instructed to drop it off.

I knocked on the door.  A staff member came out, looked over the wheelchair, handed me a form confirming the donation and thanked me, assuring me how useful it was going to be to other patients.  As I turned to leave, a sudden wave of emotion hit me. I knelt down, threw my arms around the empty wheelchair, and cried. It had gone from being the bane of Ivaan's existence to his liberation in the space of six years.  As much as it had trapped and confined him during the years of his illness, it had also set him free.

1000 DAYS

IVAAN KOTULSKY

ARTIST

October 9, 1944 – December 6, 2008

Each life is as individual as a snowflake.  A snowflake may last an eternity or melt in a heartbeat.  Ivaan’s was large, brilliant, and so multifaceted that it caught the sun from a million angles.  His warm and generous spirit, (barely contained within his gorgeous exterior), radiated through every aspect of his life.  Ivaan’s exquisite metal art, photographs, and his devoted circle of family, friends and fans is his enduring legacy.

Today 1,000 days have passed since Ivaan left the planet. Please feed the birds and squirrels some fresh bread today, and tell them it’s from their good friend Ivaan.  Thank you.

Ivaan is remembered with affection and gratitude, today and every day, by his loving wife Eya Donald Greenland Kotulsky, his beloved sister, Nadia Michisor, and by our families.

                                                    www.atelierivaan.com

       

LENIN'S TOMB: Ivaan's Quirky Streak

For as long as I've known him, Ivaan had a quirky streak.  From stories he has told me about his childhood, I suspect it originated when he was very young.  He loved to see how far he could pull the wool over the eyes of gullible people, by telling them outrageous stories and seeing if  they believed him.  He was greatly assisted in these endeavours by the fact that people genuinely wanted to believe him.  Sometimes this got him into trouble, because people who didn't know him well enough would accept everything he said at face value, and he'd be too embarrassed to tell them they'd been the victim of one of his pranks.   Sometimes he genuinely regretted a tale he'd spun, particularly when he realized he'd hurt someone in the process, but he found it hard to own up to his actions.  Wiping a tear that was half mirth and half regret from his eye, he'd tell me, "I can't tell them the truth now. I think I'm a moral coward!"

Sometimes, Ivaan's pranks were just so funny that it was a pleasure to be on the receiving end of them.  These were the occasions where the prank originated from a serious premise and then "grew legs", becoming funnier and funnier in the process.  And so it was with the story of Lenin's Tomb.

Ivaan was a history buff.  He knew a great deal of history, and not just a dry recitation of dates, names and places, either.  He spoke about historical events as if he had been there.   One day, he was telling me about events in Russian history, and he mentioned that in Red Square,  in Moscow, right next door to the Kremlin, the body of Vladimir Illich Lenin, the founder of the U.S.S.R. was entombed in a glass coffin, ever since his death in 1924, and that people would line up for hours to file past and see it for just a few seconds.

At this point in his story, I interjected:  "I wonder if it's the same Lenin as the original one they put in there."

No, Ivaan replied.  It wasn't.  Every five years in Russia, they had a Lenin Look-Alike Contest, where people from all over the country who thought they bore a resemblance to Lenin could enter themselves into the competition.   The winner - the person who looked the most like Lenin - got to spend the next five years lying in state in the glass coffin in Red Square, and have long lines of people coming by daily to pay their respects.

Ivaan told both halves of this story with a straight face, in the quiet, solemn voice he used to relate historical events that moved him, and so it wasn't until he concluded his tale that I looked up, saw him wiping tears of mirth from his eyes, and realized I'd been pranked.

I've always thought of The Lenin Look-Alike Contest as the most beautiful example of Ivaan's humour.  Starting from a perfectly "straight" premise,  the story suddenly veered into the improbable,  collided with the outrageous, and yet miraculously no one was hurt.

To this day, I can't even see a picture of Lenin without laughing.

LIVES LIVED

Shortly after Ivaan's death, two of our nephews, Angus and Ivor Benderavage, collaborated on a tribute to Ivaan which was published in the Globe and Mail, in the Lives Lived section, a regular feature about an interesting person who has recently died.  People who know Ivaan instantly recognized Ivaan's huge personality in the article, and readers who had never met him before suddenly felt as though they'd known him all their lives.  Here is the text of Angus' and Ivor's tribute:

"With Ivaan, we were always laughing.   He called us the plemeniks, Yiddish for nephews.  We called him avunculus, Latin for uncle.  Witty, debonair, endlessly fascinating, he was the coolest of uncles.

Ivaan exuded a rare, unabashed joie de vivre, perhaps because his early life was marked by extreme hardship.  He was born in a Nazi internment camp, where his parents, Mykyta and Maria, were forced to work from morning to night.  The family endured illness and near-starvation until liberation.

They immigrated to Canada in 1949 and settled in Smoky Lake, Alberta.  There, Ivaan’s passion for metalwork was sparked by observing the village blacksmith.  In 1951, the family moved to Toronto.

Ivaan was a member of the camera club at Harbord Collegiate Institute and he won awards for his early photography.  After graduating from Ryerson  Polytechnical Institute, he joined Maclean Hunter Publishing in 1967, and became Chief Photographer in 1970.  His many notable subjects included The Beatles, Janis Joplin,  Jimi Hendrix, Yousuf Karsh, Pierre Trudeau and the Queen.

By 1969, Ivaan’s focus was shifting to metal arts.  Although he left Maclean Hunter in 1973 to devote himself full time to metalworking, he continued to pursue photography as a hobby.  He won gold and silver National Magazine Awards for his photographic essay, No Fixed Address, published in Toronto Life magazine in 1996.  His long-standing interest in photographing street people reflected his deep respect for life. 

We loved spending time in Ivaan’s studio, sorting treasures and operating the grinding and polishing machines.  Ivaan transformed wax, plastic, glass and even bread dough into objects of beauty.  He cast jewellery and small sculptures in gold and silver using the ancient  lost-wax casting process.  His vision and skill were so breathtaking that nothing about him seemed improbable.  For years we believed a tale that certain painted bricks on his house were solid gold.

Ivaan and his long-time beloved, Eya Donald Greenland, married in 1995.   He taught us that carrying a camera was a great way to meet girls.

A relentless series of strokes that began in 2000 led to Ivaan’s eventual paralysis.  He adapted patiently to wheelchair life, continuing to laugh and to create.  Faced with an imminently fatal brain aneurysm, he underwent a pioneering neurosurgical procedure last December.  Although it was successful, he suffered a massive stroke, never regaining consciousness.

Ivaan was an artist for whom the creative process was as essential as breathing; from it he derived great joy.  He shared that joy every day."

MEMORIES ARE MADE OF THIS, (or: Sh*t Ivaan Said...And Did)

Lately, I've found myself bursting out laughing at the memory of the funny things Ivaan said and did.  One of the very interesting things about being around Ivaan was that you could never predict what was going to happen next.  Here are a few of the bizarre episodes I've been laughing about lately:

On one memorable occasion, we were grocery shopping at Loblaws Queen's Quay.  Now, I absolutely loathe grocery shopping, but for Ivaan a trip to a grocery store was akin to a vacation:  he felt it was essential to allot several hours to the excursion and  to visit every aisle (except the meat department), pausing to scrutinize all  the merchandise in minute detail.  Certain aisles took much more time to peruse than others.  These included the coffee aisle and the jam aisle.  Sometimes it also included the bakery aisle, if the bread was very fresh, because Ivaan only fed fresh bread to the neighbourhood  birds and squirrels.  We rarely spent much time together in a grocery store.  Leaving Ivaan with the shopping cart, I'd do a quick sprint through the aisles, gathering the essentials in my arms.  By the time I was ready to hit the checkout, usually ten minutes or less, he'd be half way through aisle one.   On one memorable occasion, we met up in the bakery section.  On the mezzanine level, above the bakery department, a Latin band was playing.  As I placed my items in Ivaan's shopping cart, the band struck up the opening notes of a tango.  Ivaan turned to me and asked, "Would you care to dance?"  "Why, yes, I think I would", I replied.  He held out his arms, I stepped into them, wriggled my shoulders a bit until our tango posture was correct, and we executed one of the best tangos we have ever done.  It's important to maintain an imperious expression while dancing the tango.  I must have been doing this with some success, because I don't recall the reaction of other shoppers, but when the last notes of the music died away, the entire band rose to their feet and gave us a standing ovation.

Our nephew Philippe is 22.  It is miraculous that he has lived to adulthood.  When Philippe was seven, Ivaan invited him and his brother Sam to visit him at his Queen Street West store.  The back room of the store was chaotic in a way that is hard to put into words.  Stuff was lying everywhere, and though urban legend had it that Ivaan knew where everything was, I have actually seen hand-drawn maps of the room he had drawn to help him locate items.  Ivaan loved anything to do with fire, and so did Philippe.  After all, Philippe was a member of the Pyromaniacs, a club whose membership consisted of Ivaan and every one of our nephews who was old enough to walk.   Ivaan had a huge pair of heavily-padded leather blacksmith's gauntlets.  That day he put those gloves on Philippe's arms.  They came almost to his armpits.  He directed Philippe to stand with his arms outstretched, sprayed the gloves with lighter fluid, then held a lit match  to each arm in turn.  I have it on good authority that Philippe looked like someone had set fire to a scarecrow.  The lighter fluid burned off within seconds, but it was several weeks before any of the Pyromaniacs confessed to me what had taken place that afternoon in the back of Uncle's store.

It was on that same occasion that Philippe decided he wanted to buy himself a silver ring made by Ivaan.  He examined all the trays of sterling silver rings in detail, trying on a variety of rings until he found the one he wanted.  Having made his selection, he went up to Ivaan who was standing behind the counter, held up the ring he'd selected and with great solemnity fired his opening salvo:  "I'll give you two dollars for this", he said, "and not a penny more."   Just as solemnly, and perhaps feeling some retrospective anxiety about the incident with the lighter fluid, Ivaan conceded that two dollars was a fair price.  Philippe counted out the two dollars, plus tax, and the transaction was completed.

Terry Robinson was five the first time Ivaan went camping with the Robinsons.  Our friends Neil and Chris have three sons, and Terry is the youngest.  It goes without saying that Chris Robinson did not go camping with her husband and sons....ever.  If she had, she would no doubt have had something to say about this incident.  One evening, while sitting around the campfire, Ivaan and the Robinson guys decided to rub some charcoal onto Terry's face, put some leaves in his hair and generally make him look as grubby and unkempt as possible.  Then they sent him round to other campsites, claiming to be lost and hungry and begging for food.  The scheme went off without a hitch, until some outraged campers seized Terry by the scruff of the neck and brought him back to the Robinson family's campsite with some strongly-expressed invective directed at the more senior members of the camping expedition.

Terry and Ivaan shared a fascination for a children's outdoors magazine called Ranger Rick, to the extent they used to address each other as Ranger Rick.  On this same camping trip, Ivaan indulged his love of sunbathing to such an extent that his skin blistered badly.  Upon his return home, Ivaan was shedding sunburnt skin in boa constrictor-size pieces, which he promptly collected, put into an envelope and mailed to five-year-old Terry....all in the interests of science.  He felt it was an appropriately scientific gift, since Terry had recently given him a year's subscription to the equally scientific Ranger Rick.

When Terry was seven, we went out to dinner with the Robinsons at Golden Thai, a very nice restaurant at the corner of Church and Richmond Streets.  Part way through our meal, Ivaan and Terry noticed a police car pull up kitty-corner to the restaurant.  Two officers jumped out and arrested a young man standing on the sidewalk.  As they were handcuffing him, Ivaan and Terry decided they'd better go and investigate.  The rest of us continued our meal.  By the time we were ready to leave the restaurant, Terry and Ivaan had still not returned.  We went outside to search for them, and eventually noticed them sitting in the window of a very shabby donut shop across the street, enjoying some coffee and donuts for dessert.