Fred Gamberg
1971 - 1995

The telephone rings. It's my sister bearing the bad news: "Fred Gamberg is dead." Within seconds, I whipped out the door and rushed downtown, my head echoing the VOCM news guy: Fredrick Gerard Gamberg (Fredrick Gerard Gamberg)… Flat Rock (Flat Rock)… Drowning (Drowning)….

It must be someone else.

A Tuesday morning thick with tragic grey cloud and all the sad faces at Fred's records testified that it was not someone else. My anxious feet tore up enough of the street to stop the traffic on the corner of Waldergrave and New Gower. There, I met my sister. She hugged me, " It was him." An old pick up pulled over just off Lemarchent. Compassion Incarnate poked her head out of the driver's seat window. Are you okay? What's wrong? I saw you bolting up over Barter's Hill there." - No small feat for such a small girl - "You look upset. Why are you crying?" I told her. She seemed genuinely concerned. And then she said, " I've got some clothes for you."

Clothes for me? I know I look young for my age, and I dress a little shabby, but offer a total stranger clothes? People share their brand of sympathy with such awkward diversity. Under the jurisdiction of human pride, such a comment could easily be sourly taken. But given my young life and his young death, I knew this woman really was just trying to be nice. I never saw her or the clothes again.

Fred Gamberg's drowning crushed me more than any other death. In fact, his body lay the soil for the first real experience of death that I ever tread. The if only's, the why's and how's, the painful thought of "one minute he's there - the next he's not". It all demanded too much permanence.

For six months my heart bawled, cursed and sobbed Fred Gamberg. I smelled his coffee in the neighbour's evening barbecue. I saw his leather jacket while I hung clothes out to dry. I heard his radio show in the dogs' barking. I thought of his mortal humanness when walking home from a friend's party. A birthday - he'll never see another one of those. The boy I looked up to, once three years older, suddenly becomes six years younger. Time plays weird tricks on us. And those who fail to see the limitations of her power, must've never known Fred Gamberg - Twenty-Four-years-old forever.

I first started this portrait while away in Ottawa. It brought a lot of comfort to me while in the sorrows of sleeping on strangers' couches and getting lost in the freezing rain. And even though I may not regard it as one of my proudest works, it's definitely the most spiritual. Ageless. Timeless. Just like Fred. We miss you.