Janis

It was our last lucid, if slightly intoxicated, conversation. He was freshly retired and full of knowledge about the difference between defined benefit pension plans and defined contribution pensions. He and his wife had plans to travel. He was still running marathons, cross-country skiing, and riding his bike. We were on the back patio of the Duke of York.

By this point I'd lost track of the number of times Janis had told me that his wife always told him "you don't buy beers, you rent them." As the meal and drinks wound to their natural conclusion, we each took a turn guarding our bags and the table while the other went to the washroom. He went to the washroom first, and the bill came, so I paid it.

I knew his rule. "While you are a graduate student, the beers are always on me." He never explained his rule, and I certainly never asked. It was only through another conversation at the Duke, with another colleague, that I came to appreciate the depth of ethical layers to the rule. Regardless, he was in the washroom, I wasn't breaking the core of the rule, so I paid.

When I got back from the washroom I could see he was troubled. "I asked for the bill and the waitress says you already paid." Grateful for the honesty of service workers, I continued to listen. "You know my rule. While you are a graduate student, the beers are always on me. Once you're done, you pay for your own beers." I could tell from how tense he was that sometime on his subway ride west from St George Station, others on the subway car, if they noticed the lanky former professor in a beret (or perhaps, given that we sat on the patio, he was wearing his Tilly), might become slightly alarmed when he contorted his arm over the back of his head to scratch his eyebrow. I could already visualize him contorting both arms over the top of his scalp to scratch both eyebrows in his living room later that evening.

As with any moderately wayward graduate student, I knew I'd already caused him this level of stress before. More than once, because I could easily visualize the progression of the stress. The guilt of causing him to get two eyebrow scratches worth of stressed about his ethics was enough for me to relent and accept cash for his share of the bill.

There were many reasons I had caused him that level of stress during my time as a graduate student. Some of those reasons were innate to Janis, some were because of my decisions and actions, and many were because the two of us were so similar. Whether we were as similar when we met, or whether we both evolved is hard to say.

First, he was thoroughly and firmly ethical, I assumed this integrity was a remnant from his training as Chemical Engineer at McGill. He was also kind, compassionate, funny, and empathetic. None of these traits were immediately evident when I first approached him as a Master's student - I thought he was stern, cold, and short.

Second, without one of Janis' bursts of pretending to be stern and short, I would probably still be in the archives. Janis, and the rest of my committee, spent at least the last year of my time in the archives telling me that I'd already read enough, more than was necessary to complete a PhD. He ordered me back from the front, and I retreated.

As I returned to Toronto and settled into writing, and writer's block, no amount of Janis telling me the story of the time someone stole his satchel while he was a PhD candidate - his satchel with the only copy of his PhD thesis in it - was going to get me back on track. Nor his anecdote about some famous scholar of the French Revolution whose servant had burned the only copy of the manuscript, forcing them to write a shorter and better, but less thorough and documented, book. He knew what I was going through, but the only strategy he knew for overcoming it was my second stern and short ultimatum. Finish before he went on sabbatical next year - the last sabbatical of his career.

Janis wrote a brilliant PhD thesis, turned it into a fantastic book, and then wrote a second outstanding book. He never gave up hope of finding another project, even when he was blocked from accessing the requisite archives for one project he imagined. I can only assume that this setback was one of many in his career. The graduate students whispered that they would never get a job, let alone tenure, if they had his level of scholarly productivity. The market had changed. But Janis knew and could relate to our feelings of being impostors.

Regardless of his output, Janis was a committed teacher and department steward. Not the kind of teacher who read the literature on teaching, nor the kind of instructor who methodically experimented with new ideas and measured their impact. Rather the kind of teacher with an innate sense of good ideas, an ineffable ability to tell whether it was connecting with students or not, and a drive to try fresh methods, if only to keep himself from getting bored. Students mostly only saw the cold veneer, the breadth of knowledge of his fields, but a few undergraduates came to understand the depth of his ethics and kindness.

As a department steward, Janis loved to quote Kissinger frequently. "Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small." He was cynical and realistic about the university, and in hindsight I can agree that the stakes were small - as one of the student society executives, we'd clashed with Janis and the rest of the department administrators over the interpretation of a $500 increase in funding packages. $500 was a big deal to us, because we were so far below the poverty line for Toronto, but it also wasn't going to get us anywhere near a minimum standard of living. We watched as Janis manipulated his very complex spreadsheets for the funding packages and TAships, both hands contorted over his head scratching his eyebrows as he tried to explain it to us.

One perspective of my PhD thesis is that it's about death. Nearly every major character in the story died either before I started or, in a couple of instances, while I was working. Janis, gracefully awkward as he was, brought a clipped obituary for one of my actors to my wedding. My dissertation was also a study of men (and a few women) who studied both more efficient ways to kill enemies, and better ways to defend against such attacks from enemies. In short, there was a lot of death.

After reading my first draft of my first chapter Janis wanted me to change two core things. First, I had too many characters and it was too hard to follow. Second, I kept using the euphemism "passed away" instead of the word "died" every time one of the characters exited my story. I followed both pieces of advice, and it was a better dissertation as a result of this and all of Janis' other advice, but "died," both the word and the final action, is always going to feel precisely and devastatingly cold to me.

Shortly after that conversation at the Duke about pensions, Janis Langins was diagnosed with a glioblastoma brain tumor. My partner and I visited him and his wife with our daughter. He struggled to find words and to get them out. Two of his five children, as well as one of his granddaughters, were there. His granddaughter and our daughter ran off to play. Neighbours stopped by, or called, under the auspices of scheduling visits with Anna, their children, and grandchildren. It was a house full of life and energy swirling around him during our brief visit. He seemed content and resigned to his fate. Rather than our normal handshake, we hugged - knowing that this might be the last time we saw each other.

His death, as inevitable as all of our deaths, is devastatingly cold and precise. I miss him immensely, and realize, through the final visit and visitation, how much of him I didn't know. He lived a full and happy life, and it is so thoroughly sad that a good life ended before its time.

Other eulogies and obituaries:
Toronto Star (fitting that it's in the Star, because it reminds me of another good Janisism)
Craig Fraser
Scott Campbell