Knox — Warts-and-all obituary grabs international attention

COLUMN — NBC’s Today Show has come clamouring for George Ferguson’s story. So has the Toronto Star. Ditto for the Washington Post. A Hollywood film and television production company is trying to get in touch.

“He would have loved this,” says Karen Shirley, the daughter who wrote the obituary that caused all the fuss. “He would have loved the attention.”

Ferguson’s obit, a wry, warts-and-all view of a man cast as a merry if manipulative scoundrel, has gone viral since appearing in Sunday’s Times Colonist.

It was remarkable not just for the story of Ferguson himself, but for his daughter’s decision to write about him with a delicate balance of bitterness, affection, humour and exasperation.

“What to say about George?” it began. “Certainly, no one could accuse him of having been a loving son, brother, or father. He’d gladly have stolen the shirt off your back and he was generous to a fault with other people’s money.”

It went on to describe a sometime United Church minister best known locally as an Oak Bay character who once owned such businesses as the Blethering Place tea room and who had a habit of talking women into his life and out of their assets. When he died in hospital June 29 at age 77, it was with an overdraft at the bank and maxed-out credit cards.

The obituary was written by Shirley, a 53-year-old Camosun College philosophy instructor. She says she was just trying to tell Ferguson’s tale honestly, as she saw it. The overall impression she left was of a lovable rogue, though in talking with her it became apparent that much of the roguishness was fun only if you didn’t have to live with the consequences.

Ferguson, the son of a Mountie, was born in Regina in 1936. Ordained in Vancouver in the 1960s, he preached in Quesnel before moving the family to Bella Bella, which is where Shirley thinks his drinking became a problem. “I’d have to say he became unpopular.”

Ferguson quit working regularly as a minister after that. “From then on he would only take it up if he was desperate.” The obit said it was impossible to tell whether he was actually religious; God’s name rarely came up when Ferguson had money.

Wives and girlfriends overlapped untidily. “He always had a spare woman around,” Shirley says. “It often was an organist.” With Ferguson’s first wife — who died of cancer in 1974 — in Nanaimo, he bought a hotel in Zeballos, where he took up with another woman.

When that business faltered, he went for the insurance. “He tried to get me to burn the hotel down,” Shirley says. She was 12 or 13 years old at the time. She declined.

Another woman entered the scene and became his second wife, but died of illness. A third marriage, to a woman he met while working as a minister in Saskatchewan, dissolved in divorce a decade ago. “These women always ended up broke,” Shirley says.

As interesting as the obituary was the reaction to it. A couple of TC readers found it harsh, but far more were simply curious about the back story. Scores and scores of comments, many from strangers, have been appended to the online version. Some praise Ferguson, some laud the author. “This is the best obit ever written!” was a typical comment.

Tom Hawthorn, the Victoria author of Deadlines: Obits Of Memorable British Columbians, said he found the death notice refreshing: “It’s honest.” Often, grieving families feel compelled to default to the clichéd and the hackneyed, editing out the less-polite bits that give a fuller picture of the subject.

He’s right. All obits are from a certain perspective, subjective and selective, but some are so mawkish or sanitized that they leave an inaccurate portrayal, a Disney-fied deceased. People are more complicated than that. Ferguson sure was.

“He’s the most powerful character in my life,” Shirley says of her father. Turns out the rest of the world is intrigued, too.

To read the obit that Shirley wrote about her father, click here.

© Copyright Times Colonist