I met my friend Chris Needham when he was 30 and I was 14. As much as this could be construed as perverted, it was an innocent, wonderful, unique friendship—he was a sci-fi type film director in Ottawa, and I wanted to be a movie star.
My parents checked out all his credentials and references, and stayed pretty close to his side while he was making the first few movies with me and a cast of about six other people. It sounded odd for such responsible parents to be saying, “Our daughter Heather is making movies with a guy in his basement, and also in the countryside, just outside of Rockcliffe, Ontario,” but they had come to trust Chris like a friend—and I trusted him like a father.
I was lucky to know him for ten years, during that turbulent growing time we call the teenage years, but in hindsight, maybe I taught him a thing or two as well. He was a single man without any children, and I was a teenager who didn’t spare any details in telling him what my life was like.
Being a teenager wasn’t easy for me, because I wanted to be myself, when it seemed that all my friends wanted to be carbon copies of each other. Luckily, I discovered the freedom inherent in drama as a pre-teen, and met Chris when he was filming a presentation at our drama class. My parents must have decided that this harmless, kind man and his dramatic crowd were a much better influence on me than the girls who wanted to go underage drinking every single weekend in Hull, Quebec. So they were only too happy to chauffeur me around on “filming weekends.” And I loved returning to school on Monday to tell my friends about my unique adventures. All they had were stories of men harassing them in smoke-filled bars. But I could tell them what it felt like to have a plaster “life casting” made of my face , or how I’d spent the weekend learning how to sword fight on film with the help of two expert sword-fighters, or how cool it was that the local TV station, CJOH, was going to feature Chris’ film with me as its main character, “Valon of Sagron,” on its station as a pilot television show.
He made my life as a lonely teen a lot easier. He empathized with me, but he didn’t let me whine too much either. He called me “kiddo.” He took me under his wing and taught me the basics of scriptwriting, directing, and puppetry. He took care of me when the older members of the cast got rowdy, telling sexual jokes and so on, simply by escorting me away from them to talk about the script and what I was going to do that day on set.
I didn’t realize he was doing this at the time, but when I recently looked at behind-the-scenes video tapes of those days, I found my older friends were pulling funny stunts (it was a hot day so one of the guys dramatically stripped to his boxer shorts for the guy behind the camera; then mooned him)—things that Chris obviously thought were not suited for a 15-year-old girl’s eyes and ears.
All this time, I didn’t know that Chris was dealing with trials of his own: at just 16 he had been diagnosed with a brain tumor and given a year to live. He fell into a coma and lost that entire year of his life. Miraculously, he came out of the coma and lived many more years before the tumour became a problem again before his 40th birthday, although he developed diabetes and lost 80 percent of his eyesight in the mean time.
When I was 17, he had to have surgery to try to remove it. They succeeded in removing some but not all of it, and he was told he had a matter of months to live. Soon after he lost his job as a civil servant because he had become legally blind in one eye.
He used his free time to make another film in his basement—this time one with a cast of puppets called Just Jeffery. It was highly successful, picked up by CJOH T.V. to be produced in their studios as a series. Unfortunately, Chris was hospitalized and fell into a coma before he was able to help produce anything beyond the pilot episode.
When he was nearing the end of his terminal illness, his powers of observation were greatly heightened. Maybe it was the knowledge that he didn’t have much time left to take in the world around him; whatever it was, it helped him to save a few lives before he lost his own.
I’ll never forget Chris telling me how one night at a Swiss Chalet he had noticed a woman diner holding her hands around her throat. The people at her table were deep in conversation, totally oblivious that the woman was choking to death! Chris ran over and performed the Heimlich maneuver, dislodging a chicken bone that had become stuck in her esophagus.
A jolly-sized man with a bellowing laugh and a lazy eye, Chris was definitely not Disney’s next-pick for a hero character. And he knew it. But he certainly wasn’t prepared for what happened next.
The woman’s husband stood up and socked Chris—the lunatic trying to assault his wife—right in the jaw. BAM! When Chris woke up on the floor a few moments later, the whole group was gone. He was told by the restaurant staff to leave.
It wasn’t until later, when the woman explained to her husband what really happened, that Chris’s name was cleared and he was given permission to eat there again.
It seems that even when there is a hero among us, too often we fail to recognize him or her for their actions.
Chris was a hero every day of his too-short adult life to many other people. He played Santa Claus every year at Ottawa’s Children’s Hospital, reading to the children and telling them stories, but he only told a few souls, like me and his mother, that he did this. He didn’t want anyone to make a big deal over him about it.
Chris taught me many lessons—the importance of just being myself and making each day count—but the most important one was that everyday heroes do exist in our society. We just have to learn where to look, and open our eyes and ears.
Heather Grace Stewart
hgrace.com
