“I’m Still Surviving”: The Life Raymond Was Never Supposed to Have

Content note: This story discusses childhood sexual abuse, suicide, incarceration and homelessness.

Raymond is waiting again.

This time, he is waiting to learn where he will sleep.

There are three possibilities, as he explains them: the temporary room where he is living could be extended; he could be moved to a Motel 6 in Burlington; or he could be sent back to another motel where he stayed several months ago.

He would prefer one of the first two.

There is also a problem with Service Canada. Raymond needs an access code connected to his Canada Pension Plan information because someone needs it for his housing application. The code should have arrived a month ago. He is not certain the person he first spoke with completed the request.

He will telephone again.

He will explain that it is urgent.

He will also be polite.

“You don’t want to piss them off at the other end,” he says. “You’ve got to be cordial.”

It is an ordinary piece of bureaucracy, almost comic in its familiarity: a missing code, another telephone call, another government employee who may or may not have done what she said she would do.

Except that Raymond’s housing may depend on it.

That is the strange imbalance of his life now. A man can survive what Raymond survived and still find his immediate future determined by whether the right envelope was placed in the mail.

He is living temporarily in the Burlington area, the place where his life began and where, for many years, it became unbearable.

He talks easily about dogs. He loves shepherds and had one as a boy. He follows politics, reads widely and maintains contacts through a journalism site. He can move from a conversation about trauma to a joke about the United States, smog or a headache requiring Tylenol.

He does not speak like a man asking to be pitied.

He speaks like a man trying to put the evidence in order.

The Boy They Said Was Not Wanted

Raymond’s birth mother was Indigenous.

He did not grow up knowing her, her family or much about his Indigenous identity. His father told him about his birth mother when Raymond was 13. Until then, he says, it was news to him.

What he was told was not gentle.

His mother had not wanted him.

His parents had considered an abortion, but the pregnancy was too far advanced.

His father also told Raymond that he would never amount to anything.

These are remarkable things to place upon a child: that his life had nearly been prevented, that his mother had not wanted him once it began, and that his father expected nothing of what remained.

Raymond’s mother left the family. His father gave Raymond and his two brothers to the Children’s Aid Society.

For approximately a year and a half—perhaps longer—Raymond lived with the same foster parents. He believes he was between two and four years old during those formative years.

He remembers them as good people.

They had no children of their own. He believes they might have kept him permanently had that been permitted.

Raymond returns to this possibility more than once. It is one of the quiet shadows in his story: the life that almost happened.

He might have grown up in a stable house.

He might have learned that adults could be counted upon.

He might have become, much earlier, what he now calls “the man I should have been.”

Instead, his father remarried and regained custody of the boys.

The woman’s name was Charlotte.

Charlotte in the Convertible

Raymond remembers first seeing her in a convertible in the late 1960s.

Her hair was wrapped in a scarf.

She was glamorous, worldly and affluent. Raymond sat on her lap and felt safe.

That detail is essential.

Charlotte did not first appear to Raymond as a threat. She appeared as rescue.

His mother was gone. His father had surrendered the boys to Children’s Aid. Raymond had already learned that family could vanish without his agreement.

Then came this stylish woman in the convertible.

She held him.

He felt protected.

Charlotte had come from Poland. Raymond says she escaped the country and was raised by nuns. She considered herself devout and presented herself as pious.

She also had money.

Raymond’s father was in debt, and Charlotte paid what he owed. She obtained not only his gratitude but power over the household. Raymond believes she was the driving force behind his father reclaiming the boys.

His father might not have brought them home without her.

Charlotte, in other words, helped retrieve Raymond from the foster family with whom he might have remained.

Then she isolated and abused him.

There were early displays of what she was capable of.

Raymond remembers an argument in the kitchen and Charlotte smashing the family’s dishes because she would not eat from mismatched plates. The act was theatrical and instructive. She could destroy the ordinary objects of family life and make everyone else live within the disturbance.

She controlled his father through money and force of personality.

She controlled Raymond through something more complicated.

If he spoke against her, she told his father.

His father beat him with a long barber’s belt.

Charlotte learned that she did not always need to strike Raymond herself. She could arrange the punishment.

It was an efficient system. She delivered the accusation. His father delivered the pain.

Raymond’s brothers eventually left the home.

Raymond stayed.

Four Seasons

Charlotte married Raymond’s father in 1972. Around that period, she introduced the family to Four Seasons, a nudist colony.

Raymond remembers the place in striking physical detail.

Their trailer was set up near the main building. There was an older swimming pool and a newer pool that was nearly ready when they arrived. A dance floor could be placed over part of it. There was a lake and a forested area with trailer hookups. There was a store, a restaurant and perhaps five or six hotel rooms in the main building.

“It was fairly big,” Raymond says. “It wasn’t small.”

At first, the nudity did not particularly trouble him. Other things had already happened in his life. Four Seasons was Charlotte’s idea, and children generally accept the worlds adults construct around them.

“After a while, you don’t really pay attention to it,” he says.

He had a friend there, a girl with whom he spent much of his time. He still wonders what became of her. He believes she may have been abused too.

The colony held a nude pageant. Raymond says he was too young to comprehend what he was seeing or what it meant.

Looking back, his assessment is blunt.

“It was a breeding ground for pedophiles,” he says.

Men and women, he adds.

It is important to make the allegation precisely.

Raymond is not arguing that nudity itself constitutes abuse, nor that every naturist or every person at Four Seasons harmed children.

He is saying that, in his experience, the environment gave predatory adults access to vulnerable children and gave Charlotte another setting in which to erase the boundary between what was normal and what was being done to him.

Charlotte sexually abused Raymond.

She also permitted men and women to engage in sexual activity with him.

He was a child.

She treated access to him as something she owned and could give away.

Raymond uses the word “sharing.”

It is a terrible word in this context because it turns a boy into an object: something Charlotte possessed, something another adult could be allowed to use.

The Comedy on the Television

One incident remains attached to a movie.

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World was playing.

The film is broad and noisy, filled with frantic adults racing after buried money. It was made to provoke laughter.

While Raymond was watching, a man began touching him sexually.

By that point, Raymond says, he had become so disillusioned that he no longer possessed the capacity to react.

He did not protest.

He did not run.

He did not call for help.

The movie continued.

So did the touching.

This is the point at which uninformed people sometimes ask why a victim did not fight, shout or tell someone.

Raymond’s answer is contained in the years leading to that room.

He had already been taught that adults could do what they wanted. His stepmother controlled the home. His father beat him when Charlotte reported that he had displeased her. The adults around him had not established that his body belonged to him.

He did not remain still because he consented.

He remained still because resistance had ceased to appear meaningful.

The first sexual touching by Charlotte had begun after she called him into her bedroom on the pretence that she needed to speak with him. Other adults were moving through the house. Raymond remembers going between the basement and upstairs, hearing conversations he could not make out and being summoned into the room where the abuse began.

By the time the comedy was playing, the groundwork had been laid.

The adults had trained the reaction out of him.

Puberty

The abuse became worse when Raymond entered puberty.

His body began responding in ways a child’s body can respond even under coercion, fear or dissociation.

Charlotte used his development to intensify the abuse.

The “sharing” became more active. Men and women were permitted greater sexual access to him.

Puberty, which should have been Raymond’s private passage into adolescence, became another piece of evidence used against him. Physical responses could be treated as proof of willingness. Curiosity could be confused with consent. A boy who had been groomed for years could be portrayed as a participant.

But Raymond had not suddenly become free because his body matured.

He was still the child who had once sat on Charlotte’s lap and felt safe.

He was still dependent upon the adults around him.

He was still living beneath the threat of his father’s belt.

What changed was not his ability to consent.

What changed was the value the adults placed on his developing body.

Charlotte eventually stopped taking him to the colony. Raymond believes she was becoming nervous. By then, he says, the abuse continued at home.

She no longer needed Four Seasons to gain access to him.

The Mother in the Prairies

When Raymond was 15, he met his birth mother.

She was living in one of the Prairie provinces.

He had grown up believing that she had not wanted him and that his birth had gone forward only because it was too late for an abortion. The meeting might have offered an explanation, an apology or at least a few hours in which a mother could learn who her son had become.

She gave him $20.

Then she said she had to get her hair done.

He never saw her again.

There may have been reasons for her leaving that Raymond still does not know. As an Indigenous woman, she may have carried her own history of displacement, poverty, violence or family separation.

Context matters.

So do choices.

Whatever had happened to her, the boy standing in front of her was 15. He had already spent a lifetime being told he was unwanted. She had one opportunity to tell him something different.

She left for the hairdresser.

Running

Raymond ran away twice.

The second time—the one that became permanent—he had just turned 15.

He had been cleaning a garage near New Street and Walkers Line in Burlington. The owner had told Raymond that his help was no longer needed, but Raymond lingered because he did not want to return to the home he shared with his father and stepmother.

Then he saw his father’s pickup truck.

He knew his father would learn that Raymond had remained at the garage after being told to leave. He also knew what would be waiting for him when he returned home.

“I can’t deal with it anymore,” he remembers thinking.

So he ran.

He went to his friend Lloyd’s home. The police found him and returned him.

Then he ran again.

When asked where he wanted to go, Raymond chose the main city in British Columbia.

Vancouver.

He was frightened because he did not know where he was going. He remembers the bus ride, the mountains and becoming particularly nervous when they reached Calgary.

Then he arrived in Vancouver and found himself on Davie Street, among the young men and boys in the area then known as Boys Town.

He would return to Vancouver again when he was 17.

The details of those years are not neat, and Raymond does not offer them as an adventure story.

A child who has been sexually exploited at home does not become invulnerable by crossing the country.

He carries what was done to him.

He carries the lessons.

Adults can want something from you.

Shelter can have a price.

Attention can become danger.

Your body may be the only thing anyone considers valuable.

The Places That Knew Something Was Wrong

Raymond entered receiving homes and institutions while still a minor.

He did not tell them what Charlotte had done.

He says he had been brainwashed.

Even in care, he remained unable to speak.

But the adults knew something was wrong.

Raymond confirmed that years later, in 1989, when he returned and asked to see his file. People remembered him 12 years after he had been there. A woman began asking about Charlotte.

Raymond could have disclosed the abuse then.

He became frightened and said nothing.

It is tempting to treat that silence as another lost opportunity for Raymond.

It was, more properly, a lost opportunity for the professionals.

They had a boy who refused to return home.

They had behaviour suggesting distress.

They had questions about the stepmother.

Years later, they remembered him.

Something had marked Raymond even when he could not explain it.

No one had found the words that would let him answer safely.

Crime, Dissociation and Prison

Raymond’s life eventually brought him into the criminal justice system.

He does not evade that.

He committed bank robberies. He served federal sentences.

During one period in Winnipeg, he had reconnected with his brother Dennis and found work washing dishes at an Olive Garden. One day, Raymond accidentally broke a glass. His brother became angry.

Raymond looked at him and saw his father’s face.

The reaction was immediate and profound. Raymond committed another bank robbery.

He was sent to a forensic unit and found unfit to stand trial. Physicians were reluctant to accept his guilty plea. Raymond spent months undergoing assessment.

During another dissociative period, he fled while on parole and ended up in Vancouver. He was placed in a regional psychiatric centre for a year and a half.

That treatment, he says, actually helped.

The criminal acts were real.

So was the damage that preceded them.

One truth does not erase the other. Raymond can be responsible for the harm he caused while society remains responsible for what it failed to recognize when he was a child.

He was incarcerated in several federal institutions, including Collins Bay, which prisoners called “Gladiator School.”

Violence there became ordinary.

Raymond remembers a man leaving a movie screening with a machete driven through his body. A friend told Raymond to keep walking and not look back. The alarms sounded. The prison went into lockdown.

Raymond did not embrace prison culture. He says he avoided drugs and violence. He read, studied and kept largely to himself.

It was another violent institution, but it also became the place where Raymond began learning about the Indigenous identity that had been withheld from him.

The Man He Should Have Been

Raymond became involved with an Indigenous Brotherhood while incarcerated.

He served as sergeant-at-arms, vice-chair and chair.

Culture gave him an explanation for parts of himself that punishment never had.

Later, in 1999, Raymond met a psychiatrist in Pembroke who incorporated Indigenous tradition into psychiatric care. Raymond felt relaxed enough to begin discussing what had happened in childhood.

Elders and Medicine People gave him an Indigenous name and colours.

The details matter deeply to Raymond, but their central meaning is simple: he began to recognize himself.

“This is who you’re talking to,” he says. “This man I should have been back then, not now.”

It is one of the saddest and most resilient things he says.

He is not claiming that culture erased what happened.

He is saying it allowed him to meet the person buried beneath it.

Raymond has survived two suicide attempts.

At 15, he nearly died from an alcohol overdose at Wasaga Beach and remained unconscious for days.

In a later attempt near Maplehurst, two hikers found him and brought him to the road. People he knew happened to be driving past.

Raymond believes someone has been watching over him.

Not giving him everything he wants, he says, but somehow ensuring that what he needs appears.

This belief does not make his life easy.

It gives him one more reason to remain.

The Life People Do Not See

Raymond says people see what they want to see.

They may see an unhoused man.

They may see a criminal record.

They may see someone who has struggled with mental illness, dissociation and institutions.

They may see a person waiting for another motel room and another government document.

Raymond says people need to look at the world in 360 degrees.

“If you put your blinders on, you’re going to walk into a wall.”

He believes the kindness he received from his foster parents between roughly the ages of two and four may have prevented him from becoming profoundly violent.

That brief period gave him a model of something different.

It did not protect him from what followed.

It may have protected other people from what he might otherwise have become.

Raymond has empathy, a quality he understands as remarkable after what he calls the systemic violence of his life.

He has been called a paradox.

He understands why.

A child told he was unwanted became a man concerned about others.

A boy treated as an object became a man who wants other survivors to reclaim ownership of themselves.

A prisoner read, studied and became a leader within the Indigenous Brotherhood.

A man who wakes each morning with reasons to die continues deliberately looking for a reason to live.

“Believe in yourself,” Raymond says. “That’s the most important thing. If you don’t believe in yourself, then you’re never going to survive.”

Then he adds the evidence.

“I’m still surviving.”

Not a Redemption Story

It would be easy to turn Raymond into a comforting story of resilience.

That would be dishonest.

Resilience is not a bright ribbon tied around suffering. It does not mean that the harm has been resolved or that survival has become easy.

Raymond says he struggles every day.

Every morning, he gives himself a reason not to end his life.

He avoids looking too far ahead because the distance can become overwhelming. He keeps himself as grounded as he can.

This is resilience without sentimentality.

It is not victory over trauma.

It is the daily decision not to surrender to it.

Raymond does not claim to have forgiven everyone. He does not pretend the past no longer enters the room.

He says something more practical.

“I know what happened to me was horrendous, but I can’t change what happened. I can change how I feel about it.”

He is telling the story because he wants another survivor to understand that the responsibility belongs to the people who committed the abuse.

He wants them to speak, despite the pain.

Keeping it inside, Raymond believes, can kill a person.

He is not ashamed.

“What was done to me was by the hands of others,” he says.

That sentence is his line in the earth.

On one side is the child who believed Charlotte defined love, safety and permission.

On the other is the man who knows she did not.

Back in Burlington

Raymond is now back where the story began.

Burlington is a prosperous city. It is also a city in which a man born and raised there can wait to learn whether his next address will be a temporary room or a motel.

Permanent housing would give Raymond more than an address.

It would give him a door he controls.

It would give him a place where permission belongs to him.

It would give him a home that is not conditional upon another adult’s desire, another institution’s decision or another government code arriving on time.

For now, he waits.

He will call Service Canada.

He will remain cordial.

He will talk to the housing workers.

He will move if he has to.

He will continue to read, talk politics, worry about people he knew decades ago and tell the truth about what happened to him.

He says that if his story prevents even one other person from enduring what he endured, then perhaps it will mean something.

That is not forgiveness.

It is not absolution.

It is Raymond insisting that the worst people in his life will not have the final use of what they did to him.

His father said he would never amount to anything.

Charlotte treated him as something she could own.

His birth mother gave him $20 and left.

The systems saw distress but not its cause.

The prisons saw the offender but not always the child.

And Raymond is still here.

Still waiting.

Still speaking.

Still surviving.

Footnote

Raymond’s story is his own. But it does not stand alone.

Raymond is a non-status, urban Indigenous man. Like many Indigenous people living away from a First Nation community—and many whose identities, family connections or legal recognition were disrupted—his life cannot be understood only through the narrow categories institutions have assigned to him.

“Urban Indigenous” does not mean disconnected from Indigenous identity. Nor does being non-status make a person less Indigenous. These terms often reveal the lasting consequences of colonial policies that separated children from families, interrupted cultural transmission and made government recognition—not kinship, ancestry, community or lived identity—the measure through which Indigenous people were counted.

Grandmother’s Voice understands this personally. Our work is grounded not only in advocacy, but in the lived experiences of Indigenous and non-status Indigenous people whose identities and relationships have not always fit the definitions imposed by colonial systems.

We have carried the story of Heather Winterstein, whose attempts to advocate for herself were not adequately heard within the health-care system.

We continue to carry the stories of L.L. and J.L.—two Indigenous children whose suffering raises urgent questions about what child-welfare agencies, caregivers and other institutions knew, what they failed to recognize, and why meaningful protection did not come. L.L. did not survive. J.L. did, and his survival must not allow the systems around him to look away from what he endured or from the support he may require throughout his life.

Their circumstances are different. Their stories should never be collapsed into one another. But each asks a version of the same question:

What happens when an Indigenous person is visible to institutions but is not fully seen, heard or protected as a human being?

Raymond was known to Children’s Aid. He entered foster care, was returned to his father and later passed through receiving homes, psychiatric services, courts and correctional institutions. Again and again, systems encountered the effects of his trauma without reaching—or adequately protecting—the child at its source.

Heather encountered a health-care system with policies, protocols and professional obligations, yet her own knowledge of her body and her requests for help were not met with the urgency and cultural safety she deserved.

L.L. and J.L. were surrounded by systems that described themselves as protective. Yet one child died, and another survived harms no child should ever have been required to endure.

These are not identical stories. They are not isolated stories either.

They exist within a longer history of residential schools, the Sixties Scoop, child apprehension, cultural disconnection and the continuing overrepresentation of Indigenous people in child welfare, homelessness, health crises and incarceration. They also demonstrate why non-status and urban Indigenous people cannot be treated as peripheral to conversations about reconciliation, Indigenous rights or culturally safe care.

The responsibility is not simply to revise another policy after another tragedy.

It is to build systems that listen before a crisis, respond before harm becomes irreversible, and understand that Indigenous identity, culture, kinship and community are not optional additions to care.

Raymond survived long enough to tell us what the systems around him failed to understand.

J.L. survived and must not be forgotten because he lived.

The question now is whether we will finally listen differently.

Support Is Available

Raymond’s story includes childhood physical and sexual abuse, suicide attempts, mental-health trauma, incarceration and precarious housing. If this story brings up difficult feelings or experiences, you do not have to carry them alone.

Housing and community support
If you are experiencing homelessness, precarious housing, food insecurity or another urgent social need, dial 2-1-1. The free and confidential 211 service connects people across Canada with local shelters, housing programs, rent and income supports, mental-health services, food programs and other community resources.

Mental-health and Indigenous wellness support
For local mental-health, counselling and crisis resources, dial 2-1-1.

First Nations, Inuit and Métis people seeking culturally grounded emotional support can call the Hope for Wellness Help Line at 1-855-242-3310, toll-free, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Children and young people can call Kids Help Phone at 1-800-668-6868 or text CONNECT to 686868 for free, confidential support, 24 hours a day.

Suicide and immediate crisis support
If you are thinking about suicide, have lost hope or are struggling to cope, call or text 9-8-8 anywhere in Canada. Support is available 24 hours a day, every day of the year.

If you have recently attempted suicide, seriously harmed yourself or are in immediate danger, call 9-1-1 or go to the nearest emergency department.

Childhood physical or sexual abuse
Adult survivors of childhood physical or sexual abuse can dial 2-1-1 and ask to be connected with a local sexual-assault centre, trauma counsellor or victim-services organization. Justice Canada’s Victim Services Directory also connects survivors with specialized services throughout Canada.

In Ontario, male survivors of sexual abuse can call the Male Survivors of Sexual Abuse Crisis Line at 1-866-887-0015, 24 hours a day.

Children and young people experiencing abuse can call Kids Help Phone at 1-800-668-6868 or text CONNECT to 686868. If a child is in immediate danger, call 9-1-1 or contact the local child-protection agency.

Residential School support
Former Indian Residential School students and their families can call the National Indian Residential School Crisis Line at 1-866-925-4419 for toll-free support 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

First Nations, Inuit and Métis people affected by Residential Schools, intergenerational trauma or other distress can also call the Hope for Wellness Help Line at 1-855-242-3310.