UPDATE - 5/26@10:27PM: Thanks to Xanagirl over at Counterparts we now have the entire text of the article. It's an excellent read. See the bottom of this post to read it.

Every month the Toronto Globe and Mail's Evan Solomon sends an unidentified image to someone in the public eye along with a challenge: Give it a title and share the ideas and experiences it evokes. This month it was Geddy Lee who submitted to the challenge. To read the entire article and see the image you need to be a subscriber, but from Geddy's caption and what he says about it we can get the gist of it. He titled the photo The Pain of Politics:

... I look at this photo and I see this suffering woman saying goodbye to a family member of some sort - perhaps her husband or her father, I can't tell - and he's reaching out to her. Korea is still, essentially, at war, 54 years after the ceasefire. This photo reminds me of the limited visits that North and South Koreans are allowed to have in order to reconnect families that have been torn apart. The Korean War is kind of a forgotten war and this picture really provoked me to think about that time and how little has really changed in terms of the division of life for family members in Korea. ...

Further on in the article he gets a bit personal and discusses his own family and marriage:

... But it's never that simple. Life got much more difficult. There were many times with my relationship with my wife and my kids where it was a very painful thing to have to leave. You know, things go on in your life that require your presence and the older I got the more I felt the damage from my continual departures, the divisions were growing. When you are not present in a marriage and not present in a parenting situation, there's going to be damage and there's going to be alienation.

So I realized at a certain point in my life I had make a stronger effort to be present, to tour less and to come home more and to make sure I keep my family together. I always tell my friends that marriage is the toughest job you will ever have and keeping a family together is tougher than any job in the real world....

... I will say my wife and I, we teetered on the brink at one stage in our relationship many, many years ago, but we both wanted to make sure that didn't happen. This was when my son was very young and I was touring at that point - oh my god, I don't know, almost 250, 300 shows a year. ...

You can read the excerpts above online at this link but, as I said, you need to be a subscriber to read the whole thing.

UPDATE - 5/26@10:27PM: Here's the entire text of the article thanks to Xanagirl over at Counterparts:

Evan Solomon: Geddy, when I sent you this photo, what caption came to mind?

Geddy Lee:Being me, I over-thought the thing a million times. But since I think the photograph is dealing with North and South Korea, the caption that struck me was, "The pain of politics."

Why "the pain of politics"?

I look at this photo and I see this suffering woman saying goodbye to a family member of some sort - perhaps her husband or her father, I can't tell - and he's reaching out to her. Korea is still, essentially, at war, 54 years after the ceasefire. This photo reminds me of the limited visits that North and South Koreans are allowed to have in order to reconnect families that have been torn apart. The Korean War is kind of a forgotten war and this picture really provoked me to think about that time and how little has really changed in terms of the division of life for family members in Korea.

You're right about the picture. It does show some South Koreans crossing that heavily armed border this week to be reunited with North Korean relatives that they haven't seen since 1953. But, of course, after the short visit, they each have to go back to their own countries.

I can't imagine that - family members that you have no access to. They can't phone each other. They don't have Internet contact with each other. Unfortunately the kind of comic presence of Kim Jong-il has made us look at North Korea in a slightly ridiculous fashion, but we forget they are half of a state that is divided and still at war. I was thinking about the Cold War that we all grew up through and this is a "cold war" of a different kind - it's totally out of our mindset as North Americans, but in that part of the world it is very real and it's an ongoing thing and you look at this picture and you see that.

Geddy, earlier you said that in typical fashion you over-thought this caption. What do you mean by that?

Oh well, give me a project and I'll think about it six ways to Sunday. I tried to think of a caption that would be revealing.

At one point, I thought "Not Enough Time" would be good. Because these two people, as they're feeling this pain, they're thinking we don't have enough time together. So that was one feeling I got from this photograph as well.

So much of your life - in a very different way - has been about not enough time. You are always on tour, making connections and leaving. How did you handle that with your own loved ones, as a father raising a family, always saying goodbye?

Well, that's an interesting question. When I was younger, it was easier for me because I was so enthralled with the dream. The dream of chasing my career. So I justified the leaving and the pain I caused my wife and my children by saying this is the job I'm meant to do and I have to follow my dream.

But it's never that simple. Life got much more difficult. There were many times with my relationship with my wife and my kids where it was a very painful thing to have to leave. You know, things go on in your life that require your presence and the older I got the more I felt the damage from my continual departures, the divisions were growing. When you are not present in a marriage and not present in a parenting situation, there's going to be damage and there's going to be alienation.

So I realized at a certain point in my life I had make a stronger effort to be present, to tour less and to come home more and to make sure I keep my family together. I always tell my friends that marriage is the toughest job you will ever have and keeping a family together is tougher than any job in the real world.

Did you almost lose your family?

I will say my wife and I, we teetered on the brink at one stage in our relationship many, many years ago, but we both wanted to make sure that didn't happen. This was when my son was very young and I was touring at that point - oh my god, I don't know, almost 250, 300 shows a year.

That is the rock-star life, isn't it?

It wasn't so much the rock-star life as trying to be a rock star. When you are trying to get there, you don't say no to anything. We would stay on the road for months at a time without coming home and obviously all of us experienced damage to our home lives.

And that's when we started to institute some pretty strong rules. We wouldn't go away for more than three weeks without coming home for a week and we began turning opportunities down in order to preserve our family lives.

I think that was the smartest decision we've ever made.

The Korean photograph also has to do with loss and how people try to cope with it. How has loss affected your life?

I experienced a massive loss very early in life. I lost my Dad when I was 12. And that was a terrible disruption and a terrible thing for a 12-year-old boy to handle.

How did he pass away?

Complications from the war. My parents were Holocaust survivors. My father was never 100 per cent healthy and his heart was not healthy from his labour during the war. And one night, his heart just gave out.

Was he in a concentration camp?

Yes. Most of my family was in camps. My mother and my father were both in Auschwitz and they then got transferred to different concentration camps. My mother was liberated in Bergen-Belson and my father spent some time in Dachau as well before he was liberated.

Was living with a sense of tragedy and loss, and even the guilt of survival, a shadow in your family?

My mom is an amazing woman and she very openly talked about [her] experiences. I know other children of Holocaust survivors tell different stories - how their parents won't speak of it, they won't discuss that pain - so I feel very fortunate that I had a tough mother who had a good sense of humour, who embraced life and handed it off to us too. It really helped me get over the loss of my father. I lost a friend a couple of years ago to cancer and that was a very tough moment for me. Witnessing what [Rush drummer] Neil Peart has gone through with the death of his wife and his daughter was another difficult time. But somehow or another I feel like my mother prepped me for all of this...

Your father died so long ago. He never saw you succeed, or raise a family. I wonder, does the ache ever really go away?

Not really, no. I think about that. I think about how great it would be to have him around to see my kids. More than my success, that's what I wish he was here to enjoy - my children and my wife and all that. But what can you do? Life throws you curve balls and you got to do your best to handle them.

You and the band are about to tour for your new album. Do you still get a kick out of playing older hits - or do you want to move on to the latest material?

One of the reasons we tour without an opening act is so we can have 2½ to three hours to indulge everything - play the old stuff and play a good amount of new stuff. But for me to walk out on stage and after, what, 33 years of touring, see people who still want to hear something I've written 25 years ago... Well, I'm very happy to play that for them.

Some people say that when rock musicians get older, they lose their creativity. Do you still feel creative?

Absolutely. We've been through a lot in the last couple of years on the personal side, but now I feel like we're acting like a band again. We're still having fun with it, so the spirit of rock and roll is back with us.

Is that the caption for Geddy Lee right now?

Maybe. It could well be.

Evan Solomon is a writer and journalist. He is also the host of CBC News: Sunday and Sunday Night. How They See It will appear monthly in the Focus section.

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