I’m caught up in the details of organizing this ritual. Somehow, I have to free my thoughts of the minutia and write a eulogy. Sometimes there is a tendency to focus only on glorious achievements, while ignoring more down-to-earth, even negative aspects. I want to write about all of it, but from a place of love and understanding.
In June I posted an entry about the untimely death of my father, and the discovery of a short note that provided insight into his personality as well as my own. DNA is powerful.
I said nothing about the impact of his death on my mother, who was a 43-year-old, stay-at-home mom with three kids. At the beginning of 1970 she didn’t even know how to fill her own gas tank because dad had always done that for her. By the end of the year, she’d gone back to work as a public school secretary, sold our house in Brampton, Ontario and moved us all to Muskoka, where she grew up, and built a new house on a lake. All this during a time when single mothers were a relatively new phenomenon. This amazes me.
Her world was cruelly rocked again only 11 years later, when her eldest child, my big sister, passed away after a brief but debilitating illness. No parent should ever have to endure the anguish of losing and outliving a child.
Anyone who travelled with her knew how much fun she could be, whether it was paddling an outrigger canoe in Hawaii, lugging home a heavy hammock from Costa Rica, or riding camels in Egypt. I think Muskoka was where she felt most alive. She was always game for walking in the woods or cross-country skiing down a forest trail, even into her 80s. When we were kids, we explored the achingly beautiful wilderness of 50 years ago, long before NHL players built million-dollar “cottages,” and small towns groaned under the weight of condo developments.
She had a great sense of humour and loved dirty jokes. Even in her late 80s, after the fog of dementia had clouded her eyes and she lived in long-term care, she never lost it. I told her jokes just to hear her laugh.
“Hey mom. There’s an elderly couple sitting together at church. The wife leans over and whispers in her husband’s ear, “I just had a silent fart. What should I do now?”
And the husband whispers in his wife’s ear, “Put a new battery in your hearing aid.”
Sometimes I told the joke again 10 minutes later and she laughed just as hard.
In my Father’s Day post, I alluded to some friction in our relationship. Unfortunately, she had an undiagnosed personality disorder that affected some of her important relationships, including ours. The indomitable will she needed to cope with the events life threw at her, sometimes got in the way. She never seemed to realize when she had gone too far. I doubt she was ever aware of the tension between us. It was something I felt but certainly never discussed with her. I loved her regardless.
She passed away in November 2018 and you might be wondering why I’m only getting around to this now. We had a date scheduled for October 2019, but my father-in-law’s sudden illness derailed those plans. Covid shut everything down in March 2020. Later this month, almost three years after her death, I have a brief window of time when I can give her the send-off she deserves.
She wanted some of her ashes to be scattered in Muskoka, the place she loved so much. The rest she wanted scattered with my father and sister, the people she loved so much, who are in the Brampton Cemetery. This will be a full-circle moment for me.