OUR MOTHERS’ LIFE JOURNEYS
We never stop learning from them
My mother’s wallet still smells of her perfume, trapped in the fake leopard-skin pattern she loved, and there is usually a small, tearless cry when I fumble through it, my fingers tracing hers.
The day she died, Oct. 6, it was cruelly beautiful outside and, from the fifth floor of the Civic hospital, there was an exquisite misty carpet on the fields of the Central Experimental Farm, a dawn with no grey.
Congestive heart failure for four years, a triple bypass in 2015, finally a pneumonia that raged — but lucidly a mother to her last breath. My brother Norm slipped out on a coffee run a couple of hours before she passed. A miserable mask on her face, weak as a kitten, “There’s money in my purse,” she panted.
We held her hand. What else is there in the last hour, when it will all have to rest unsaid?
Mid-morning, my wife arrived. “Doreen, it’s Laurie. We’re all here now. We’re with you.” And my mother, who could hardly breathe, somehow answered: “Thanks for all you’ve given me,” words of gratitude that shatter me still.
Days later, we found her birth certificate, which held a surprise. “Myrtle May Frazier,” it read, about the woman we had always known as Doreen Mary. “Jesus,” my sister Suzan said, “we didn’t even know her real name?”
It fits, really. My mother was the most selfless person. It was never about her. She grew up the youngest of 11, in poverty she never talked about, but in circumstances that shaped her, without room for self-pity.
Years later, with no shortage of money, she would still save a cold cup of tea to reheat in the microwave, and use the bag twice. Once, after several days in the heart institute, we were packing up and I noticed several little bread buns, still wrapped in plastic in her purse, saved from the hospital trays. “I couldn’t just throw them out.”
There may be something special in that generation forged in the fire of the 1930s, made with some lost alloy of toughness. She was five-foot-nothing, weighed 113 pounds, but survived all this calamity and somehow, unfailingly, smiled every time you met her. She lost her parents in her 20s, lost a brother to the Second World War, lost contact with most of her siblings, buried two of her children in horrendous circumstances, survived my father’s long journey through an alcoholic wilderness. And still, she was happy, grateful for what life gave her. Survive? No, she prevailed.
She had a career as an employment counsellor, a job that suited her honest desire to help people improve. She volunteered often, donated money freely. She took communion to the sick. And she prayed often. In the wallet, in drawers, in coat pockets, we’re still finding rosaries.
She had marvellous auburn hair that, in 85 years, hardly greyed. She sang beautifully, became a good bridge player, grew addicted to Coronation Street — about her only vice.
I never liked Mother’s Day much. Too many times it was racing over with gas-station flowers and stupid cards, the hasty work of an ungrateful son who lacked wisdom. She deserved better. I appreciated her so much more when I became a parent, but you never repay, do you? You die indebted.
The last five years weren’t great. Dad went in 2012, then came the heart disease and multiple emergency stays in hospital. Sometimes, she went by ambulance in pyjamas and it fell to Norm and I to bring her clothes from home. What do I know of dressing a little old lady? But even that, she looked after: in her closet, she hung her outfits together, this blouse, with those pants, with that vest, with this scarf. Even the jewelry was colour-organized.
It’s how it ends. Your children, eventually, dress you, put you to bed, hold your hand, carry your coffin home. It’s the son finally found what he’s for.
During the last week in hospital, my mother couldn’t eat, for fear of aspiration. It drove her mad. We felt useless in the face of her constant pleas for food.
“The last few days, honest to God, Kelly, I feel like I’m in another world,” she said one morning. You were, Mom. In that in-between place before you go, when all your work is done, all your thanks are given.
And so I take the Raymond Carver fragment to heart, folding the wallet now and again, as her fingers did, if only to touch something of her: that you got what you wanted from life, Myrtle May become Doreen Mary, felt beloved on this earth.
Because you were.
There was that time we took our moms to Italy.
Both were in their 70s, and, my mother-in-law having been recently widowed, my husband and I invited her to join us in travels. Peggy would need a companion her own age, we thought, so my mother, Jean, became the fourth member of our party.
Peggy and Jean were ladies of their generation, which is to say they had stayed at home, reared their families in the suburbs and rarely been outside North America during their adult lives. For them, Italy was magic.
They loved the food, the tourist sites and the landscapes, and Jean in particular rhapsodized over the art; she had taken up pastel painting as her children grew older. We traipsed the moms through the Vatican, through small mountain villages, through the Uffizi. We got them soaking wet searching for a restaurant in the rain one night. We terrified them driving over bumpy roads. And we knew the holiday had been a resounding success when we witnessed the moms skipping past us back to our hotel one night, arm in arm, giggling (perhaps from the wine?) and belting out a Sound of Music melody.
It’s 20 years later. Both ladies are still with us, in their 90s and enduring the daily, difficult battles of old age. Peggy, with Alzheimer’s, recently entered long-term care; Jean, physically frail and mentally slowed, moved from her longtime home a few years back to a retirement residence.
They’re surrounded by decent, caring people — either neighbours, as in my mother’s case, or the expert staff who watch over Peggy. They have family members close by who visit, purchase necessities, help with wardrobe and personal hygiene and, when necessary — as it inevitably is for the elderly — advocate for them when they’re in distress.
Their lives have shrunk to a few rooms and very few activities; they are hollowed out in comparison to the vibrant, plucky women of our youths. It is hard to decipher how they feel truly about this. But we, their middleaged children, feel lucky: we not only still have them in our lives, but because of our enforced caregiver roles, we have rediscovered them.
My sister and I cajole Jean to do things (such as walking outside) she no longer wants to do. We share Blue Jay broadcasts, tackle simple jigsaw puzzles over and over, dabble in pencil crayons and adult colouring books. We remind her that the paintings adorning her small apartment are all her own, earlier work. We’re experts at toileting. We know precisely what she will eat and what she won’t. When she muddles her words, we know exactly what she is trying to say.
Unexpectedly, we’ve become friends with many of the other people in her retirement home. There’s a former British air force pilot and his wife. There’s a 96-year-old recently awarded the Légion d’Honneur for his Second World War service to France. There’s an inquisitive retiree who always asks me “what those boys are doing on Parliament Hill.” This community of elders has become an extended family of sorts. These complex individuals have taught us what we always should have known: the elderly are compassionate, resilient and often insightful.
My mother’s aging has brought other unexpected twists. Not particularly close to my sister during our younger days, I’ve spent so much time in elder care with her over the last six years that we have become fast friends. I look at my mother and smile: “I blame you for this.” At some level, she delights in the tightening relationship.
Peggy, my husband’s mother, faces different hurdles and at this point, her struggle is tougher. There are hard decisions to make about her treatment and her future. But even given her altered state, it’s easy to remember the bubbly, social, warm woman who travelled so eagerly to Italy with us and occasionally drank a bit too much wine.
So, this Mother’s Day weekend, hug a mom. You’ll never stop learning from them. Christina Spencer is the Citizen’s editorial pages editor.