‘She is what the story of Canada is supposed to be about’

For 20 years, the late revered writing teacher Donald M. Murray wrote a column for the Boston Globe on the pleasures, surprises and inevitable losses of aging.

The experience of long living teaches us how to cope and persist, Murray wrote. “We have been tested and usually found ourselves stronger than we expected.”

If our elders had just one message for us, it would likely be a variation on that theme.

That the world can hurt, but pain passes.

That life’s problems are usually less massive than we imagine, our abilities to solve them greater than we know. That small first steps are often turning points.

What we need to retain, Murray said, is “an ability to welcome change, to take advantage of the unexpected, to step from the secure.”

The lives of many of the seniors lost to the coronavirus pandemic in recent months suggest Donald Murray’s counsel was sound.

Svetlana Wronski, who died at 93 in Toronto, was 15 when the Nazis invaded her country of Yugoslavia. She escaped the Germans, then later Sovietcontrolled Czechoslovakia.

When she arrived in Canada with her parents, Wronski spoke six languages — and learned English here.

“She is what the story of Canada is supposed to be about,” her son told the Star.

Anna Rita Babey, who died at 97 in Toronto, grew up in Saskatchewan as one of12 children.

Times were tough on the Prairies during the Depression and Anna’s early life was hard, her daughter, Donna, told the Star.

In 1942, Anna started receiving love letters from a man she had never met — Paul Babey, a young Ukrainian immigrant who worked in forestry in Thunder Bay.

Like something out of “Cyrano de Bergerac,” Anna fell in love with Babey through his words and, in the fall of 1942, two weeks after meeting, the couple married.

They moved to Winnipeg, had seven children. Anna taught Sunday school. She cared for Paul during years of illness. After his death in 1986, she travelled the world.

Agnese De Amicis, who died at 90 in Pickering, was born in Italy and came to Canada in 1960 with her husband, Giovanni.

She worked as a seamstress, knitted and crocheted. Her backyard was dedicated to her fruit and vegetable garden, and her front yard full of flowers and trees.

She was devoted to her two granddaughters, Jessica and Angela, and was able to meet her only great-grandchild last year.

“So much of who I am is because of her, what she taught me, and what I try to emulate now,” wrote her granddaughter Angela. “She was loving until the end of her life.” Which was much the way Don Murray saw it, too.

“I have lived by the rule of love: knowing that the love was true, even if what I said or did — or did not say or did not do — was at that particular moment foolish, a mistake, or just plain wrong, it was all right. “It was done — or not done — with love.”