They Left Us Everything (11 page)

We start with a short prayer and a hymn, sung by a choir made up of young women in Mum’s Bible study group who have volunteered to “sing her to heaven.” Their voices sound just like Mum’s—enthusiastic, but completely off-key—and it warms my heart.

I make my way to the lectern next, fumbling with my notes. I survey the congregation and slowly put on Mum’s sunglasses—the ones with the red laughing lips that look like something a stoned rock star might wear. “Mum would be horrified to see so many of you here …” I say, and the place erupts in laughter. I tell them that a few weeks before Mum died, she said, “I know you’re supposed to have a purpose in life, and I’ve searched for mine and I think it was just to make people laugh.”

I describe Mum as a “life force” who valued every second of her life with insatiable curiosity and boundless enthusiasm.
I laud her generous nature. I share memories of her “waifs and strays”—the times she invited whole families who were down on their luck to live with us for months—and I tell the story about the day a vacuum cleaner salesman had the misfortune to ring’s Mum’s bell, offering to demonstrate his machine, just as the dog was throwing up on her blue shag carpet. I found it impossible to talk about my relationship with Mum. I knew I was using all her funny stories as a smokescreen; maybe that’s what Mum used them for, too.

I explain how Mum suffered from claustrophobia and would have sat at the back, close to the exit; how she was terrified of public speaking even though, paradoxically, she was an unstoppable raconteur; how she hated being in the limelight, even though she always stole the show. I tell them it was more like Mum
was
the limelight, that spot onstage, front and centre, that was most illuminated. Mum was so intensely interested in other people’s lives that her questions shone the spotlight on them; people glowed in her presence. Whenever she met someone new, she’d say, “Now, tell me about you!” The next time they met, Mum would remember everything about them—who they voted for, where they went on their last vacation, the names of their children, where they went to school, what they ate for breakfast—everything.

What I don’t tell them is that the great
disadvantage
of a limelight at the end of the nineteenth century was that it required the constant attention of an individual operator who had to keep adjusting the block of calcium as it burned, while simultaneously tending to the jets of oxygen and hydrogen that fuelled it—exactly like the jobs we held, tending to Mum. She got her oxygen from people, which is perhaps how she lived so long when deprived of the real thing.

After I speak, Chris gives the homily and other family members take their turn, telling more funny stories about life with Mum. These are interspersed with hymns: Mum’s Southern favourites, like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Carter has sent his story by email, which Virginia reads in his absence, and Jessica gives a reading from “The King’s Christmas Message” of 1939.

By the time we’re finished, people are saying they’ve never heard so much laughter in a church. As we file out through the side door, I pass two elderly women speaking to the minister.

“That’s exactly the kind of funeral I want!” says one of the women.

The minister chuckles. “To have that kind of funeral, you have to have lived that kind of life.” Then he turns to me, shaking his head at a memory. “The first time I met your mother, I had a headache. And you remember what she did? She made me hold a banana peel on my forehead until it went away!”

“Did your headache go away?”

“I guess it did … you don’t see any banana peel, do you?”

After the service, friends are gathering back at the house for the reception and a friend of my ex-husband’s, Paul, is waiting in the downstairs hall. I pass by and he touches my elbow.

“Was your mother Jewish?” he asks me.

“No—why?”

He waves his arm in front of the bookcase. “Because there are so many Jewish artifacts here.”

I explain that my mother was deeply religious. Although she was raised Episcopalian, she valued independent thinkers and liked to be intellectually stimulated, so she went to wherever
the good preachers were. She didn’t care whether they were in a Roman Catholic church, a Muslim mosque, a Buddhist temple, a Jewish synagogue, or a Baptist revival tent; as long as a speaker had something interesting to say, Mum would go and listen. She’d made pilgrimages to Jerusalem several times and brought back many souvenirs, including the plate with the Hebrew blessing,
SHALOM!
, that Paul was looking at now. Mum loved the fact that the word
shalom
meant so many different things—not just peace, but hello and goodbye and harmony and completeness. She said Asian cultures had
namaste,
but North Americans didn’t have a word like it.

I show Paul a framed, casual snapshot of Bishop Tutu and, on the shelf above it, Mum’s photo of the Dalai Lama, but he’s fixated on Mum’s clay figurine of a Jewish rabbi, looking like Tevye from
Fiddler on the Roof.

“I hope you don’t mind my saying, but if you’re getting rid of stuff and nobody wants this, I’d love to have it.”

I make a mental note, and several months later it’s bubblewrapped and delivered to Paul. Mum would be thrilled that her souvenir found a proper Jewish home.

That evening, a few stragglers are still milling about the living room and I’m hearing stories I’ve never heard before. A middle-aged man whom I haven’t seen in decades—one of the young boys who had emigrated with his mother from England and temporarily lived with us in the 1950s—is telling me how he finally met his father for the first time: “After my mother died, your mum said to me, ‘Now you can find your father. Here’s what I know about him. Look there—don’t wait. Do it now!’ Because of your mum, I got to know my father just before he died.”

When everyone leaves, the dining-room table is a sad mess
of half-filled glasses, crumpled paper napkins, empty plates, and crumbs. Mum’s earrings are littered around the ice cube trays we’d taken from her jewellery drawer to use as the centrepiece. Sambo is comatose under the table. There are dozens of floral bouquets—some on standing easels—sent home from the church. Most of the sympathy cards have become detached from the bouquets so we don’t know who sent them.

The following day, I receive a telephone call of condolence from Elisabeth—my older cousin in England.

“How are you feeling,” she asks, “now that you’ve joined the rest of us with our backs to the wall?”

I don’t like this implication that I’ve moved up a notch— into the line of fire—just because, like Elisabeth, both my parents have died. But I understand her growing feelings of mortality. It happens to all of us as we age. Death, like decline, is inevitable, but to me its timing and circumstances have always seemed random, not exclusively hierarchical, and not necessarily something to be feared.

Life is short, as we learned from the early culling that took our brother Sandy, but it can also be long. Some might say too long. Mum has died in her ninety-third year with her mind still intact, but Dad died at age ninety-two having been supposedly saved in his late seventies by a triple bypass, only to live the last twelve years in the fog of dementia. Perhaps death isn’t the ultimate tragedy.

After Mum died, we received dozens of letters of condolences from women I barely knew—women my age who’d been mentored by Mum, who looked up to her as an “Other Mother.” I knew she had these relationships—Mum had always taught me the importance of having friends of all ages—but the
contents
of the letters from her “Other Daughters” filled
me with remorse. They didn’t describe the forceful mother I had been experiencing for the past twenty years—the one who invaded my privacy, demanded I call her every few hours, who seemed judgmental and disapproving of my choices—they described an Other Mother who was loving and wise, confident and charming, admirable and true. They described a woman I wished I had known.

Or perhaps a mother I had pushed away. A mother I just needed to remember—someone who had been there all along.

PART II

Inheritance

Other Mothers

In many ways, Mum was the ideal mother for any young woman transitioning from the conservative post-war years to the liberated sixties. She was a feminist at heart. But although I inherited many of her attitudes, I stayed in her shadow, observing. I noticed the close friendships she forged with young and old alike, from all walks of life. I saw how the exchange of new ideas fed her curiosity, kept her youthful and broad-minded, and I understood that we can guide and be guided at the same time, but when she tried to mentor me, our mother– daughter relationship complicated things. It’s hard to accept guidance when you’re trying to break away. So, just as she inherited Other Daughters, I inherited Other Mothers. One thing I learned for sure is that we can all use more than one mother … and more than one daughter. It keeps us sane.

One of my Other Mothers is a sculptor named Pat, who lives near me in the city. Over the years she and I have developed a deep relationship. Pat and I frequently have morning coffee together, buying cappuccino and almond croissants at a small
café and crossing the streetcar tracks to sit on a bench in the leafy park nearby. Sometimes we meet for a pasta dinner at a restaurant around the corner. Often I simply drop in—the door to Pat’s house is always open. It’s a restored Victorian workman’s cottage, and in summer the oversized French doors in her living room are thrown open to a walled-in courtyard. Wisteria blooms overhang a tiny pergola in the corner; they weave and drip like giant grapes, shading a small tea table. Blowsy pink peonies the size of salad plates mingle along the fence with orange lilies, climbing roses, and purple irises. Pat’s sculptures settle into the greenery like silent, meditating goddesses. It reminds me of Findhorn—that Scottish microclimate of positive energy where every plant explodes to double its normal size as if by magic.

Even in the middle of winter, when Pat’s French doors are closed, bright sunlight still glances off the high-ceilinged walls and infuses the room. Her indoor furniture is the same as her outdoor furniture—lacy white wrought iron, the tables glasstopped—bringing the effect of her airy garden inside. Vases of fresh-cut flowers are everywhere.

This morning I’ve made a trip into the city to see her. I holler her name, kicking off my boots, and she emerges from her backroom art studio, her short, steel-grey hair streaked with alabaster dust. She’s wearing an old shirt over stylish clothes. Large silver links loop around her neck and a bold copper cuff encircles one wrist. She puts down her chisel.

“What a delightful surprise!” she exclaims. “I’ll make us some coffee.”

I hear the
tick-tick-tick
as her gas stove ignites and she puts the kettle on. I’ve brought some pastries in a brown paper bag. She hurries them onto a white paper doily on a pretty
scalloped plate, setting cups on a wicker tray. Small paper luncheon napkins are thin as tissue, printed with roses. Nothing escapes her artist’s eye.

For years, Pat has been helping me deal with my relationship with Mum. I know she had a similar struggle with her own mother and I crave her hard-won insights. I feel as if I can tell Pat anything. Even though we’re twenty-six years apart, I feel no age difference when I’m with her—I feel completely understood.

“I hate to tell you, dear,” Pat says with a laugh, “but we all deal with our mothers until the day we die!”

Pat should know. Even though she recently turned ninety, her own mother lived much longer and her aunt lived to a hundred and one. Longevity is obviously in her genes.

Pat’s second career began at the age of seventy-seven when she gave up painting to become a stone carver. When she found this cottage she was a widow in her eighties, an age when most people would have moved into a retirement home, but Pat’s only difficulty had been lifting blocks of fifty-pound stone up to a second-floor studio. All she felt she needed was a place with no stairs.

She hates Canadian winters and is leaving soon for a month of carving in Mexico. She’s worried about tripping on the cobblestones of San Miguel de Allende, but she’s looking forward to the courtyard at the Instituto where she can chisel her block of stone outside in the sun. She’s taking her new iPad with her so that she can keep in touch via email.