Posts from the “Remembrances” Category

Remembering Margo

Posted on May 18, 2016

My best friend’s mother passed away this week. ‘Passed away’ – where did that expression come from? It makes it sound like death was a graceful movement from one room to another, like from the hallway to the parlor. In a way, I suppose it is, if the passing is gentle and gradual rather than sudden and painful. Dear, sweet, gentle Margo. Jess said Margo was like ‘a bird’ at the end. I completely understand what she meant. I sat with my dad for a week while he was in palliative care, under a Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) order. Again, I can intellectually comprehend why a DNR exists – no extraordinary measures for someone nearing the end of their life on earth. But whenever…

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Categories: Modern life, Remembrances

A gift for a Queen

Posted on September 10, 2015

I’m continuing my slog through the piles of paper that I packed after my mother’s funeral in July 1998. Today, I found a letter dated 3 July 1939 to my mother from an official from the Governor-General’s office. She’d sent it the week before to the Prime Minister of the day. William Lyon Mackenzie King – Canada’s 10th Prime Minister, is remembered as a secretive, cold and excessively ‘spiritual’ man who employed mediums so he could keep in touch with his dead mother, appears to have annoyed a lot of important people, including the Allies during the war years. John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, was our 15th Governor General. Like my mother, he was enthusiastic about literacy, he was a writer and a proponent…

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Categories: Remembrances

Treasures and Memories

Posted on September 8, 2015

I finally got around to cleaning out the scarred green trunk of memorabilia we moved from my Mom’s house in Calgary after she died. Although she passed away on July 4th, 1998, the grief is still raw. Until recently, touching things that were hers was actually painful – my head would get fuzzy and my eyes would fill with tears – so I just didn’t. It was time, though, so I loaded a historical romance onto my iPod, turned on my Bluetooth speakers and drowned out the sorrow with stories of lords and ladies from another time (my, but they were a horny bunch) where there is always a happy ending (in both senses of the phrase). In a wrinkled brown envelope, I found…

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Categories: Modern life, Remembrances

I will always remember you, Dad

Posted on November 11, 2014

R. A. Miller, born in Cuba in 1920 or thereabouts. There are no parish records. A quiet, studious, serious boy. Orphaned before he was 10. Sent to live on the charity of relatives. Was kept out of school to work as a labourer. Lied about his age to fight for the British Empire in Africa. He’d talk about the heat and flies, but not the friends who died beside him. The war destroyed much more than his innocence. He was my mother’s Beloved. He tried, he really tried to be a husband and father. Without the compass of loving life experience, he had no emotional resilience. A machinist and failed farmer, he was cursed by the demons of silence and stoicism. Although he deserted…

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Categories: Modern life, Remembrances

Tagged: Remembrance Day

Farewells

Posted on November 10, 2014

November makes me melancholy. It’s a combination of having to acknowledge that summer is well and truly over. That we face months of short gloomy days when we hunker inside to keep warm. But most of all because of Remembrance Day. November 11th. When we were kids, my mother would always make us pause (back then it was a school holiday) and bow our heads. At the time I didn’t understand why it should be so solemn. When I grew older, I realized that our little ceremony honoured my father and what we as a family had lost because of the long-lasting impact of the Second World War on my father. I remember, when my Mother died ten years ago, some woman – no,…

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Categories: Family, Modern life, Remembrances

Tagged: Saying goodbye