March 8: Today is my Mother’s birthday. Born in 1923, she turns 94 today. She has outlived all of her siblings and all of her High School friends save one. She is literally the “last one standing”.
She was the eldest daughter in a family with 5 kids. They were raised on Roxborough Street East and must have enjoyed a life with a certain amount of privilege. Unlike her younger sisters, she finished High School and had no inclination to go further with her education. Instead, as mentioned in the previous post, she opted for enlisting in the RCAF as a way to assert her independence. After training she was assigned to a unit that tracked aircraft off the east coast and served some time in Newfoundland. At that point, it had not yet joined Canada, so she was awarded the “Foreign Service Medal”. She is very proud of that, if slightly amused.
After the war she returned home and was married in 1946. She told me once that she knew she was going to marry Dad when he turned around and winked at her in Grade 9. They spent 66 years together.
She was a stay-at-home wife and mother. She was very proud to call herself a “housewife”, especially in later years when that was not fashionable. But there were years when it could not have been easy. When Dad was drinking, she struggled to get him sober and to shield Nancy and I from his behaviour. Whether that was the right thing to do can be debated; she did what she thought was the right thing at the time. Ultimately, Dad did get sober and they enjoyed more than 30 years of apparent happiness before the sad betrayal of his Alzheimer’s diagnosis.
She struggled mightily with that for more than 4 years before he moved to Sunnybrook. The fact that she did so – in her late 80’s – is a sign of a central characteristic of her personality. She can be incredibly determined. Put less charitably: she can be irrationally stubborn. While it’s very possible that we need to be stubborn to survive as long as she has, there were times when Nancy and I were young when her insistence that something happen in a certain way clearly made no sense. Circumstances had changed and I was often unsure of why she was insisting, yet arguing would not change her mind.
Sadly, she now has early stage Alzheimer’s disease. She has become unfamiliar with the building where she has lived for almost 10 years and continues to go for walks on Mt. Pleasant “to explore the neighbourhood”. While I admire her determination / stubbornness to continue to be active, she has physical limitations and her wandering has become unsafe. Polite suggestions that she stop, or at least use a walker have yielded outright refusal.
Reflecting on what is to come brings very mixed emotions. We have seen the progression of the disease before and it is a slow-motion agony for everyone involved. She remains very determined to continue living her own life and I truly admire her for that. Ultimately, of course, Nancy and I will have to make decisions to force her to do things she does not wish to do. And perhaps this is a lesson we learned from her: you make the best decision that you can make in the circumstances, and then you follow through. Something she has been doing since 1923….