My first memory of my mom is hard to distinguish. We lived on a farm in Alberta. My dad’s great grandparents had immigrated from the Ukraine, settled in the area and started farming in the early 1900’s. That was all his family knew. But my mom’s story was quite different. Mom was born and raised in Valleyfield, Quebec near Montreal. She was an only child and her parents had an English background. My mom was very prim and proper - she taught us how to set the table, manners were important and she tried to show us how to use proper etiquette in a variety of situations. So how did she end up in a small town in Alberta, living on a farm?

Mom had visited the west in her early twenties and fell in love with it. She loved the prairies and she loved the Rocky Mountains. She was looking for a teaching job, when she saw an ad for a position in a rural community. She was offered the position and shortly after moving here, she went to a Halloween dance, where she met my dad and the rest is history.

The early memories of my mom might be blurry, but there are plenty that are very clear. I remember watching Mom put on her makeup, do her hair and put on the perfect pair of earrings. She never left the house without doing all of those things, even if she was just running to get the mail. “You never know who you will run into”, she would say. She was always very well put together, at least on the outside. Mom took great pride in her appearance. I am not sure if this was because of how she was raised, her pride, or her concern with what other people thought. Many years after she passed, I wonder if maybe she was trying to hide what was really on the inside. But I will never know.

When Mom and Dad started a family, Mom stayed at home to raise the kids and help on the farm. She quit teaching and when we were older and she was ready to go back to work, her degree from Quebec was no longer recognized in Alberta. She never taught again. Even though Mom taught for a short period of time, she had a significant influence on her students. Some of them have told me so personally. Her not being able to teach was the school’s loss and Dad’s gain. Mom turned out to be a great farm hand. And she hated it.

Mom would start her days getting up early to feed the pigs and clean the barns. She would make our lunches (up until the day I finished grade twelve), prepare breakfast, and get us out the door. In the winter, Mom would bake cookies and cakes and talk on the phone with her friends for hours. In the summer, she would tend to the garden, weeding the vegetables and fertilizing the flowers. She loved her flowers. The spring and fall were the busiest times for farming. Mom would do chores in the morning and afternoon and prepare and deliver meals to the field for Dad and any of the help. Even though it was a busy time, we barely saw Dad, and Mom was always stressed, harvest was one of my favorite times of year on the farm. Meals on the field were a treat for me and I always looked forward to them!

As my brother and sister graduated and moved out of the house, I became sort of an only child. I was only starting grade eight when my sister moved out and I was the only one at home. I was busy playing sports and participating in 4-H. And Mom was a huge part of all of it. She was my biggest fan, coming to every softball game. And she became the leader of our local 4-H club. We spent a lot of time together and became even closer. The more I grew up, the better friends we became.

My graduation year of high school saw a lot of tears - from both of us. I was moving out and we were going to miss seeing each other every day. There were a LOT of phone calls my first year of University. I needed my mom more than I realized and I missed her terribly.

As close as we were, and as well as I knew my mom, nothing could have prepared me for seeing her as a grandmother. When my first child was born, it was like a switch was flipped. Mom was happier, more fulfilled, more patient, more loving, more present. She was more of everything. And it filled my heart. She created memories with them, just as she had with me, every chance she got. 

She loved all of her grandchildren deeply and differently. She knew them all so well - what they liked, what they didn’t like, what they were good at. I think in some ways, she even knew who they were going to be as people. And she beamed with pride in every grandparent moment.

In 2010, when my kids were eight, six, four and two, my mom suddenly became ill. She called me to tell me her skin had turned yellow. She felt okay, aside from being very tired, but the doctors were trying to figure out what was wrong. A couple weeks later, she was diagnosed with autoimmune hepatitis. I was with her at the appointment when she was diagnosed. I remember very clearly the specialist telling us that “if you are going to have a liver disease, this is the best one to have.” He assured us that the treatment would suppress her immune system and stop it from attacking her liver. But the treatment didn’t work. A week later, she was rushed to the hospital for further treatment. Although much of her time spent in the hospital is a blur, I also have some very vivid memories. The meeting with the transplant team. The questions they asked. Driving in to visit Mom with my dad and him informing me (for the first time in my life) that she was adopted. The phone call from the doctor saying she was not doing well and that we should come in. Feeding her an orange because she couldn’t lift her arms, which turned out to be the last thing she ate. Sitting in the waiting area talking to my sister on the phone, while they wheeled my mom past me on a gurney. Visiting her in the ICU for the first time. The “family” room where we would meet with the doctor. I can tell you exactly where we were sitting when the doctor told us Mom’s “window was closing” and there was nothing else they could do. Listening to the chief of staff telling me that my mom was going to die. Saying goodbye and asking her to watch over my kids, telling her how much I loved her and walking out of the room knowing I would never see her again. 

Early memories of my mom may be a bit blurry, but the last memories of her are still very clear in my mind. At the same time, I don’t allow those last memories to be the everlasting memories of my mom. We had a lot of laughs. We shared a lot of moments. She left me with some unanswered questions, ideas to ponder and plenty of healing to do - from both my childhood and her passing. There are so many things I don’t know and so many things I don’t understand. But what I do know is that she loved us deeply. She didn’t always say it, express it or show it. But I have proof. A few weeks after she passed away, I found these notes written in a book in the drawer of her night stand. I suspect that she wrote them in the time she was home between stays in the hospital. It was like she somehow knew what was going to happen.

To my beloved children with all my love and gratitude for the wonderful people you are. May your lives unfold with ease and grace. May you find joy, serenity, and abiding love and may all the opportunities you dream of be yours. I wish you happy endings, happily ever afters, friends,

companions, and spouses who treat you with tenderness, love and respect and children as wonderful as you are. If you have children like mine, you will indeed be blessed.

If motherhood is difficult, being a grandmother is marvelously simple, filling our hearts with uncomplicated happiness and our wallets with shameless numbers of photographs. In our relationships with our grandchildren, there are fewer obligations and more enjoyment, fewer

expectations and more acceptance, fewer lessons and a lot more laughter, fewer vegetables and more dessert. Being a grandparent is parenthood, one blissful step removed.

Mom always had a gift of finding the right words - to say, to write, to share. And these words that she left us might be the greatest gift of all.