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Happy day, you mothers
TODAY IS MOTHER'S DAY and I’m thinking about my mother.
Mother’s Day was not known in Ireland, so none of us knew anything about it until we came to Canada. “Don’t revere me or honour me one Sunday in May” scoffed my mother. “Honour me and revere me EVERY day.”
This is the first Mother’s Day since she died, and I miss her enormously.
My mother fell and broke her hip. She either fell and broke her hip or she broke her hip which caused her to fall. We’ll never know.
At the time, she was living alone in her late eighties. She had recently given up driving but was almost completely self-sufficient. She still cooked for herself and for guests on a regular basis; she went to the gym three days a week and she enjoyed trips to the symphony and the opera.
My mother was fastidious about her appearance. I never knew if it were a case of vanity or a feeling of “this is how I should be” but her hair and her nails were always perfect even though her hair colour defied anything even close to natural.
So, there she was, lying on the floor with a broken hip. She had crawled across the kitchen floor to the phone to call me, but by the time I got to her place and by the time the ambulance arrived, she had been on the floor for close to three hours.
She must have been in agony.
When the ambulance crew lifted her up onto their stretcher the pain must have been excruciating. One of the paramedics said: “Are you comfortable?”
Looking up, with a cheeky grin on her face, she said “Enh, I make a living.”
Throughout all the pain, she still managed to go for the punchline.
What a wonderful woman!
That was actually the last night she lived alone, and it really was the beginning of the end.
After an extended stay in hospital followed by rehab, she moved into a retirement home for a year. When she was too difficult for them to look after her, she moved in with Trudy and me for a few long, long months while we waited for a spot to open up at Baycrest. She spent about 18 months, at Baycrest and following a year-and-a-half of rapid decline both cognitively and physically.
The care she received at Baycrest was wonderful. The nursing staff, the doctors, the PSWs – all magnificent and I hope I never have to meet any of them again.
She loved good food; classical music, knitting, playing Scrabble and reading, but her greatest love was saved for her three children, nine grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren. Friday night dinners were important to her – and to the rest of us, even though her matzah balls were like rocks. She was traditional if not observant. She spent many, many years working hard within the Jewish community.
She worked at Israel Bonds; then the Weizman Institute and then Reena for more than 20 years, where she was the director of communications. She wrote speeches for politicians, edited two regular magazines and raised millions of dollars for Reena. She was also president of the sisterhood at Beth Tzedec.
One other thing that I shared with my mother was watching the Raptors on TV during their championship season. She had no concept of basketball, but she was so excited whenever a Raptor scored a basket. “Yay” she’d squeal. Then they showed a replay of the same shot “Yay”, then the same shot from a different angle “Yay”. She could never understand why the Raptors weren’t winning by 50 points.
Her decline over the last couple of years of her life was pitiful to watch. A once proud woman - independent free and vibrant – was reduced to a blubbering, drooling, incontinent spectre with zero quality of life or awareness of anything nor anyone around her.
She would not have wanted that and, had she had the mental acuity to take advantage of MAID she could have avoided it.
She died in October and, even though I had grieved her passing long before she left us, I was still not ready for it.
This is the first Mother’s Day without her.
I still think of her when I see something – a show, a restaurant, a flower – that I think she’d enjoy, and I say to myself how I’d like to share the moment with her.
I miss her enormously.
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