10 January 2010

Two years ago this evening, my mother passed away.

She lived in Kitchener at the time, having relocated there some fifteen years earlier, following her return to Ottawa after my father's death in 1979.

My mother was born Dorothy Mae Sharpe in 1925, the sixth of thirteen children born to Sam and Sarah (Gizzard) Sharpe.  Four children died as infants; so my mother's family composition closely mirrorred the family she herself would eventually have:  she was one of seven girls and two boys.  One sister, Catherine, after whom I am named, died at the age of sixteen following an accident on a playground (our details are fuzzy).  My mother was barely past her tenth birthday when she witnessed the accident, and she remembered well not only the vision of the incident, but also the anguish her mother suffered as she tried to deal with the health care system of the day.

My mother's education was interrupted before she completed high school and she once confided to me that she always felt inadequate because of that.  I had a tough sell convincing her that she was in fact a very intelligent woman, in spite of what circumstance may have thrown her way.  She worked for some time as a waitress before her early marriage, when she devoted her time to raising a family of six girls and two boys.

My parents were childhood sweethearts, having first met when they were 12 years old, and my mother devoted herself to the role of motherhood and managing her busy household.  But one of my most vivid childhood memories is that of seeing my mother getting cleaned up, putting on a fresh apron (yes, women wore aprons over their dresses) and standing in front of the mirror applying her lipstick.  We always knew, by that scene, that our father was due to come home.  She wanted to look nice for her husband.

With their family grown and having started families of their own, my parents moved first to Montreal in 1973 and then to Toronto in 1976.  My mother had returned to the workforce some years earlier "for something to do" and she settled easily into the Toronto community.  Unfortunately, her time there was short since my father passed away in 1979 and she quickly returned to Ottawa, where most of her adult children were still living.

In the early 1990s, my mother decided that she would rather live in Southwestern Ontario where her three youngest adult children were by now living (see folks, it pays to have lots of children!) so she once again packed up and relocated to Kitchener.

The photo on the left was my mother's "official portrait," which was taken in 2006; the photo on the right was taken in December 2007, just one month before her death.

On January 10, 2008, my mother finally returned to her beloved Richard, for whom she had mourned since his untimely passing 28 years earlier.

Rest in peace, mother.