A Mother’s Day Remembrance: She Was Loved!

What I remember most about this Renaissance woman is that she was the kindest person on earth, a good and loving person, warm and cuddly as a mother, and the best friend a girl could ever have.  I was a lucky child to have a mother like her! 

by Mary Foran

She died at the age of 90 in agony—a victim of septic shock: an infection that raged through her body from an operation she had had a year before.

I held a damp, cold cloth to her forehead as she shivered and shook until she literally “gave up the ghost” and passed away. The Doctors had said that even antibiotics couldn’t save her, and I was so shocked that I couldn’t even cry, just pull the sheet gently over her head.

She had been a good mother, one of the best, sacrificing herself for her four children in many, many ways. She was naturally talented as an artist, a pianist, a knitter and a sometime engineer. She liked to build things like a bicycle shed or rabbit hutches and lay paving stones to form pathways in the gardens she would tend.

She had a beautiful voice and made tape recordings of her singing voice on an old-fashioned recorder which she learned to run. She had been a beautiful woman in her youth and was still beautiful to me in her old age.

“She would take me out of school to go on adventures for lunch, tell me stories of her own childhood, how she was sent away to boarding school never to be visited by her mother again.”

I remember how she would take me out of school to go on adventures for lunch, just the two of us. She was very possessive of her youngest child, and would tell me stories of her own childhood that would scare the pants off me and make me feel very sorry for her indeed. She told me how she was sent away to boarding school at the age of 5, never to be visited by her mother again. She was left in the hands of the nuns of the convent school who punished her severely for wetting the sheets which she was made to wash herself. She suffered greatly there, and was remembering the torturous situation on her deathbed.

Now she reposes in an urn in a niche in a Catholic Cemetery far from her birthplace in Vancouver, B.C. Canada. She doesn’t get many visitors except for my brother and myself who live at quite a distance from there.

What I remember most about this Renaissance woman is that she was the kindest person on earth, and hadn’t let the ill-treatment of the nuns sour her on life. She loved dogs and all animals and she was a good and loving person, warm and cuddly as a mother and the best friend a girl could ever have.

I was a lucky child to have a mother like her!

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Images
Featured image (“My Wife andDaughter” by Wilfred Leroy Metcalf)/photographed by Irina, PD
“Young Girl Reading” painting by Zandomeneghi Federigo/photographed by pixelsniper, CC BY2.0