Losing Our Mother

I have been thinking about writing this for some time. Sometimes writing of this nature helps bring closure to a situation. It can be somewhat cathartic, perhaps healing. A past trauma can be dealt with. 

Losing our mother had a beginning in a certain point in time. However, as life has continued to unravel in this area, I realized that losing one’s mother does not necessarily come to an end. At least, not in this life.

It was in Winnipeg; December 14, 1963. I was in Grade XII. Mother had experienced an exciting fall getting back into teaching after eighteen years. I remember how pleased she was to be able to put on a lovely white blouse over a grey wool skirt, pin on a favourite brooch, and get back into the classroom. She was just 43-years-old.

We were deep into winter – snow, freezing temperatures. Christmas was coming. We had a tree up in front of our ‘picture window,’ with lights encircling it. Something new and fascinating was a little coupling, between light cord and socket, that caused the ‘Christmas lights’ to flash off and on intermittently. My younger brothers were playing in our living room, where stood the tree, and were bothered by the on-and-off feature, so it was ‘off.’

Our parents were preparing to go to a Christmas social at our church. They were going to pick up Dad’s brother, Uncle Victor, and his wife, Aunt Margaret, who was, coincidentally, mother’s cousin. They had just moved to Winnipeg. The women of our church were putting this social on and their husbands were their guests. Our parents were excited to go; it was their first such outing since moving to the city some sixteen months earlier. 

When they had dressed, and passed by my room at the top of the stairs, I asked mother whether we couldn’t leave the intermittent light switch ‘on.’ I thought it helped make our place more noticeable to passersby. I think she asked me to consider my brothers and we said goodbye and I turned to my homework and they continued down the staircase and left.

A few hours later I heard the door open and steps on the stairs. I turned to my bedroom door and there was father, with Uncle Victor right behind. Father had a pained expression on his face. It was as if he was choking on the first words that came out of his mouth, “Your mother’s dead,” he said. 

The rest of the evening, and indeed, much of the days that followed, remains a blur in my memory. I do have a diary that I kept, that I can refer to, but I don’t want to be obsessive about details here.

We children, there were five of us in school, quite school a week earlier than our peers for ‘Christmas break.’ Our grandparents, our uncles and aunts, friends from church, were in and out of our home. They brought food or prepared it at our place. They helped look after us – my youngest sibling was 7-year-old Tim – while also helping father with the necessary arrangements for things like a funeral and burial.

When a funeral home had been secured – Loewen’s of Steinbach, whom I discovered later, had longtime connections with our parents – father took us children to view our mother’s body, nicely dressed and lying in a casket. I remember how gray she looked… I had my little camera along and took a picture. 

Besides our grandparents – mother’ parents from Winkler and Dad’s from Clearbrook (now part of Abbotsford), BC, other uncles and aunts came to the city. Uncle Henry and Esther Born and their family were traveling back from South America where they were in mission work, to BC, and made a last minute detour to Manitoba.

Then came the day for the funeral, held not in our church, Winnipeg Bergthaler Mennonite, but in the larger more distant Bethel Mennonite. It was bitterly cold - minus thirty degrees. A long black limousine came to pick us up to go on the long ride to the church. I had mixed feelings about riding in this car – there was the element of luxury for a teenage car nut like myself at the time – but it came with death. 

After the funeral, of which I remember nothing, we again rode the limousine to Brookside Cemetery out by the airport for mother’s internment. Our family and friends huddled around the gravesite while last words were spoken in the fading winter sunlight. Then it was back to the church for a reception, which was the custom. All I really remember of that was our Aunt Ruby (Dad’s older brother Peter’s wife) Brandt’s mother, Mrs. Robinson, coming up to me to give me a big hug and express her condolences. I don’t recall anyone else doing that. Hugs were not yet common in the Mennonite repertoire of social behaviour. As I write, it is only days since I shared that memory with Aunt Ruby, now 97, long-since widowed, and my cousin Shirley, her daughter, on a visit to them in Houston, Texas, where they now live.

Then it was on into the New Year, 1964. Distant relatives went home. However, we continued to get a lot of support from especially mother’s parents and siblings and their families. Mother’s youngest sister Marian was still single and in the city and she came over a lot to help with household tasks. Loretta, next youngest to me at 15, our only sister, went through an accelerated period of learning to do more of the tasks considered women’s work in those days.

We went back to school, except for me! I had contracted mumps somehow during this period of time, and so was a couple of weeks late returning to classes – at the new River East Collegiate in North Kildonan, where we had moved six months earlier.

Life continued. There was no talk of what we had just experienced. Of course, family and friends showed their support and care in the ways already described. There was no lack of love. However, I don’t recall anyone expressing any particular concern for how we were all doing. There was no processing of our experience. There was certainly no grief counseling, as there often is nowadays. That was something unknown in our circles. 

We had lost our mother, traumatically, long before we should have. That’s all we knew. Were we in shock? Is that why I have so little memory of this all? Were we in denial? Was that the only way to cope? It seems we all just closed the wound as quickly and as best as we could in our own ways and carried on. 

To be continued