Mummy

Thirty-four years ago this month, my mother died unexpectedly when she was the age I am now - 55 going on 56 - on 18 February 1976 - my sister Ada's birthday. My sisters and I rushed to Edinburgh to be with her and it was the most heart-wrenching experience of my life. Despite the length of time that's passed since her death, I still miss my mother terribly and sometimes feel guilty for leaving her to come to Canada when I was 18. Sometimes I wonder if she might still be alive if I'd stayed because I was the fourth of her children to emigrate and now that my own son lives in Scotland, I know what it feels like to have a child live halfway across the world. My sister Maureen stayed though so mum had her but after mum's separation from my dad, she was lonely and depressed and maybe she felt unloved because everyone had left her. Maybe I'm being a drama queen thinking this way because, after all, what difference could I have made in her life by staying. She didn't take her own life as this story implies, but she allowed her previously robust health to deteriorate to the point of death. Maureen did all she could to involve mum in her own life and Maureen's two children adored their grannie.

I intended, when starting to write this to commemorate my mother's life by saying why I still miss her after all these years but, as usual, I've gone off on a tangent. Well I miss her warmth and wisdom, her sense of humour and irony, her intelligence and far-reaching knowledge. Since I was a little girl, I've wanted to be like my mother and, as I get older, I see more of her in myself. She taught me compassion and empathy early in my life and I believe I've inherited or learned common sense from her. I see her smile in my own daughter, and her unique sense of humour in both my kids, whom I wish she could mave met and vice versa. I think they would have enjoyed each other. My brother brought up an interesting point about one of the influences she had on him and it makes a lot of sense to me: she gave us the confidence to believe in our ability and desire to learn by giving us a solid cultural grounding because she shared her love of literature, art, history and music. My siblings and I are avid readers with a passion for music and art. In fact, my brother is a writer of some renown in his field of specialty and my one remaining sister is an artist whose work is preserved in the National Library of Scotland. She created a series of paintings which illustrate some of the poems of Robert Burns. Her work sells in galleries throughout Scotland and her specialties are Highland landscapes and old Edinburgh, including some of the characters of the 1940s and 1950s she remembers from her childhood - like the chimney sweeps and fishwives. History, albeit the history of two different countries, is the favoured subject of both my brother and sister and it seems clear to me that they were influenced in large part by our mother's interest. Any walk through Edinburgh with our mother was coloured with her stories of the historical significance of wherever we happened to be. We shared fascinating strolls through several of Edinburgh's many graveyards, illustrated by mum's stories and we all still enjoy looking through graveyards to this day. When I was still living in Edinburgh in 2006 and could still walk with ease, I took Maureen to a fascinating graveyard I'd discovered one day while walking home from Tesco. There was one especially touching gravestone with the inscription 'Wee Maggie'. Wee Maggie was only two years old when she died in the 1800s. There was no last name and unlike some other Victorian gravestones I found, this was just a plain lump of grey stone instead of a carefully cut square of granite festooned with cherubs. Maureen was just as excited as I at the discovery and she later took me on a dark, wet night to a really old one just up the road from her house in the small village outside Edinburgh in which she lives.

There I go rambling off on a tangent again. Sorry dear readers.

Bye mummy. I miss you.