I read Dear Life, by Alice Munro, and I am, as is the literary world, intrigued by her last four stories, the ones she describes as “not quite stories,” because they are in fact fragments and memories from her life. I was struck by her relationship with her mother, a woman suffering from Parkinson’s, and a woman who in some ways was placed in a life to which she always felt there should be more, that she was a different woman trapped in the life she had.

It made me think about my mother. The voice of our mother remains in our heads and our hearts, regardless of the kind of relationship we had. My mother embodied the essence of that word. She was goodness. I hear my mother’s words, sense the touch of her hand, still, even after almost five years since her passing, I carry her in my comings and goings, and she is the voice that guides me.

It wasn’t all tea in the rose garden. I remember how it was towards the end. She wasn’t putting on any airs, contrary to her British upbringing, and her loving designation as Queen Mom. That was part of her metamorphosis, her struggle toward the end of her life when she couldn’t recognize herself. When the woman she had been, and still felt somewhere inside, became trapped in the agonized body of age.

But, there was always a glimpse of my mother. Her fingers, crooked with arthritis were still somehow tender. The same touch as when she sat on my bed, singing a lullaby, “….they’re lighting a stairway to heaven… sleep my little one sleep…” and she traced the shape of my eyebrows, and tucked my hair behind my ears. Her brown eyes, that grew old with flecks of green, and smiled at me. Kind, unquestioning eyes, that understood that love was the only thing that mattered. The calm when I put my hand on her chest, and her breath softened and her shoulders sighed.

We found peace in one another. We had survived the death of her husband, the death of her son, and cancer, and we held our pain like a secret that hung as a hammock between two stoic trees; it lingered, unspoken, felt, with no touch, honoured, so we could get through each day. We were a teepee – her, me, the past – fastened together with ropes and knots at the top, and individually knocked firmly in to the ground, dependent on one another to remain intact. That’s how it was.

As I arrive at her ages, I often recall what her life was like, what her experience was, and how she must have felt as a woman. I can look at these times differently now, not as a child, a teen, a young woman, but through the lens of a woman who too, has experienced love, children and the joys and aches of each passing year.