I wrote the following shortly before my mother passed away in 2006, with input from my siblings. None of us were able to deliver the address at the funeral, so we asked the service leader to do it.

I have written other eulogies, but I do not feel right about posting them publicly.

If you wish to hire me to write a tribute for your loved one, please contact me at the phone number or e-mail below. A bit of lead time is best, but I understand that sometimes these things can’t be predicted. I will of course need to ask a lot of questions about their life, what aspects are to be highlighted, and to know how long you wish the speech to be. I charge according to length, and how quickly I must produce a finished document.

Christine. 

Please contact me, at e-mail to christine.cover@gmail.ca.

While writing this eulogy, we asked ourselves what our mother would like us to do now that she has passed over. We are confident that she would want us to heal ourselves and move on, to accept her passing and live a life she would be proud of, while remembering her always.

Our mother had both infinite patience and a great sense of humour. She often needed them both when dealing with her family members.

Take the example of her first night in Canada with our Dad. Our father and grandfather picked her up in Brockville from the Halifax train and took her to our grandparent’s house, where all of the immediate members of our father’s family waited, along with a huge welcoming feast. This feast was completely unexpected by Mom, as it was around 11 o’clock at night, and meeting all of her new relatives after two sleepless nights on a train was something of a shock, but she was gracious about it.

The main problem was that Mom desperately needed to go to the bathroom, but wanting to make a good impression, didn’t want to ask any of her new in-laws. Unfortunately she was unable to get our father alone for some time, and her desperation mounted. After about an hour, she did manage to ask our Dad in a whisper where the facilities were and he, without considering what she was used to in England, directed her to a door leading off the kitchen.

Mom quietly stole away and walked out the door our father had indicated to find herself outside. Before she knew what was happening, the door slammed shut behind her and she was alone in the pitch darkness of the garden. Unable to find the latch on the door she had exited from, Mom was forced to find her way around the outside of the house and come inside again from the front.

Dad had neglected to explain that she was looking for an outhouse, how to find it, nor indeed, what an outhouse was. Bewildered and embarrassed by her strange experience, she did not use the facilities that night at all, but waited until morning. Although understandably a bit upset at the time, Mom laughed when she told the story later, and actually made it much funnier than it has been related here.

From this somewhat inauspicious beginning Mom made a new life with our Dad here in Canada. Viewed by some as a “foreigner” that Dad had met during the war, not everyone was welcoming at first. However, our mother was not shy, and she always thought the best of people until proven otherwise. She quickly made friends with people in her adoptive country and became a very patriotic Canadian citizen.

As for Dad’s side of the family, Mom became very close to all of them, especially our grandfather, who welcomed Mom to the family that first night by calling her his new daughter. Our mother, who had lost her own father at the age of fifteen, was extremely touched by his kindness and never forgot it. She also developed very strong bonds with her sisters-in-law Ester and Mildred, as well as our cousin Shirley.

As for us, their children, Mom and Dad raised us to be individuals with minds of our own, and in this they succeeded all too well. We are four very strong and distinct personalities, with (shall we say) well-formed opinions. It was largely due to Mom’s influence that we tolerated each other as children, and now get along so well as grown-ups. She taught us the value of considering the values and views of others, even if we disagreed with them. Mom was able to see several sides to any argument, and she slowly and painfully taught all of us to take a bigger view of things as well. Although often exasperated, she was able to love us all in spite of ourselves, supporting us through marriages, heartbreak, divorces, births and deaths. We know that we weren’t perfect, but we also know that even if we were, we wouldn’t have deserved her.

Like most mothers, Mom always told us not to talk to strangers. However, the truth was Mom talked to strangers all the time. In fact, it was her habit of talking to strangers which led to her meeting our father. If out with our mother, say at a mall, it was not at all unusual to come across her having an animated conversation with someone we had never seen before. Eventually they would say goodbye to one another, and once the person was out of earshot we would ask who they were. More often than not Mom would say something like “Oh I don’t know. She was just standing there and we started talking.”

Mom had great generosity of spirit. With the exception of politicians, she nearly always assumed that everyone’s motives were good ones. She accepted people for who they were, with no judgement for past mistakes. A person’s colour, race, and religion simply did not register with her – people were people, and her contention was that all people are more-or-less the same everywhere. She was also not afraid to challenge the prejudices of others, and was quite outspoken at times.

Always very British, our mother made sure that all of us knew how to make tea. A visitor to the house would always find a Pyrex teapot on the stove full of extremely strong Red Rose tea. Requests for coffee might get them a cup of instant (if they were lucky) but if the visitor wanted tea a fresh pot would be brewed up for them.

Although an extremely good cook, our mother did have some peculiarities in her own taste. For example, she always took the end of a roast. For many years we thought that this was due to her self-sacrificing nature, but she actually liked the taste of well-done or even burnt food. Indeed, every now and then she would deliberately burn toast for herself, putting butter and jam on it before eating it. The house would be full of thick black smoke, and none of us could bear to watch her eat it, but Mom got her fix of burnt toast. In fact, when we first saw that famous Canada Heritage Moment about the woman who smelled burnt toast before an epileptic seizure, we joked that it was just Mom making her breakfast.

What some of you may not realize is that our mother was very musical. She had perfect pitch, and a great sense of rhythm, although she did not play an instrument. As a young girl she did have some free piano lessons from a lady in the neighbourhood, but the woman moved away and our grandparents could not afford to pay for lessons so Mom never learned to play the piano, even though she had aptitude for it. However, much to Mom’s delight four of her descendants are musical – her daughter Christine, grandson Graham, great-grandson Jessie, and great-granddaughter Lily all play multiple musical instruments.

Mom’s sense of rhythm could be problematic, because she had a habit of working around the house while unconsciously making drumming noises. Requests that she please stop would be greeted with a bewildered “Stop what?” We also discovered that when singing Mom could be made to change songs in mid-bar – without ever realizing that she was singing at all. All we had to do was hum a couple of bars of a different tune than the one she was singing, and Mom would immediately and smoothly switch song, key and rhythm to perform the new song. Our record was something like eight song switches, and she really never caught on to what we were laughing about.

Speaking of laughing, we always made a joke out of the fact that our Mom got us mixed up all the time, calling Alan Maureen, Linda Alan, and Christine Linda. In fact, she would usually go through all our names until she hit on the right one. We used to ask her what would have happened if she had had twins, or at least children who looked alike. Sometimes when exasperated with us saying “My name is. . .” she would say “Well whatever your name is, you know I’m talking to YOU!”

Our mother was a voracious reader, easily able to read an entire novel in an evening. A standing joke with her was that she moved into Brockville because she had read all of the books in the Lyn Library. She especially loved murder mysteries, and for the amount of information that she amassed over the years, she should have been able to commit the perfect crime. If you go into the Lyn Library, check inside the front cover of the mystery books – quite often you will find a tick mark placed by our mother to remind herself that she had read that particular book.

Speaking of mysteries, there was one that our mother was never able to solve, and it tormented her. Within the family we refer to this as The Mystery of the Rhubarb Pie, where the last piece of a homemade rhubarb pie disappeared in the night, and no one could be made to confess to having eaten it. The theories and suspects were many, but the puzzle was never solved. It was not that she was upset that the pie had been eaten – that was what she expected would happen to it eventually – but the fact that she couldn’t figure out who had purloined it.

Our mother was in many ways like mothers everywhere – not famous in the larger world, but exceptional to those closest to her. She consistently encouraged us to do our best, and was always proud at our successes, and supportive when we fell short of our expectations. She taught us how to laugh, how to love, give comfort, and how to live our lives morally.

There is no higher praise.

Thank you all for the love and friendship that you gave her, and for coming here today to say goodbye. We humbly ask that all of you who are still able to do so – please go home today and hug your mothers.

We leave you with the following quote from Jacob R. Rudin which we think sums up our mother quite well:

When we are dead, and people weep for us and grieve, let it be because we touched their lives with beauty and simplicity. Let it not be said that life was good to us, but rather that we were good to life.