Roughest Toughest Frail

After the call came, and I had made my flight, somewhere over North Dakota, I started to write about my mom.

My first thought was that Mum was so competitive. 

After spending all day Sunday watching the Queen’s journey from Balmoral to Edinburgh, Mum probably wanted the spotlight back.  Not that she craved the attention, but she never REALLY minded when she had it.

I am relieved that she is finally at peace. 

After having spent the summer in hospital because of a fall and COVID and pneumonia, she was so grateful to be back in her chair and among her friends and that made the stroke particularly cruel.

That is not to say that she didn’t appreciate the attention she received from the terrific nurses at Royal Inland, but she loved her apartment more.

I remember when they moved into Lorne Street.  

It was so cute the way she was worried about fitting in, especially after Eric’s stroke.  She was so tentative about joining Wednesday Coffee and Friday Happy Hour, but they quickly became features of her weekly schedule.

Fitting in, belonging, seems to have been something of a theme in my mom’s life.  She demonstrated the capacity to do big things, but she also wanted to be a local.  She loved to travel, but she never wanted to be a tourist.  

Mom comes from solid Maritime stock, from farmers and merchants and people who would put everything they had into their lives and then let the land, or the economy, determine their fate.  But she also had a fierce intelligence and seemed to think there was something more for her in her life.

While at the University of New Brunswick, Lois went to Montreal to work each Summer.  That’s  where she fell in with a fast crowd of McGill women, and began working at Royal Securities where she demonstrated a facility for the investment business.

And it was at Royal Securities that my parents met.  My dad was finishing up his MBA at the University of Western Ontario and my mom was this kid from the Maritimes.  They worked across a partner desk doing the same job.

My dad took her under his wing and tried to protect her from the big bad city and its wolves.  She would often tell us that he advised her to always drink scotch, and stay away from the “fruity” drinks so she would always know how much she had had.  (That was the kind of practical wisdom that was passed down to us in preparation for the “real” world.)

They were very much partners at that stage learning the practical aspects of the business at the same time.  My mom got her credentials as a financial analyst more than 60 years ago.  I think she was again trying to fit in.

Their friendship turned into a marriage that lasted more than 20 years.

At the office they had started  on an equal footing, but once she was Mrs. Campbell, the rules of the game changed.  He was the surgeon’s boy from Westmount and she was the girl from outside of Fredericton.  

But she worked hard to fit in to this new role.  She joined the Junior League, had a copy of The Joy of Cooking and served drinks and snacks to my dad and his friends–some of whom she had lately worked with, but she was no longer a peer, she was Mrs. Donny Campbell.

In the early Sixties, wives didn’t work and so she found other outlets such as volunteering for the Montreal Oral School for the Deaf.

Joining, belonging, welcoming, accepting and being accepted:  these are the traits I suspect most of you would associate with Lois.  When you shared time with her, you felt she was interested in you and you left the interaction having felt seen and heard.

She tells a story about traveling to England by boat one spring with my dad who famously “never got seasick.”  This was a point of pride with him.  But, no sooner had they hit the open ocean than he went down for the count and spent the start of the 6-day trip searching their cabin for his sea-legs.  

This would not have been a big deal except prior to their departure, my dad, whose birthday would fall in the middle of their crossing, had tasked my mum with organizing a cocktail party reception and inviting 30 to 40 of their newest, and as yet un-met, friends.

The weather did not improve and yet, as promised, my dad made his first appearance as the guest of honor at this party with virtually total strangers.

As she would describe it years later, in the midst of a Force 9 gale, Lois, my dad and this room full of strangers were glued to their booths to avoid being tossed around like bowling pins.  So, in order to make everyone feel welcome, she organized an extreme form of musical chairs allowing the guest honor and the hostess to visit each table and meet each of the guests.

That was my mom.

By the time Andrew and Sarah and I were in all-day school, Lois had aged-out of the Junior League and was looking for some place to put her people-skills to good use.  

She felt keenly the fact that she had never graduated from university and so decided to go back to school.  

I’m not exactly certain how she found her way into Applied Social Sciences and Counseling Education, but, once that connection was made, my mom was forever changed.  

Like the move to Lorne Street, she had had some initial apprehension about “fitting in” as a senior student among all those young people, but that didn’t last long.  She was impressed by what she learned from them and, surprised that those younger students seemed to want to learn from her and her experience.

She had found her tribe.

She learned how to listen and how to ask the right questions and she hoped to be able to use those skills to help her raise us and reconnect with my father.  

And, perhaps most important of all, in the process of completing her degree and then her graduate degree in counseling, she unlocked something within herself.  She recognized that she couldn’t really help others get at what was holding them back unless she could first help herself.

It was then that she did the bravest I have ever seen:  she risked making other people unhappy with her, even disappointed.  Nevertheless, she acted in favor of her own happiness.

Having some of my mother’s DNA, I know that was not easy.  Add to it being diagnosed with MS and it must have seemed impossible, but she persevered.

My parents separated and Lois began to build a life for herself.

These were hard, painful steps that were necessary to get her to the place where she was ready to meet Eric and know 37 years of happiness.

Eric was content to let Lois be Lois and it was absolutely the right prescription for them both.

She would talk to me about relationships being like a see-saw:  one person was up and the other was down, and vice versa–this was unavoidable–but the goal was to be more like a scale with everything in balance.

With Eric, my mom found equilibrium.

With Eric, Mum reached the fullest expression of herself and she was happy.

And she wanted the people she cared about to know the same kind of happiness that she had found with Eric.  The last words I heard her speak were the hope that Todd might have the same kind of happiness that she had had with his father.

And, with grandchildren–first Eric’s and then her own–she got the icing on the cake:  the sweet taste of the Nouveau Beaujolais after an uncertain winter.

The phrase “massive heart attack” is not in and of itself good news, but my mom had a massive heart, so it fits.  It brought about an end to her time in the hospital–the one place where she did not care to “fit in.”  

In the last years, she had spent far too much time in hospital as time and gravity took a toll on her.   She certainly didn’t want to end her days going “owie, owie, owie.”  

Nor would she have wanted to be a burden, or a responsibility.

I can’t be sad about my mom.  She found a way to make her life work for her.  It might not have been the one she planned from the start, but I would wager any amount that she wouldn’t have changed any of it.

She’s my hero.

She didn’t just play the cards she was dealt, she shuffled the deck and got better ones.

Even at the end, she was looking ahead to being invited to the wedding of Todd’s daughter and picking her Plus One.  She had initially wanted to take the cute speech therapist from the hospital who fed her pudding, but later opted to take my sister,Sarah.

No, we can’t be sad.  She was thinking about her beloved apartment and Asparagus Sue, Cannabis Jill and all the friends she had made since coming to Kamloops.  

She was not going to be held back, she was not going to be defined by any old stroke.

One day, I hope it can be said that I lived my life as well as she  did.  I’m not sure I’ll ever catch up; there’s a lot of ground to make-up.

My dad, during one of his more “expansive” moods, christened my mom “Lucky” because she was “lucky to be living with him.”  And, for the longest time, she hated that name, 

But I think, without meaning to, he had picked a prophetic nickname.for her.

She was “lucky” to have been able to find her way to the right choices when she needed them.

She was “lucky” to be able to overcome her MS and not be destroyed by it.

She was “lucky” to have had a truly satisfying Second Act.

She was “lucky” to have had two fantastic grandsons, who were able to enjoy her, and she them.

She was “lucky” to have had 3 kids who could be relied upon to let her know when she missed the joke.

She was “lucky” to have had a lifetime of friendships and friends for a lifetime.

But, we were the luckiest of all to have shared this life with her.

We are all “Lucky.”

--Graham Campbell