Saying Goodbye to “Doris from Devon”

My mum’s name was Dorena. Not Doris. But she was from Devon, as the north side of Fredericton used to be called back in the day. “Doris from Devon” was a handle she adopted as a joke when, at age 87, she started reading my blog.

Mum passed away a few months ago, in May, just shy of her 96th birthday. But we waited until her birthday month, August, to hold a memorial service for her. Partly because that time lapse allowed us to come to terms with the utter shock of her not unexpected passing.

I know, I know that doesn’t make sense. We knew she was getting more and more frail, less and less mobile, until she had lost almost every aspect of her independence, except her independence of mind. Somehow we expected her to rally. Somehow. Somehow we were shocked when she didn’t.

Holding her service in August allowed us all to be there. Children, step-children, grandchildren, spouses of the above, great-grandchildren, and even two tiny great-great-grandchildren. Nieces, nephews, cousins, neighbours, friends, even Mum’s favourite bookstore owner showed up to say good-bye to Dorena, aka Doris from Devon.

I read the eulogy at Mum’s service.

I stressed and stressed before writing it. How could I capture Mum? How could I walk the fine line between being funny and a bit irreverent and being disrespectful? A eulogy for Mum that was not at least a little funny would be somehow inappropriate. How could I honour who she was and what she had overcome and achieved without becoming sentimental or sappy. She would hate sappy. How could I follow the Sullivan tradition of jokes and fond funny remembrances at funerals? I kept thinking of the reception at my grandfather Sullivan’s funeral when my uncles and my mum gathered in the kitchen swapping funny stories about Grampy of which my grandmother, who was sitting in the livingroom with the priest, would not approve.

Anyway. I finished it a few days before Hubby and I left for New Brunswick and then, I swear, I did not sleep a wink until after it had been read. This is what I wrote.

“Warning” by Jenny Joseph

“When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat that doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me,
And I shall spend my pension
on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals,
and say we’ve no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I am tired,
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells,
And run my stick along the public railings,
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick the flowers in other people’s gardens,
And learn to spit.”

This poem by Jenny Joseph always, always reminds me of Mum. 

Okay, so she didn’t wear purple much. 

Or spend her pension on brandy and summer gloves. Maybe an excess of flowers for her garden. Maybe a pair of gardening gloves. But no brandy. Unless it was for a fruitcake. She never bought satin sandals. Or wore a red hat. Except there was that pink “Burpee Drilling” one she wore gardening. 

She didn’t run her stick along the “public railings” like a little kid. But she did swear when she got her stick caught in her shopping cart. People around us always laughed when that happened. Why is it that everyone seems to laugh when a ninety-year-old swears in public? 

Mum didn’t wear her slippers in the rain. 

She did not spit. 

And despite all the things in this poem that she did not do, I’ve always thought that it embodies Mum’s spirt. Her refusal to give up, give in, or do what she was told. If anyone dared try to tell her what to do, that is. 

That indomitable spirt never deserted her right up to the end. But I’m not here to talk about the end. More about the beginning and the middle.

Mum was the youngest daughter of three, born in 1927, just before the deluge of five brothers who followed. There was less than a year between her and Uncle Buddy. Irish twins they call them. 

She suffered from rheumatic fever at age 14 the consequences of which never left her. Lost her sister at age 16. Married at 18, became a mother at 19, 21, and 23. Was widowed at 23. Married again, had me, was separated and divorced, spent 8 years alone raising her 4 kids. Then married Lloyd and became a wife again and a step-mother. A farm wife, a gardener, a tractor driver, then a grandmother, great-grandmother, and great-great-grandmother. And a widow again. 

But all those titles, mum, wife, widow don’t speak to the person mum was. Or to the person we thought she was. 

When I was teaching I used to talk to kids about themes of “identity.” Who are we? How we are so many different people throughout our lives. How different people see us differently from each other and different again from how we see ourselves. How we become someone different over time and circumstance.  

So who was Mum really? Was she defined by her skills of which there were so many? Best doughnut maker in the universe. Best baker, actually. Her pies were sublime. Her fruitcake legendary. Maker of so many things: jams, preserves, pickles … Seriously, if something grew on the old farm she picked it, froze it, preserved it, and otherwise fed it to Lloyd. And to us.

She knit, made dolls, refinished furniture, painted, papered, made pillows and curtains… you name it, she tackled it. She was never, ever daunted by hard work or the fact that she didn’t know how to do something. She looked it up, figured it out, and set about doing it. 

One winter she took a course on making wedding cakes. Lloyd ate a fully-decorated practice wedding cake every week that winter. And never complained. Ha. Then she made both Connie’s and my wedding cakes. 

My favourite story about Mum tackling something unknown was when she was widowed the first time at age 23. She and Terry, Carolyn and Connie were living in a little house with no indoor plumbing in Aroostook Junction, and she decided to freshen things up by painting the livingroom ceiling. Red. Her friend and next-door neighbour warned her, but she’d bought the paint cheap, so she persisted. A day or so later the friend arrived and was surprised to find Mum back up the ladder, repainting the ceiling… white. She said when she was finished the ceiling felt as if it was sitting on top of her head. So she redid it. 

That was so like Mum. Try it. Mess up. Try something different. 

One winter when we were both knitting a lot she drove me crazy unravelling yards and yards of yarn, because she’d found a mistake. The sweater needed a redo. “All that work!” I remember wailing. 

So maybe Mum wasn’t defined by her skills, so much as by her determination to master them. 

In her seventies she learned to drive the tractor. Finally, finally she was a driver. 

We used to laugh about Mum deciding every once in a while that she “would drive, darn it.” She’d passed her test back in the fifties and never let her license lapse. Just never utilized it because she was so nervous. One day in the early seventies when she’d been practising in the driveway, our elderly neighbour Eva Burgess called from across the road and said, “Dorena did you mean to park the car in the strawberry patch?” 

When she was 79 we bought her a treadmill because she said she wanted to keep fit. It was Carolyn’s idea. I was worried at first that we’d have to get her a helmet. But no, she loved it. She’d put on her dedicated treadmill slippers with the rubber soles, crank up Eddy Arnold on the ghetto blaster, and exercise. 

At age 84 she learned to use the computer. She was tickled that she was so “with it” as she said. She emailed, googled recipes, and read my blog faithfully, then she’d call me to comment on what I’d written about.

She said if she were to leave a comment on the actual blog her handle would be “Doris from Devon.” I have no idea where the Doris came from. One day after I’d written a post on consumerism and how we all buy things we don’t need, I’d asked readers to enumerate how many pairs of shoes they owned. Mum called me and said: “Doris from Devon” here. Just read your blog post, and I want to report: Two pairs, both black, didn’t count my slippers.” And from then on, she was “Doris from Devon” whenever she talked to me about my blog.

At age 85 Mum took out a 25 year mortgage, bought her own little mini-home, and paid it off a year ago, just shy of her 95th birthday. 

Mum never saw herself as others saw her.  For instance, she could NOT understand why people thought she was funny. But she was. 

She couldn’t understand why as teenagers we thought she was all seeing, all knowing. I still remember the time when I was fifteen, she sat chatting in my room with my friend Debbie and me as we prepared for a night out. She had two cigarettes in her hand and when she went downstairs she left them behind on my dresser. We did NOT touch those cigarettes. For weeks. Although we could ill afford to pass up free cigarettes. We knew they were a plant to see if we would take the bait. Years later I found out she’d just forgotten them.

After we all left home Mum took up flower gardening. And this became her great passion. Her flowers were legendary. She read books about them and tried new things. Lloyd hauled the manure, and she wielded her grub hoe. I’m still not sure what a grub hoe is but she loved hers. 

But even Mum’s many skills and hard work do not tell the full story of Mum. I mean if one can ever really tell someone else’s full story. 

Mum could be a little excitable. In case you hadn’t noticed that. Around birds and bats in particular. 

One weekend Mum and I drove Lloyd’s car up to visit Nana Knowles in Aroostook. I drove. We hit a crow on the highway, at sixty miles an hour. It landed square in the middle of our windshield. Bloody, deader than a doornail. Wings spread, looking in at us. Mum shrieked, “Flick it off Susie. Flick it off!” I tried to extricate it, swerved the car from side to side, then turned on the wipers. Big mistake. All that blood. More shrieking followed.  

Mum was full of contradictions. 

She loved clothes but never had the money to buy what she really wanted. Later when money was not so tight, she lost the urge. And lived vicariously through our wardrobes. 

When she was older she gave up housework almost entirely. She’d lost interest. So she gardened, painted, and read… and scolded me over the phone for not doing enough of my own housework. 

Mum could be fearless. And yet in some ways she was defined by the trauma she faced in her life, and at times she was filled with fear. The year before Stu and I married, Mum finally tackled some of her fears and went for counselling to overcome what had become crippling agoraphobia and panic attacks. And when she went to Ottawa the summer of our wedding, we ate out in crowded restaurants (she hadn’t done this in years), shopped till we dropped, even rode the three-story escalator all the way to the top at a nearby mall. And when she’d become flustered she’d say, just leave me alone, and she’d do her deep breathing, and in a minute or two she’d be fine. I remember feeling so much admiration, first, that she’d reached out for help, and second that she overcame so much. 

Mum could always surprise us. 

She loved music. Old hymns like “How Great Thou Art.” And classics like “Everybody Loves Somebody” by Dean Martin. But did you know that her favourite band was Doug and the Slugs? Me either until she called me one day and said how much she liked “those boys.” 

Sometime in her eighties she started doling out hugs. She hugged family, friends, neighbours, even the shy young man at the bank. She’d say “Doctor Oz says you need a hug for your heart.”

She really surprised me one morning. When I called, she was upstairs in the old house and talked to me on the extension which sat in the hall. She’d been changing the beds. Getting ready to do a wash. And before she got dressed she went down the hall to fetch the clean sheets from the back bedroom. In the nude. And she’d been swanning around doing her upstairs housework in the same state. “Mum!” I gasped. “What?” she replied. “It’s very freeing you know, Susie.” Nude-bed-making. Bet you never knew that one. Maybe I should have titled this “a few things you never knew about mum.”   

I know I’ve left out so many stories. And that many of you have your own stories of Mum. Your own perspectives. 

I laughed out loud when I received a note of condolence from my cousin Mark in May and he said, “I have no one to yodel for me now.” Ha.  Mum’s yodelling when we were kids. I’d forgotten all about that.

Now, I want to come back to Jenny Joseph’s poem. “When I am old I shall wear purple…” But, she continues, when we’re not old we must be responsible, we must not swear in the street, and set good examples for the children. And then she says…

“But maybe I ought to practise a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.”

So I think we should all practise at being old a little today. In honour of Mum. Wear purple. Swear a little. Swear in threes; Mum always swore in threes. Speak your mind. Tell someone what you don’t like about their hair. Ha. We all know she could do that. Hug people you don’t know. And people you do know. Hug everyone. Tell someone you love them. Tell them a story. In honour of Mum. 

In fact, tell someone your own story about mum. I think she’d like that. 

Everything went well on the day of Mum’s memorial: the service conducted by a family friend, the reception following it, and the gathering of family back at the house. Everything was wonderful, actually. And now we get on with the next era in all our lives.

To be honest it feels a bit freeing to not be worrying about Mum. For years after my stepfather died in 2008 she was on my mind most days. Was she happy, was she lonely, was she eating enough, did she have enough books to read, and later, would she fall getting out of bed, would her caregivers actually arrive or would they cancel and leave her to her own devices? My sister Carolyn being able to move in with Mum for the last year and a half of her life was a godsend. For all of us. But all that worry and anxiety is over now. And I feel a certain amount of guilty relief.

Mum was a force to be reckoned with. She was strong and smart. She was talented and funny. We loved her. But she was not always an easy person. Especially for those of us who were closest to her. At times in our lives my sisters and I have all felt ambivalent over our relationship with Mum. Not at the same time. It was like we tag-teamed being “good daughters.” And frankly those ambivalent times can make mourning quite complex.

One thing we learned from the celebration of Mum’s life is that none of us had the exact same relationship with her. Neighbours and friends, grand-children, spouses of children and grand-children, cousins, the guy who advised her at her bank… everyone had a slightly different interpretation of who Mum was. And I guess the key going forward is for each of us to mourn who she was to us. And at the same time to respect that our view may not, probably will not, be the same as someone else’s.

I have to admit I was thrilled that so many people approached me at the reception following Mum’s service to say they liked one particular part of my eulogy. They were listening, I thought. How great is that? One of Lloyd’s nieces said she was disappointed no one applauded. “We always applaud in my church,” she said. I loved that. And I particularly loved that my sister Connie’s former priest, who had attended as a guest, approached me as we were leaving to say how much he liked my eulogy. “Not too much?” I asked. “Not too many gestures?” I cannot speak without moving my hands. “It was perfect, he said, “with just the right amount of Irish embellishment.” Oh, that made me laugh. “What would a story be without a little embellishment, eh?” I replied.

You know, I’m a bit sad that my mum and I never got to make the “Doris from Devon Edits Her Closet” post we’d been planning. I mean we edited her closet several times over the last few years. Often when I’d have a closet editing post up, she’d call and say she wanted me to edit her closet when I came home. She’d sit up in bed after a nap, and I’d take everything out of her closet and drawers. We’d discuss each piece, make relevant piles, hang some things back up, fold other things into her drawers, pack the purged items into a bag, and then go have tea. Ha.

There’s always tea in my Mum stories, isn’t there? Mum may have been a changeable person. But there was always tea in the end.