I attended a play at the Rosebud Theatre some time ago. It was a comedy about death. The dead person was a mother and two of us sitting in the audience had just lost our mothers to that very real and ever-present scourge, cancer. You wouldn’t think we’d find anything about that play funny, but we did. We laughed uproariously as the “Last Supper Committee” prepared the lunch in the kitchen and the harried funeral director tried to manipulate everything so that there would be at least a few people attending the “viewing.” You see the mother in this play wasn’t someone you would remember fondly. But I laughed and I cried and I thought of my mom.

Mom’s life wasn’t always easy. She was an only child of a single mother, raised in a small town during the 20’s and 30’s. She started to work in a florist’s shop when she was only twelve, met my father when she was sixteen, married him when she was seventeen but didn’t tell anyone for a year due to “complications” in both families. They had two children and then she said good-bye to her husband for almost six years as the Second World War raged. She welcomed a stranger home at the end of that time, had two more children and followed him five hundred miles to a new community and a new risk as they opened their first family shoe store. They opened a second store just as a large department store opened across the street. They lost their businesses, their home, more than a few friends. My mom’s mother came to live with us all and more challenges came with her. My father developed bleeding ulcers and almost died. More than once.

Through it all, Mom clung to her faith in God and tried to put a positive spin on even the most difficult of circumstances. When she was eighty years old someone gave her a new purse. When I admired it she said, “Yes, it’s nice but it’s kind of an old lady’s purse, don’t you think?” When I reminded her of her age she looked surprised, then laughed at herself. “But I’m not that old, really,” she said. It was many more years before she finally did seem “that old.”

My mother would have liked the play we saw in Rosebud. She had a strong sense of irony and a deep vein of humour that often rose to the surface for all to see. She would have liked the honesty of it – the way the characters finally admit their true feelings, their fears and their flaws. She would have liked the healing of it too – the healing that happened in the play and the healing that happened in the audience. Because Mom knew you couldn’t take life or death too seriously. She knew there was something more for us all. Now she’s enjoying that “something more” firsthand. I miss her. But I smile when I think of her. And that’s a gift for which I am very grateful.

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