Three years ago this month my mother was widowed. Since then I think she has thought about Dad, her husband and partner of 61 years, several times a day. And has missed him terribly. Last week I read an interview with a expert in palliative care who noted that wish to die in their sleep but only 10% of the population actually does. Instead they die as they lived. My father died in his sleep. In bed, beside my mother, who was awake and reading. I wanted to read a poem at his funeral but all I could think of was the utterly inappropriate “Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night” by Dylan Thomas . Dad had never “raged” and certainly not “against the dying of the light.” He went as he lived – quietly and at peace with himself and the world.

Now Mom is a highly pragmatic person and I think she thought that getting on without her husband would be easier than it has been. So she has come up with a 19-point plan for overcoming grief that she recently published in her church bulletin. She believes this is a helpful plan even for people who are not experiencing grief, which is why I am sharing it here. As someone who is perennially harassed by the clock, I have certainly thought a lot about rule number 12, “Never refuse an invitation.”

1. Do three works of charity every day: (e.g., phone calls, cards, visits, alms to the poor, baking for a friend or neighbour).
2. Ask others about their troubles and trials.
3. Be diligent about your own health. Walk each day, preferably outside for 30 minutes (to get vitamin D).
4. Climb stairs each day to improve endurance and maintain bone mass.
5. Take advantage of the sun: work or relax in a room into which the sun is shining.
6. Share meals with others. Take turns eating together, especially Sunday dinners.
7. Prepare nutritious meals for yourself. Do some preparation for dinner early in the day so you will be more likely to eat properly at night rather than resort to tea and toast.
8. Let restful music soothe you.
9. Vary your routine from what you were used to when your loved one was alive.
10. Spend time on a hobby.
11. Treat yourself once in awhile to a, manicure, pedicure, movie, concert.
12. Never refuse an invitation.
13. Ask others for favours.
14. Plan activities where you will be with other people: join clubs, take a fitness/yoga class, do volunteer work.
15. Have a rest midway through each day.
16. Plan things to which you can look forward (e.g., a trip, visit from family, etc.).
17. Keep you mind sharp by playing bridge, doing crosswords, studying a second language, etc.
18. Make a list of partially completed projects and then start getting them done.
19. SMILE.

My parents at their 60th wedding anniversary.

I like to joke that I married my husband because the apartment he was assigned at the university in Beijing, where we met, was equipped with hot water, a bathtub, and a refrigerator.  In truth however, I married him because he received care packages from Germany at Christmas.

They were carefully wrapped and thoughtfully chosen collections of chocolate, gingerbread, marzipan, and home baking. His landlady even sent an entire Linzertorte, a cake that fortunately improves with age, through the diplomatic pouch. The first care packages – in the signature yellow cardboard boxes of the German post office - arrived in time for the beginning of Advent or the Feast of St. Nicholas on December 6. Another set usually arrived in time for Christmas. Since both his mother and aunt were looking after him from afar, he was already getting double rations. But as soon as he announced that he had met a young lady, the size of the care packages increased. By Easter, they were sending two of everything.

The other Germans on campus were also being spoiled by their families. I remember being in the student dormitory – Building 6 – when Christine from Berlin and Astrid from Hannover opened their care packages and shared the contents with a party of friends gathered for the celebration. Bars of Milka chocolate, Ritter Sport, solid chocolate Santas, jars of Nutella and instant coffee, bags of gummy bears, and even loaves of stollen, or Christmas cake, spilled out of their lovingly wrapped packages to shrieks of delight and hectic gorging. It was 1987 and the selection of food at the cafeteria of our university was dismal in winter. Eggs and tomatoes, fried potato with bits of fatty pork and green pepper, fried aubergine, and the ubiquitous Chinese cabbage topped the menu in winter. Breakfast consisted of steamed dumplings stuffed with either meat or red bean. We weren’t starving, but by December all of us were craving chocolate. Besides, these students – among the first generation of foreign students in China to study Sinology - were paying to live in pretty desperate conditions. Their dorm rooms had poured concrete floors, metal beds, and rickety, ill-fitting casement windows. The washrooms on each floor had cold running water in trough-like sinks and squat toilets. The hallways were dimly lit with bare lightbulbs. Trash was swept to one dark corner of the hallway. The doors to the building were locked at 12:00 p.m. Hot showers could be taken once or twice a week at the public showers.

Into this scene then, imagine the comfort and joy that Swiss chocolate or mother’s baking can bring. Since then I have learned to bake the nutty half-moon biscuits with lemon drizzle that my husband’s mother perfected, and Linzertorte, prepared according to his landlady’s handwritten instructions and complete with a dash of schnaps in the mix,  is now a standard in my recipe canon.

I remember crossing the bridge in my hometown on the last day of school one year, opening my satchel and dropping all the contents into the river. Watching all that loose leaf float down toward the flume and the falls, I watched my cares of the school year float on. Terrible for the environment, but great for my mental health. I didn’t hate school. In fact, I enjoyed school so much that I played school with my sister and her friends during our summer vacation (I was always the teacher). I had a number of teachers who believed in me, and encouraged me by assigning extra work or books to read. One of my favorite teachers was Mrs. Kirkham,  my Grade 7 teacher. Her bearing was majestic, crowned by glossy black hair that she wrapped in an enormous knot on the top of her head. Once my mother came back from a parent-teacher meeting and I pestered her to tell me what the teacher had said about me. My mother, clearly embarrassed, only told me that Mrs Kirkham had made some flattering remarks about me.

I wish my 11-year-old son had a Mrs Kirkham. I wish he had teachers who believed in him, teachers who praised him and encouraged him. Instead, he was sent home for the summer vacation last week with a report card containing the following – roughly translated – remarks from his teacher:

“F. showed interest in most subjects, but was often careless. He was particularly disinterested and unwilling to make an effort in Physical Education. He had troubling concentrating and following the lessons in all subjects except English and Art. He raised his hand only occasionally, but worked well on his own, although at an extrememly slow pace. To some extent he had difficulty getting organized. Not only did he forget his homework and notebooks, but he also slouched in his chair and showed a negative attitude in class. In the first half of the year, he could not be trusted to obey the rules. Moreover, when confronted with his misdemeanors, he was incorrigible, stubborn, and unwilling to show reason. This improved only towards the end of the school year. Towards his classmates, F. was helpful and considerate. In the open discussions with the class he often contributed to solving problems by making good suggestions.”

Uff! Now, haven’t we all learned to give the positive feedback first, and only then the negative? Those words depressed the heck out of me. I knew all that stuff and have a number of e-mails from the teacher to prove it. Why rub it in at the end of the school year? Why can’t teachers be a little kinder? There are Mrs Kirklands here – but where? My little boy has been suffering tough teachers for the past three years. But this was the first year that he had detentions and had to write lines. I think he found it mildly sadistic when the supervising math teacher passed the time by listening to her i-pod, helping herself to a bag of gummy bears and flicking through a magazine. The next time my boy got a detention I asked the teacher if F. could at least use the time sensibly by doing his homework or memorizing a poem. Homework, no; poem, yes. F. and his father chose Goethe’s “Totentanz”  (“Dance of Death”). Now at least he can recite Goethe.

So here’s a weird thing. I’m on Facebook and a number of classmates from high school have contacted me after searching for our high school. It seems as if all of them live in Western Canada and live lives that feature water, snow, horses or cattle, and nature. Always nature. Don runs an inn on Vancouver Island and gives lessons in white water kayaking (here is his website - stay in the yurt!); another teaches yoga in Vancouver; yet another has a ranch in Alberta. They lead lives that humble me, that I cannot imagine living myself because I would fail miserably, and because the hugeness of the nature would swallow me.

But the best is Charlie, who runs a ranch in Alberta. He says, “I run a business hauling water to oil rigs as well I run an animal health service for a 20,000 hd feedlot as well as training and buying & selling horses.” Okay, that’s a lot of information, so I had him translate for me. That’s 20,000 head of cattle he is talking about. On 160 acres of land. He goes on to say that it is his wife who hauls most of the water to the oil rigs: “We have a 2 ton dodge truck with a tank on it we only haul the potable water to the trailers that the rig workers live in while they are on the rig site.” I have a lot of respect for Charlie’s operation but could never imagine doing his job, or living  as remotely as he does.

One day not too long ago after a particularly long and hard week at work, when I came home on Friday evening with a head like cement, I called my sister. She and her family live in the town where most of these folks grew up. Her husband answered the phone. He was sitting in the upstairs sunroom in a rocking chair watching the ducks on the pond and enjoying the view of his rather expansive property. It was 2:00 o’clock in the afternoon. He wasn’t sure what he would do for the rest of the day. (“You must at least be drinking a cup of tea!” I croaked). We had a long and lovely chat, which ended with him quoting Voltaire’s Candide: “Everyone has to tend their own garden.” And it seemed to me that if there is one thing these friends I have mentioned here in common, it is that they tend their gardens.

I was listening to SWR2 on a Sunday morning recently and was delighted to discover that their subject was one that the media often ignores but which i adore: sewing. It is one outcome of the economic crisis: consumers are tired of same old same old Kleenex clothes that are disposed of after a couple of washings.  In the U.K. sales of sewing machine are up. In Germany homesewing courses are booked solid and at the ethnic markets in Berlin people are snapping up fabrics for 50 cents a meter.

My mother would smile. No, laugh. Even when she travels, she is never without needle and thread. She spent the month of March in Victoria, British Columbia and before she left she told me that she had packed a large board to use as a work surface for her quilting projects (“I just lay it on the luggage rack.”)  My mother was always economical. She made diapers for her many babies from the cotton sacks in which 50 pound bags of flour were delivered. We wore “Pure Canadian Wheat”  on our bottoms. She also made most of our outer clothing as well. Some of the best items that I remember were the birdcage bathing suit that she made for me and the “paper” dresses that she made for my younger sister and me. Not Kleenex dresses, these were made from a brightly printed papery cotton. We didn’t go to pre-school or kindergarten or daycare – we were homeschooled in making dolls clothes.  

Mom sewed on a heavy, but rather dainty black Singer sewing machine that she got when she married in 1945. My sisters and I all learned to sew by hand, and then on this machine. I had it with me at university in Montréal, by which time Mom had bought a new one for herself. I sewed long, narrow, six panel skirts from a Vogue pattern, one in black velvet with pin prick dots, godets flaring at the hem. Or another in fine Italian wool with kick pleats. My favorite fabric store was a tiny boutique called Au Long Metrage in Outremont. But sometimes my girlfriend Robin, another sewing fanatic, and I would enter the bargain basement of Fabricland in search of two-for-one offers on patterns.

My sister and I spent entire summers competing for the use of the Singer, she whipping up Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls, or stuffed toys. She once even cut up a vintage beaver skin coat to make a jacket. We made pinafore tops, wrap skirts, and apron dresses. It was the 70’s. The nearest fabric store was in the next village, 11 miles away. Sometimes we biked the distance just to buy fabric for new skirts or dresses with our babysitting money.

When my sisters and I graduated from university, we each received not a car or a trip to Europe, but a sewing machine. Actually, not quite. I got a loan to travel to China where a teaching job awaited me. I bought my first sewing machine there, a treadle machine. That was all that Beijing’s finest markets had in the late 1980’s. I laid out and cut my Chinese silks on the long tables in the reading room of the university library after hours. And when we came to Germany, I got the machine I have now – a Pfaff brand. It was important to me then that my new machine have a buttonhole function. Until then, I had been making them by hand.

When it came time to learn German, I found easy ways – by reading sewing instructions. But that is a topic for the next post!

My sister M. writes to say that she wants to read more personal stories in this blog. About the family. I gather she was bored by my last post and wants to hear more about us. And my eldest brother suggests that I blog on the fact that ours was an unusual family because we never fought. A friend of his, also a member of a big family, says that harmonious, non-fighting families are “really weird”. In her family, fights were the norm.

So we were weird. We did not have arguments or fist fights or brawls. At university I had a feminist friend whose rhetorical skills she had honed at her family’s dinner table, where political debate was the evening fare. We never had any of that. My father’s opinions and beliefs and proclivities ruled. We voted Liberal but were conservative in our values, attended separate schools, participated in community life, volunteered, were PTA and hospital board and church council presidents, went to church every Sunday morning, and (almost) never got into trouble with the law. There was never any alcohol in our house, which might have played a role. My mother still buys a single bottle of wine for a Christmas dinner. For 14 adults. Instead, we showed our aggression in small, mean ways. By turning the cold shoulder. By tugging the blanket off my sister on a cold night in a double bed.

This was the kind of household where bathroom reading included Dominic Savio, Teenage Saint and Jude the Obscure. My father subscribed to The Catholic Register and Writer’s Digest. It was because Dad dominated the dinner conversation that we didn’t have much to say. We were not encouraged to challenge his viewpoints. “Crazy notion,” was one of his favorite expressions. “Keep a Christian tongue in your head,” he would say if we spoke meanly about others. I want to say that he did not hold forth with monologues or lectures, but maybe my memory is unclear. What I do remember was how he tested what we were learning at school by conducting impromptu Latin and vocabulary quizzes.

Mom ran the household like a military camp. With 12 children, there was no other way. She did not countenance any backtalk. So essentially we were disciplined and were taught respect. Does that explain our non-confrontational attitudes? Do disciplined families bottle up their anger, rather than taking it out on each other? I am curious to hear responses from my siblings.

My eldest brother sends a very minor correction to my last post: “The car with the fins was a 1960 DeSoto. I always loved that car as it had quite a large V-8 motor and had lots of pick-up. I remember  cruising in it when gas was 25 cents a gallon.”

Actually it was not a cousin, but a cousin’s husband who gave me the photo you see in my last post. Here is a link to his photo archive, which will mostly interest family, but also history buffs. When Dave sent me the link to his archive, a treasure trove of doozies of my sisters on really bad 70’s hair days, I also found this graphically and sartorially pleasing image from the 60s:

I love the horizontal cladding of the garage ontrasting with the vertical lines of the sleeveless blouse and the harmony of blues. But above all I like the shorts and top set in that Mondrian print in the back corner. Three of the girls here are my sisters (including the one in the striped top and the one in the Mondrian outfit); my brother is here too. The others are some of our 88 first cousins.

When my father died a year and a half ago, a cousin brought this photo to his wake and pressed it into my hand. I had never seen the photo until then. It was taken by my uncle. I love this picture. It is one of my favorite photos of all time, and perhaps the most beautiful memento I have of my father. That’s me on the right and my little sister Theresa on the left. Typcially, I look goofy. My nickname was Pookie. I had an imaginary friend called Maggie who lived across the street. I was freckled and skinny and skipped around like a kelpie. I have a framed copy of this photo in my living room, and people who don’t know my family often think it is quite recent. “Is that your husband?” they ask. Many German friends are surprised to learn that the photo was taken in the mid-1960’s, when color photos were still unusual in Germany. Others find it contemporary because of Dad’s brush cut and polo shirt.

I don’t remember when or where this photo was taken, but I remember the feeling of protection I had just being with my father, either on his arm, or beside him. On Sundays he would take us out for a ride in the country, and show us where the deer were likely to congregate, or where one might spot a fox, or where an old Scottish settlement could be found in Lanark County in Ontario. When I was very young he drove a pale blue Chevy with fins. Later, despite his height, he even drove a Mini.

The night of Dad’s funeral, my mother gathered her children and grandchildren, sons and daughters-in-law around her and held a speech. There were probably 50 of us in my sister’s grand parlour. All immediate family. Mom had told us that she wanted to say a few words after the funeral. I assumed she would talk about the estate, and flippantly remarked to my sister as we settled down to listen that we wouldn’t be needing any more tissues. Instead, Mom surprised us by telling us the story of their life.

She and my father were married in August 1945 when the war in Europe was over, but was still raging in the Pacific. Dad, who had spent most of the war as an educational officer in England, volunteered for active duty in the Pacific Theater. But before flying to Japan, he took six weeks’ leave to marry my mother. They spent their honeymoon in a remote cabin in the Gatineau hills near Ottawa, with no newspapers, no radio, no phone, and no other contact to the outside world. When they emerged after several days alone, they discovered that the war had ended. That was the lucky star under which their life together began. It wasn’t always easy, she admitted, having so many children, and yet, she said how proud they were of all of us. It was when she revealed that Dad had told her every single night of his life with her that he loved her, that we were most sorry we didn’t have tissues.

Yesterday my parents would have been married 63 years. And my mother misses Dad more than ever.

The list of things I wanted to do this weekend was the same as the list of things I wanted to do last weekend but never got done.

• Clean up sewing corner and move to ?
• Mending
• Garden!
• Remove junk from laundry room to trash
• Make or hang curtains for two bedrooms

I didn’t get any of these things done. Instead I:

• Made macaroni and cheese
• Cooked a big Chinese meal
• Spent 349 euros at IKEA on bright, colorful sheets and rugs
• Spent Saturday afternoon in a cafe with my husband and son as the latter played Battleships on scraps of paper with his friend
• Rose at 7:00 AM on Sunday and ironed for an hour
• Went for a power walk with three girlfriends
• Watched a movie with my son
• Helped my other son learn French verbs
• Prepared a briefing for work
• Surfed the Internet
• Read but did not finish my novel