Eulogy
May 19, 2009
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Dearest friends and relatives of Lois Grace Mattson…
daughter, sister, mother, grandmother, great grandmother and dearest friend to many.
My mother passed away on Wednesday evening, May 13th, at 8:00 p.m. She was 97 years old.
I had just arrived from Los Angeles at her residence and was walking toward her room when the nurse came out and said to my sister and I, "your mother just died." I was stunned! It was too bizarre… like the timing in a dream. My sister had been with her all afternoon and had just stepped out. She and I met in the bathroom moments earlier, squealing with delight upon encountering each other as we had not seen each other for 3 years. I would like to imagine it was on that vital wave of joy she chose to die.
I am sad about having missed saying goodbye to my mother, yet I am very glad she died as quickly and gently as she did. She had wanted to live in her home until her death, and essentially did. She lived in her home for 46 years, and thanks to my brother, Charles, and his life companion, Marie Claire, she lived out her final years with exceptional care.
Yet no matter how many years someone you dearly love lives, and no matter the suffering you do not want them to experience, we still grieve... I still grieve her loss. So much becomes acutely clear 'after the fact', which seems to be the tao of life. I wish many things in this reflective space I now sit in. And at the same time I am grateful for what we did share together which was meaningful to us both.
My mom authored books in genealogy and family history, which I seem to have inherited the enthusiasm for as well. And thus we spent hundreds of hours recording her life stories and those of her ancestors, as well as pouring over old letters and artifacts she inherited and had kept hidden away safely over the years. Incredible treasures!
Like two detectives pouring over the clues to a mystery, we knew we were piecing together the larger mystery of this lineage we came from and are a part of and continued to create ourselves out of. This was what inspired us so!
The best part of that shared experience for me has been the fleshing out of the more all encompassing woman, individual, my mother was. We live such a short time with our parents, most of us really only knowing them as child to parent and intimate with the personality that is dominant at that time of their lives. I learned so much more of who this person was through our exploration! I had so many enlightening realizations!
“I was born on the 6th of February in the year 1912 to my parents Grace Harriet Patriquin Bigelow and Emerson Bigelow. My sister Irene Evangeline was seven years my senior. My Mother and Father were no doubt pleased that I had arrived safely.”
An excerpt from my mother’s memoirs.
As a child she could not tether herself to the house duties she later as a mother did ceaselessly for years. She preferred instead to be out in the fields with her father, plowing the fields with a team of four horses. She took pride in her father calling her a 'slave driver' when after lunch she would eagerly seek him out to get back out in the fields to work.
I loved helping my Dad with the farm work. Milking the cows, riding the horses or helping my father with the plowing, discing, harrowing and especially helping with the haying operations.
My favorite hobby was horseback riding. I used to ride three or four miles to our store for groceries or to get the cows from the pasture. We also rode horseback to school quite often--it was three miles or we would drive a team on a buggy or sleigh to school.
In almost all the photographs of my mother as a child, she is with animals. She loved and nurtured all the animals, caring for them when they were sick, daily feeding and tending to them. They were as individuated as people to her. She and her bestfriend of a lifetime, cousin Dorothy, had dreams of having a horse ranch together as adults.
I often wondered where the drive for music came from in our family for it is so central in our lives yet somewhat absent in our early childhood environment. I learned of her love of the piano that was never actualized because of her parent's necessity to sell their player piano during the depression before they moved to the farm. She was sorely disappointed about this. She was only six at the time but her love of that instrument never died. Forty-five years later… this unrealized passion was passed on to me, a music & piano teacher for hundreds of children; to my brother, an accomplished pianist; my sister who plays; my brother who plays the violin and sings; and my other who lives with music as a central force in his life.
Reading her early letters to her family and friends and her sweetheart, my father, before they were married, I discovered a writer, a poet, a romantic! an enthusiast of life! Of course writing was the only means to stay in touch with family and later with my father during the war…
Yes, I’ve done my best to manage the farm and take care of the children while you’ve been gone these past three years & more and I’m not saying I’ve done very well either but we need you here with us too my Darling – its such a dreadfully lonely life I don’t know how I’ve managed to stand it this long and certainly can’t much longer, so I’m sure its very miserable for you over there too Dear waiting & waiting with nothing much of importance to do. But we’ll be thinking of you & loving you always & living for the Day when you’ll return to us.
She continued to write over her lifetime… Christmas letters, family chain letters, her diaries, the family history, while again nurturing this creative drive for writing and reading in her children.
I had always thought of mother as a 'homemaker', but discovered she had run the farm as a business woman, managing workers, raising chickens and food to sell at the market which is what we survived on when the crops failed or when my father's work for the impoverished families in the community could not pay him.
I learned of her innate value of community and why it was so meaningful to her. Without community, people would die, either from starvation or loneliness. She dedicated herself to the Women’s Institute while on the farm and when we moved to the city, she sought another community to fulfill her needs, and found herself fulfilled in this church and community.
This value of community again was woven into the values her children embodied and later sought for themselves
Her huge gardens are renowned and fed, nourished and grew our bodies over our lifetime. This was not a hobby. This was an act of survival from her earliest beginnings. She grew the blueberries she then juiced and fed her mother in her dying days; the only food her mother could eat. When you got into the garden with her, you knew you were with an earth scientist. She knew exactly how and where and at what time to plant what. She gardened until she was 94.
Mother then took those raw materials of the earth and transformed them in the art of baking, which many of you can attest to her creations. She baked cookies and pies and cakes any time anyone was coming for a visit. My childhood friends always speak of the chocolate chip cookies they ate while sitting round our kitchen table waiting for us to finish practicing the piano. And her cinnamon buns nourished many a starving artist! Mom sent her goods around the world to be enjoyed during the holidays. She baked thousands of gingerbread boys over her lifetime for her children and then grandchildren, and great grandchildren... the last of which were received in her 93rd Christmas.
My mother’s life spans almost one hundred years and thus I can only lightly touch on vignettes in hopes to convey the essence of the larger woman my mother was.
In closing I would like to say…
It was a special opportunity to tend so intimately to my mother's body over these last years as she lost her mobility. Of course my brother Charles and Marie Claire are the real heroes in this area, caring for her intensively day in and day out for 31/2 years. I came a few times over the last 3 to care for her in their absence. It was so much like caring for a young child and thus evoked a tenderness, and a welcomed reciprocity as she had once cared so tenderly for me. This bodily intimacy was new and changed me on the deepest levels as a woman.
I know my mother and her life will continue to waft through me as the fragrant flowers she so dearly loved… over the days, months and years to come. And I know that she will live in me throughout my lifetime, rising up from my flesh and bones, her flesh and bones, the flesh and bones she gifted me with and marked me by.
I love you, mother. I am eternally grateful for all that you gifted me with.
Thank you all of you for your love and thoughts and support at this time. We are truly gifted and nourished by you all. You all meant a great deal to my mother.
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