Cancer had not been on my mother’s radar when a checkup for a stuffy nose revealed a malignant tumor. She always thought her final demise would be brought on by cardiac arrest, prompting her to keep a steady supply of low-dose Aspirin on hand. “Are you trying to give me a heart attack?” she’d rage when disagreements erupted, and since disagreements were always erupting, never once triggering anything close to a heart attack, my siblings and I had learned to accept her outbursts as a systemic character flaw, complete with a profound contempt and distrust toward anyone who could, potentially, induce such a life-threatening event. Even in the hospital, she thought the staff were trying to kill her.

Can it be she’s forgotten she’s dying of cancer? I wondered after one such outburst, only to have a physician confirm my thinking. “It’s probably spread to her brain,” he said. But the truth is, my mother had always been paranoid. 

Josephine was not an easy person to get along with. Over the years, the state of our relationship swung like a pendulum, back and forth between obligation and estrangement, remaining tense and painful most of the time. Occasionally, the pendulum would rest at centre. I’m grateful her cancer diagnosis came during one of those lulls. I stepped in and did what I could, accompanying her to medical appointments, tending to yard work and grocery shopping. My sister and I regularly received calls to pick up bananas, parmesan cheese, mini chocolate bars and cases of Ensure Meal Replacement drinks. Always frugal, my mother phoned us whenever she spotted a good sale. Just days before discovering the cancer was no longer treatable, she dispatched my sister in pursuit of prickly pears. There were still a dozen in her fridge when she was admitted to the hospital, and I brought one to her when she could no longer stomach the meals provided. I peeled it and fed it to her as she expressed disappointment about the fact they were the green fleshy type, and not red, but she devoured it anyway. She knew you didn’t always get what you wanted in life.

My mother was born in 1941, in the midst of World War II, and while she was too young to actually remember it, she never forgot the lingering effects. Imminent threats and potential shortages always lay on the horizon. You had to be prepared, and prepared she was. Even after the disappointment of Y2K (and we all laughed), she continued to amass a steady supply of batteries, candles, bottled water and canned goods. My mother remained vigilant right to the end. It was almost like she knew what was coming.

She passed away on October 29, 2019, with few companions in her life. But what my mother lacked in personal connections she made up for in possessions. My brother, sister and I wandered through every room of her house—four bedrooms, two kitchens, three living areas, a crawlspace and garage—marvelling at the mass of supplies she had squirreled away, including surgical masks and toilet paper, never imagining that just six months later, the global pandemic she’d been preparing for all her life would have us all scrounging and stockpiling.

We laid out a plan for how best to clear out the house our mother had lived in for thirty-three years and made a list. It was overwhelming, but our strategy seemed sound. In the first month, we dealt with trash, unwashed laundry and the remaining prickly pears. We pushed off processing the loss of our complicated mother and instead focussed on simple tasks: donating cases of Ensure Meal Replacements to local food banks, redirecting the mail and cancelling her cable subscription. Her house was sealed tight with an alarm system and multiple locks on all windows and doors, an attempt to stay safe while keeping everyone else out. I would think of this often in the coming months as COVID-19 safety protocols forced us all to follow suit.

In the meantime, we set about sorting her vast wardrobe. Facilitated by the Shopping Channel and a house too large for its lone occupant, it spread from room to room, infiltrating every closet and cupboard. We consolidated fur coats and evening gowns, sweatpants and pyjamas, some items still sealed in plastic wrap. There were pieces we’d never seen our mother wear and others that held onto her scent, often prompting us to stop and ask, “Remember this?” We fell into a rhythmic motion as we liberated jackets, blouses and pants from hangers and pulled garments out of drawers, piling them into plastic garbage bags labelled “donate” and “trash.” Each decision seemed to carry the weight of how we’d choose to remember our mother.

As we entered 2020, I took over the majority of purging and packing and made my way steadily through my mother’s belongings as news of COVID-19 intensified. Having cancelled her cable TV subscription, I listened to reports on her little clock radio. (The large supply of nine-volt batteries suddenly made sense.) I often wondered what she’d make of the crazy world we found ourselves in. Would she have said, “See, I told you so?” I thought of her constantly but rarely felt her presence in the house. I hoped she had moved on. I tried to reflect upon the times my mother had been a source of comfort. The darker times, like her possessions, I tried to relinquish. I couldn’t hold on to everything. I went through cabinets, closets and drawers, moving items into manageable categories, obsessing and inspecting even the tiniest objects—elastics, twist ties, string and wire, buttons, needles and thread, glass jars, plastic bags and newspapers—before deciding which garbage, recycle, donate or keep pile it belonged to. The stacks of newspapers from the 1990s proved especially helpful in the packing up stage.

The glass jars and margarine containers she had kept were another story. When did she last eat margarine? I thought, before shoving the plastic tubs and vast quantity of empty glass jars into recycling bags, then walking them down the driveway to be collected the next day.

That night, I received a phone call from my mother’s next-door neighbour, Doug. “Rose, I noticed you put out some recycling in front of your parents’ house. I don’t think the city will pick them up like that.”

“You don’t?”

I felt emotional and tired. I was doing the best I could. At my request, my siblings had left me to handle the bulk of the job on my own. I needed to be in control. That was the problem. It had been my mother’s problem also. We were two people attempting to sort things into neat little boxes, but the messiness of life could never be contained. I resented her for trying to dictate my life. Now I was beginning to see she had only been trying to hold onto what she could.

On the other end of the phone, Doug awaited my response. I could tell he sensed my hesitation. “I’ll just drive them to the recycling depot for you,” he offered.

I blinked away tears—I didn’t have to carry this weight. It wasn’t mine alone. I thanked Doug for this kind gesture, and the empty reminders were soon gone.

In the end, the things I kept were few and random. Jars of buttons, which my daughter and I sorted one bored day during lockdown. Records, including Sicilian pressings, Elvis’ Christmas Album and countless 45s—all of which I organized, matching album to sleeve to cover, attempting to find order at a time when things seemed to be spinning out of control.

I kept the antique Singer sewing machine, the one my grandparents purchased second-hand in Montréal when they first immigrated to Canada. My mother used to make my sister and I matching outfits.

I brought it home, along with the buttons and thread and the old black metal fabric shears—small remnants of her life and the large impact she had on ours.

It wasn’t all as bad as I remember … was it?   

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Image: David Trautrimas, The Golden Days of Missing You, 2023, archival pigment print, 50 x 46 in.