Letters from Rona / Mothers and daughters / Sort by date

Twenty-one years ago almost to the day, my mother died without telling me the one thing I most longed to hear. Her silence on a painful subject continued to trouble me, like a bum knee that aches in cold weather. When a wise stranger proposed that I write her a letter, I pooh-poohed the idea (nothing new about letters to the dead). It turned out that I spoke too soon. [more]

After my mother died, I found at the bottom of a closet the scuffed, leather walking shoes in which, just the previous summer, she had walked six miles a day. They lay where she had kicked them after an ordinary ramble that turned out to be her last. Dusty laces trailing, they curled against each other like sleeping puppies that might wake at any minute and hurl themselves at the door in an ecstasy of eagerness. They still held the shape of her toes. [more]

My mother taught me to love the stories at the heart of every life. Now that she's no longer around to meet me for a Mother's Day lunch, her stand-in is the stories we lived together. It's partly in tribute to her that I've created a forum on this website, the mother/daughter gallery, where readers can post defining memories of the women who formed them and the girls they are guiding into adulthood. If you haven't toured the gallery, what better time than Mother's Day? Read on for a preview of the preview of the colourful, unforgettable and sometimes maddeningly complicated characters you'll meet. But don't stop there. You too have a mother/daughter story, and this is the place to share it. [more]

Kate MGarrigle, the singer/songwriter who died of cancer this week at 63, was so wholly and happily bound up in my mind with her sister and partner Anna that in 30-odd years of loving their luminous harmonies I never bothered to distinguish the two. But any fan can tell that "Matapedia" is a story from Kate's life as daughter, mother and middle-aged woman contemplating mortality. I couldn't get Kate off my mind tonight. And so on the elliptical machine, where I usually pump away to hard-driving stuff, I couldn't stop playing "Matapedia." [more]