Life and Loss Remembered
My mother left me but she lives on in my heart
In 1964 the Toronto Maple Leafs won the Stanley Cup. My country was on a quest to choose a new flag and a tsunami caused millions of dollars of damage in several places on the wet, left coast of Canada. Places where decades later several of my children would live although I started my life thousands of miles from there and those towns and cities were a foreign land to me back then.
The first Tim Hortons was opened that year and I don’t imagine anyone could have guessed what a Canadian icon they would come to be. They now have thousands of restaurants scattered in many countries around the world.
I probably watched the final winning Stanley Cup hockey games on our small black and white TV along with my dad and a few of his friends. I don’t remember but it’s likely.
I don’t recall hearing conversations about the flag-choosing process the government was engaged in nor the visit of the King and Queen to Canada that also happened that year.
Memory is a strange thing; what we can retrieve from it and what we can't.
What happened in 1964 in our family, which is embedded in my heart was the death of my baby brother. He died of what was then called crib death after an abbreviated life of just over three…
