Stories of Love and Betrayal: On Making My Mother’s Portrait
My mother was tiny, her bones delicate, like a bird’s. When the young woman at the Mount Royal Crematorium handed me her remains, she said, “That’s the lightest box of ashes I’ve ever seen.”
Sealed with tape and never opened, that plain white cardboard box sits on the fourth shelf of my office closet between a pile of bubble wrap that I’ll use someday and a stack of three-ring binders I won’t. The label on top of the box reads:
CREMATED REMAINS OF:
Frances Rodick
Registration number: 278718
Your Father Was No Beauty
Like my father, my mother grew up poor. She never lost the habit of frugality and never threw anything away. Small towers of used teabags stood waiting on the kitchen counter for one more kettle of boiling water. Used wrapping paper from old presents lay piled up in the basement, tinder for the fire I was sure would kill us all. The spare bedroom in our house became uninhabitable, billeted for her collection of secondhand clothes purchased at church bazaars and piled to the ceiling. Most of it she’d never wear, not even once. All this was just in case — just in case the gods detected us and rendered us destitute or worse. Though I grew up in an affluent neighbourhood, I was a young adult…
