8. The Missing Piece

At seventy-six, just as my mother had finally begun to enjoy the big payoff of her and my father's lifelong efforts—a stable financial situation, a comfortable home, graduations, weddings, grandchildren—the news she had cancer hit like a sledgehammer. The doctor assured her they caught it early, stating that surgery alone was necessary to remove the malignant cells.

I called her every day but felt guilty that I did not have more to offer. I had two toddlers and a busy job as a partner in a communications firm I had founded ten years before. It was a life where something was going on every single minute of the day. She had my father, I rationalized, and they seemed to be managing. Looking back, I realize that it was my father who first called me with my mother’s cancer diagnosis. True to her character, my mother kept her worries private.

When I phoned, sometimes my father answered, and we would exchange a cheerful word, maybe two, but he would quickly say, “Here’s your mother.” He had a deliberate but subtle way of trying to close whatever space there was between us. Even more so now that she had cancer.

"I am working on my stamp collection," he often replied if I had the opportunity to keep him on long enough to ask what he was doing. After handing my mother the phone, he returned to his comfortable chair in the den to contemplate what to do next with the stamps he had laid out on the coffee table. At least, this is what I imagined.

I imagined my mother sitting at the Formica kitchen table with chrome legs with a floral-patterned apron tied around her waist. The coiled cord, as long as a transatlantic cable, dangles between the beige phone with the rotary dial on the wall and the handset held to her ear. Her cup of sweetened tea in her favourite porcelain mug rests on the table before her. Behind her is a small bookshelf brimming with cookbooks. The kitchen counters are laden with the paraphernalia of a passionate cook. In front of the patio door, plants hang from macramé holders, some flourishing and some in the process of being nursed back to health. There’s the crucifix—the small metal crucified Christ—hanging above that same patio door. As I speak to my mother on the phone, the kitchen where she sits is as familiar to me as my own, right down to the spatula with the broken white handle in the stuffed top drawer beside her sink.

If it’s Wednesday, my mother might be perusing the grocery store flyers spread out on the table that arrived with the afternoon edition of the local Sarnia Observer, deciding whether there were better deals at the A & P, Loblaws, or the Dominion store. In the end, she’ll shop at all three—a habit—to maximize the bargains and stretch her grocery budget.

My daily call was a casual chit-chat about what she was cooking or the visit of her grandchildren, my sister's sons. I asked how she was feeling.

“I’m fine,” she always said. I wanted to believe it, but how could I know? She had always kept her feelings to herself.

The details I provided were equally superficial. “Yes, the kids are fine,” and “No, I’m not tired.” She had cancer, and I wasn’t going to worry her about my concerns about my children or my work. Neither of us was in the habit of sharing our problems.

"I love you," she said at the end of every phone call.

“I love you, too.” Done. I checked off the task on my mental to-do list.

My mother never spoke about her childhood and how the family managed after her father was robbed and killed while carrying cash from selling a small parcel of land. She was eleven the year this tragedy struck, and I only knew about it because one day, I asked her how my grandfather had died. I imagine she left school—in grade 4 or 5?—to help care for her three younger siblings and the family’s subsistence farm. While I asked about my grandfather, I did not ask if she had been afraid, or cold, or hungry during the war and how much she had suffered working in Germany, which by this point in my life, I knew was forced labour. I sensed that the experience was the reason for her silence about the past.

She never told me how she met my father or what it was like to arrive alone in a new country. She never mentioned the house in Westmount where she had worked as part of a government-sponsored immigration program for displaced people—DPs as they were called. She never remarked that it was a block from where I was raising her grandchildren. I learned the address only years later, after her death, too late to inquire about such things. She never said that caring for three children without help had been too much for her, although she did confide once that sometimes, at the end of the day, she wept from exhaustion. This was a rare admission that she could have used some help.

Health was another topic that my mother did not talk about. Within four years of the diagnosis, the cancer had metastasized. On my visits home, I could see its ravages on her tired face. There were chemotherapy treatments, surgeries, and several hospital stays for another five years. During the final weeks, she was admitted to the palliative care unit at the local hospital, the same one where her children were born and where she had once worked as a nurse’s aide, during the few years my grandmother from Poland lived with us. Palliative care was a sanctuary, a stark contrast to the regular ward, with its incessantly beeping monitors and nurses hurrying in every four hours to monitor vital signs. My sisters joined me in helping our father, and we took turns being by our mother's side.

All I could do, when it was my time to sit with her, was gently push aside the morphine drip that tethered her body and crawl into the hospital bed beside her. I would hold her and run scenarios through my head: was her silence about a childhood filled with hardships and poverty, years of enduring the war, or unspeakable acts of violence or cruelty she had witnessed? I was never brave enough to pierce the silence around her memories. And now it was too late.

For the last two decades after my mother’s death, I chose to focus on the happy memories rather than the secrets and the silence. My mother never sat down, nor did she complain. With three daughters born within three and a half years, and no relatives or extra money for help, she did it all for us. I can't recall her ever asking me to do anything around the house. She was a devoted—entirely—and caring. Her priority was her family. Cooking and baking—busy in the kitchen, preparing her delicious Polish recipes—were her way of engaging or playing with us.

She wasn’t the type that got down on the floor. The rare moments of her pushing us on swings or playing tag existed because they were recorded on 8 mm Kodak film, but in my memories, I do not have access to them. Equally rare were the times she laughed out loud and expressed joy as if she believed these simple pleasures might be snatched from her.

I hold on to all the skating, swimming, Polish folk dance lessons, and piano lessons that my mother took me to. At twelve, I rebelled and refused to go back to the folk dance lessons at the Polish Hall. So my mother bought a second-hand upright piano and started me on lessons with Mrs. Dobrowolska, the wife of our family doctor, a Jackie Kennedy wannabe. I had limited musical talent, but I endured the hour each week, fascinated by the doctor's much younger wife with her soft, breathy voice, just like Jackie’s, and her elegant cashmere twin sweater sets paired with a single strand of pearls.

I hold on to my mother’s love of pretty clothes. It mattered to her that my sisters and I were well-dressed. Sundays required frilly dresses and patent leather Mary-Jane shoes to wear to church. I hold on to the many times my mother told me to dress warmly. For her, a warm winter coat and gloves were of the utmost importance. Are you warm enough, was her mantra.

When I was a teenager, my mom allowed me to pick out my own dresses at the nicest dress shop in town. The moment I entered, I was in a world of matronly salesladies sporting French twist hairdos. I’d peruse the racks and select as many as five dresses to bring home for her approval. I usually got to keep all of them. She had a weakness when it came to a pretty dress.

I remember the rare times she praised what I wore, declaring, “You look smashy!” Her English was by no means perfect, but I knew she approved. Over the years, I graduated to designer labels and indulged in acquiring more pieces than I truly needed. Perhaps they served as a reminder that the little girl in the floral dress and plaid pants had come a long way.

But I couldn’t let go of what I perceived as her judgment. On one visit, probably shortly after she was first diagnosed with cancer, my mother said something that has stayed with me to this day. She watched me look after my young son, who could be difficult. Being in new situations and unfamiliar places, including the annual visit to his grandparents, was hard for him. I did not realize then how changes to his routine overloaded his sensory system. After one of his meltdowns in her home, she turned to me and said, "He’s gonna kill you."

I knew she didn’t mean literally, but had intuited an issue, foreshadowing a challenging parental task ahead. But all I heard was criticism. Maybe I wasn’t a good mother. No matter how much distance I had put between what I perceived were her expectations, her judgment rang in my ears whenever my son had a tantrum or suffered a meltdown and spiralled into panic.

Home, food, family, warm clothing, and, yes, my mother’s expectations were elements that have stayed with me. But until recently, I failed to grasp why they were important to her.

My mother was an enigma. The distance between us stretched from Montreal, where I lived, to Piątek Mały, the tiny village in Poland where she was born. A similar distance had separated her and my grandmother. Where she came from, what she had experienced, why she could not say, made the distance too far.

The silence my mother carried was unsettling for me, but with time, I came to accept it, or at least to push it out of my conscious mind. Her death made it easier for me not to look, and eventually, I stopped thinking about what I didn’t know—the missing piece.

I used to believe I didn’t want what she had settled for. Now, I realize my mother felt like she had captured lightning in a bottle. Against all the odds, she believed her life was extraordinary. It’s taken me a lifetime to figure this out. But I have so much more to tell you before I get to that.