It’s hard to believe my mum, Dawn Frearson, has been gone for three years. There are still days when she feels so closeI forget she’s gone. I sometimes have dreams that she’s sick again, and I wake up relieved that she’s not actually living with cancer before I remember that she’s dead and feel the grief again. I’ve been thinking a lot this year about how unfair it is to have lost my mum.
We were up in Vancouver this week, in Kitsilano where we lived when we moved to Canada. As I was remembering the places my mum took us while we lived there, the small moments, I was filled with sadness that she won’t get to take Rex to those places. She won’t get to see him play soccer, learn to ski, act in his first play, race around a playground. She won’t get to learn along as he homeschools in the amazing community we’ve found. It’s just not fair.
I know my mum would love to see all her grandkids as they grow up. Seeing Merritt buy his own truck and snowmobile. Watching Morgan’s volleyball games and getting videos of her cheerleading. Seeing Roland learning how to read and sharing that with Rex. Watching Sophie grow into her own woman in our family and see how kind she is. I’m so grateful for my mum’s presence throughout my life, and I absolutely hate that she doesn’t get to participate in the lives of her grandkids. It’s just not fair.
As I was looking at pictures of her this week, I remembered a poem she had a book of, Warning by Jenny Joseph. In the poem, the woman says “When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple” and talks about all the things she’ll be able to do as an old woman; the freedom she’ll have when she’s an old woman; how she won’t need to care what people think, because she’ll be an old woman. She ends the poem by saying:
But maybe I ought to practice a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.
I do think my mum was practicing for being an old woman, and I’m glad she did, because she never quite made it there. I’m glad she lived with some whimsy. She didn’t put on airs and act how she ought to. One day, a few months before her cancer was found, we were driving out to Kansas to visit family and stopped for gas in North Bend at the truck stop. We just happened to be texting my mum about something and told her where we were, and before we’d finished filling up, she had driven up to come spend 10 minutes with us at a gas station. I think it’s so unfair that my mum didn’t make it to being an old woman, and I think it’s a good reminder to seize the day and do the things now, while we can.
Two Lemons 