MOURNING BY PROXY: Some Thoughts About My Mother and the Queen

 

Two days ago, my brother Ron texted to tell me that Queen Elizabeth had died.  You may be wondering why my American brother felt moved to share this with his American sister.  Even more puzzling will be my confession that I felt emotional upon receiving this news.

 

         It’s not that The Queen loomed large in my life.  She did not.  I am a not a royalist, and I did not pay close attention to the British royals.  Oh, sure, I enjoyed gossip about her disfunctional family as much as the next person, but, really, what is royalty for in the twenty-first century?

 

         There is this, though -- the queen was a bit like furniture.  Let’s call her political furniture, a world leader who was always where we expected her to be, doing what we expected her to do.  She was the one unchanging political fact of the twentieth century.  So, it’s odd, even dislocating, that she is gone.  

 

         But I don’t think that is why my brother texted me, and it is not why I felt emotional upon hearing the news.  

 

It was all about my mother.

 

My mother, who was a Scot, loved the queen, and, while it is true that she would bristle if anyone in her adopted America mistook her Scottish accent for an English accent, she was proud to be British. And she did love the queen, spoke of her as if she knew her personally. So, given that they were on a first-name basis, I will here refer to the queen simply as Elizabeth.

 

My mother was born in Glasgow six years before Elizabeth’s birth in London. She left this life at age 93; Elizabeth made it to 96.  And, although their circumstances could not have been more different, both came of age during, and were shaped by, what my parents’ generation simply referred to as “the war.” (WWII)  

 

         My mother always spoke with admiration about Elizabeth’s father, who, after ascending the throne upon his brother’s abdication, stayed with his wife in London during The Blitz.  Elizabeth and her sister spent most of the war at Windsor Castle, 20 miles outside of London.  My mother and her sister, having little choice, remained in Glasgow, which was bombed during the Blitz.  

 

In 1940, when she was 20, my mother supported the war effort by joining The Women’s Forestry Service, doing what was then considered men’s work, while the men were off fighting.   

 

 

In 1944, when she was 18, Elizabeth joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women’s branch of the British army, as an auto mechanic.  

 

 

 

            In 1943, when she was 23, my mother married my father.  She gave birth to her first child, eleven months later.  Two more children followed.  In 1947, when she was 21, Elizabeth married her prince.  Her first child was born a year later.  Three more children followed.

 

Elizabeth was still a princess when my parents left Scotland for the new world, and when the princess became queen a few years later, my mother proudly displayed her portrait, along with one of Prince Philip, on our living room wall.  So, although most of you probably picture Elizabeth as an old woman, the young queen was a fixture of my childhood. 

 

 

For all of her long life, my mother followed Elizabeth with great attention, speaking of her often and with affection, perhaps even a bit of wistfulness. I think the royal family was a link to the life she had reluctantly left behind when my father decided that the family should move -- first to Canada, and then to the U.S. 

 

         And, so, I am calling my emotion over the queen’s death mourning by proxy.  I am my mother’s proxy, feeling some of what I believe she would have felt.  (I am deeply grateful that she did not live to hear the news of Elizabeth’s passing.) Or maybe it is that the queen was a proxy for my mother.  As long as the queen was alive, my mother’s parallel life wasn’t quite over.   

 

         I don’t know if the monarchy will survive the queen’s passing, and I don’t much care.  I just know that two young women grew up and grew old, more-or-less in tandem, and the second of them has died.   

 

For this I mourn.  

 

 

            

 

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

At a family dinner for my birthday last November, one of my bonus sons** suggested that everyone take turns describing me in one word. And so they did, each in turn, going around the table.  It was lovely and interesting and touching.  When it was my son-in-law Peter's turn, he did not hesitate.  "Curious" was his word.

I was flattered. I am, after all, as the title of this blog makes clear, not getting any younger.  To be seen as curious feels like a high compliment.

And, indeed, I am.  Curious.  I love to learn new things, to read about stuff I heretofore knew nothing about.

I love discovering new words, new writers, new poems and novels.  I love being surprised by new ways of approaching old problems.

I am the kind of person who asks questions of the dentist when her mouth is filled with equipment.

Curiosity seems a fine way to ward off aging.

Here is something cool my curiosity recently led me to.  I have been doing research for a writing project.  This involves reading about 19th-century Glasgow, as well as reading books written during this period. In the course of my reading, I came across the word speir.   When I looked it up, I learned it means inquirer.  Thus, my name --Speirs -- reflects my curiosity.

I love this.

Before discovering its meaning, I never much liked my name.  For one thing, no one can spell it.  Even when I spell it out slowly, it gets written down as Spiers or Spears or Speers or Speris.  For another thing, people think I am German, which would be OK if I were German, but I am not. I am Scottish.  My folks left Scotland for Canada shortly before my birth, and Speirs really is a Scottish name.

Here's proof.

When I was in Scotland last autumn, I took a picture of this street sign not far from my aunt's home in a suburb of Glasgow.



And then there is this Edinburgh-based estate agent company (realtors to Americans).



And, finally, there is Glasgow's Speirs Wharf.

Regardless of my background, I am, of course, an American.  But being a naturalized citizen, my roots feel very close. And now that I know its meaning, I feel more warmly toward my surname.

There is still, however, the matter of my first name.  Growing up, I was the only Marjorie among the Lindas, Cathys, Barbaras, Carols, Marilyns, and Susans.  No one under the age of 80 had my name and it has not come back into fashion during any decade of my lifetime.  

Is it not odd that we don't get to choose the name by which we present ourselves to the world? On the other hand, if the choice were not given to our parents, we might wander about without a given name for years. And what are the odds we would want to live with a name we might have chosen at, say, age three? 

When I became an American citizen at age 19, I considered changing my first name to Heather.  (This could easily have been accomplished as part of the citizenship paper work.) I would simply ditch Marjorie. After all, as with my surname, who could spell or say it?  To this day, when I order a sandwich, I give my middle name to avoid hearing the person behind the counter yell out "Mayjorie" (no 'r') or "Margarine."

I am glad I did not make the change to Heather for I would have been stuck with a name that, for me, lost its appeal over time.  A decade or so later, though, I again semi-seriously considered changing my name. This time, I toyed with Anne (my middle name) Thomson (my mother's birth name). I quickly realized, however, that I would still have spelling issues.  I could imagine myself repeating, "That's Anne with an 'e' and Thomson, no 'p.'"

And so I (mostly) made peace with my name (just don't call me "Marge") and gave the name Anne to my first daughter and Mara to my second born. Simple names, I believed, and yet, Anne, while living in London, introduced herself to someone and was met with, "Your name is "N?." And I sometimes have to correct those who would pronounce Mara ( properly Mahrah) as Mayrah, with a long "a" in the first syllable.  

I conclude, therefore, that there are no simple names.  I am sure that people can find a way to mishear and misspell or mispronounce Smith or Jones.  I can hardly begin to imagine the plight of those Americans who do not have European-sounding names.  And I am certainly aware that any challenges presented by my name are nothing compared to the challenges of those whose "Black-sounding" names keep them from getting job interviews or other perks of our white-centered culture.  Sure, there was a time in my youth when my female first name might have kept me from opportunities, but at present the only prejudice Marjorie is likely to evoke is the assumption that I am ancient. And now that I am getting up in years, I can't even complain about that.

And so I will sign off here with the full name given me by my parents -- Marjorie Anne Speirs.  

And just out of curiosity, I will ask:  How about it, readers -- what have people done to your names and would you change them if you could?  

**I have three stepsons.  A few years ago when I was casting about for a term that would indicate our relationship, without making them "step" or claiming to have raised them, a friend suggested "bonus sons."  This seems to cover the pleasure of my having them in my life, without my taking any credit for their awesomeness.  I guess that makes their wives "bonus daughters," and the man one of them married, another "bonus son."  Such bounty.

TODAY WE (BELATEDLY) BURIED MY MOTHER

Today we buried my mother's ashes.

They had been sitting in a closet for over five years.  Every once in a while, I would be rummaging through the closet and would come across the black velveteen bag containing the box in which her ashes resided.  I was always surprised.  Dang.  Mom's ashes.  I would quickly shove the box to the back of the closet and shut the door.

What was I supposed to do with her ashes?   What was I supposed to do with her?  I asked my brothers.  They had no ideas.  

Those of you who follow this blog (thank you) know that my relationship with my mother was fraught, and that my feelings about her have softened since her death.   See:  Today I Missed My Mother.  Now that she is gone, I am no longer holding my breath or biting my tongue.  I have released my longing for a mother with whom I could talk, with whom I could feel at ease.  I know that she did the best that she could.  And so did I.

Still, there was the issue of the ashes.  

Even if the relationship hadn't been fraught, what do you do with the ashes of a person who has lived in three countries on two continents?  A few months back, I tried to write about it:

For five years

your ashes

have lain in their box

nested in a velvet bag.

For five years

I have passed 

With unseeing eyes

The closet where they rest.

But recently, occasionally,

I have felt their restlessness,

their desire to be set free

from the smothering clothes

that hang above.

Where do they belong, these remnants

of you that are not you at all?

In Scotland where you began?

The place you ever turned your face

with eyes of longing.

In Canada where you spent your

days as a young mother?

In New Jersey where you birthed

a second son and raised us all?

In Florida where you warmed your

Jersey-chilled bones?

Or here

in the Pacific Northwest

where you spent your final years?

Where were you happy?

Were you ever truly happy

once you education was cut short

so that you might enter the world of work?

Are you free now of

the losses and resentments

that haunted you?

Will you be happy with your 

ashes in a local stream ?

Will anywhere do? 

Or must I travel

to the land of your origin,

the place of your happy girlhood,

to set things right for you?

In the end, I decided that a local stream would have to do.  I needed to get her out of the closet.  So, I made a plan with my daughters and their father (who was kindness itself to my mother) and my husband.  We would go to a local forest and spread the ashes in or near a stream.  We chose a date and a rendezvous place.

And then, last night, on the eve of the planned ash spreading, I knew that this plan wasn’t right. The place would be too public.  It had nothing to do with my mother.  I was thinking about the fact that my cousin Judy had recently buried my Aunt Pat’s ashes in my aunt’s garden.  A lovely idea, but my mother had resided in an assisted living facility for the 12 years before her death.  She didn't have a garden.  

It was coming on toward 9 p.m.  Too late to change the plan.  I was tired and trying to finish defrosting the freezer by whacking at the ice with a hammer – seven hours is long enough to wait – right?   As I banged away, the idea wouldn’t leave me. We didn’t need to go to a public place; we could bury the ashes in my garden. 

And so I called the others and changed the plan. This morning, my husband arose early and dug a hole.  I, at the suggestion of Anne, my eldest, made a quick trip to a nursery to buy a plant. I came home with a spirea and (of course) a couple of heather starts.

It was a cloudy and unseasonably chilly morning.  We gathered next to the place where Bill had dug, and took turns pouring ashes into the hole.  (I kept back a small portion of the ashes to take to Scotland in September.)  Roger, my ex—father of my mother’s granddaughters, offered us each a “wee dram” of scotch from the cap of the whiskey bottle he had brought with him.  Mara, my youngest, placed the plants.  

I read Rabbie Burns’ My Heart’s in the Highlands, and it all felt just right.

We dispersed – Anne and Mara going off with their dad for a Father’s Day lunch, Bill and I heading out for lunch ourselves. It wasn’t quite time to resume the day’s activities.

I felt and feel at peace now that my mother’s ashes are out of the closet and in the ground.  

I hope that you are at peace, as well, Mom.  I pray that your soul is flying free over the highlands.  

GENES ACROSS AN OCEAN

     (for Margaret Patience Shepherd Speirs MacLeod    May 27, 1919 - September 9, 2018)

My Aunt Pat, my father's little sister, would have turned 100 this week.  After her passage last September into the great mystery that we call death, there were no family members left of my parents' generation.  She took with her her memories of a world war and its aftermath and all of the secrets and lessons of a 99-year life.  Following my Uncle Syd's death in 2000, Aunt Pat had lived alone in her semi-detached house outside of Glasgow until just over a year ago, when my cousin Judy (her only child) felt she had no choice but to move her into a care facility.

I felt surprisingly emotional when Judy emailed me from her home in Scotland to tell me that her mother had died, and I have been pondering that emotion ever since.  Certainly, the death was not unexpected -- Aunt Pat had been failing for a while, and it's not as though I had spent a great deal of time with her.  She, like my other Scottish relatives, lived thousands of miles from me, my family's immigration (while I was in utero) from Glasgow to Quebec Provence, and a couple of years later to New Jersey, having left me bereft of close relatives as I grew up, and my further move to the Pacific Northwest as an adult, having widened the distance..

Still, Aunt Pat was important to me.  In my childhood, she was one of the shadowy relatives with whom my mother exchanged air letters, those bits of light-blue, tissue-thin folded paper through  which people kept in touch with geographically distant family before the advent of email, texts, Skype, and relatively inexpensive phone calls.  (There were never phone calls to Scotland when I was a child, not even when my maternal grandparents died one year apart - it would have been unthinkable to my parents or their far-off kin to spend that kind of money.  The news of these deaths came via telegram.)  The steady flow of mail, together with my mother's stories, kept me aware of my distant family.  (Most effective in this regard were the occasional cards with a pound note or two enclosed--very exotic.)

It wasn't until 1971 that I met Aunt Pat in person.  In the summer of that year, I traveled to Scotland and spent the better part of three months with Aunt Pat, Uncle Syd, and Judy at their home outside of Glasgow.  It did not take long for me to recognize my aunt as not only kin, but kindred.  I confess that I often felt alienated from my father during my growing-up years, yet I felt a near-immediate connection to his sister.  I recognized myself in her; I could relax in her company.

I was fortunate enough to spend more time in Aunt Pat's company during her infrequent visits to the U.S. in the years that followed and on a couple of visits to Scotland during the past ten years.  I think she was about 94 the last time I saw her in person (there were a few Skype visits after that), and she remained delightful throughout all of those years.

Aunt Pat was a gardener; I wasn't one in 1971 when I noted the pleasure she took in toiling among her vegetables and flowers, but it wasn't long after that I started rooting around in the dirt, and I have not stopped in the decades since.  I am thinking about her today as I prepare to leave my home to visit relatives in the midwest, and to tear myself away from my garden, which is springing into full bloom even as I prepare to get on an airplane.

Here is something I wrote back in the '90s about that long-ago trip to Scotland:

                 "I am sure I admired my aunt's garden, but I could not      understand her devotion.  I remember clearly my puzzlement over her statement that she hated to travel in the summer because it was so hard to leave her garden.

                "How could a small patch of growing things possibly compare with the adventure of traveling?  The idea didn't bear further contemplation.

                 "Now, 20 years later, I understand.  I understand how a patch of green and living things can capture the imagination and soothe the soul.  I understand how--after patiently waiting out the winter--one could be reluctant to leave a garden at the moment when it is at once most in need of attention and most worthy of admiration."*

And now, a couple of decades on, as travel seems less of an adventure and more of a wrench, I continue to share Aunt Pat's desire to stay close to home during gardening season.  By the time I return from my trip, many of the spring blossoms will have fallen and weeds will be running riot. I hope the neighbors enjoy looking at my flowers while I'm gone and kindly overlook the weeds.

And I hope I will, like my aunt, be fit enough to garden well into old age.

May it be so.

     *Back in the '90s I wrote a weekly garden column for The Columbian (Vancouver, Washington's daily paper).  I didn't ask permission to quote these few paragraphs, so mum's the word.  

   With Aunt Pat in 2013

   

ROOTS (or where is the place we call home?)

            Breathes there the man with soul so dead


            Who never to himself hath said,


            This is my own, my native land!


                                    - Sir Walter Scott

           

          The story begins with a wedding in wartime Scotland.  The year is 1943.  The bride is 23, the groom 31.  In their wedding photo, they look happy and as cautiously hopeful as is possible under the circumstances.  

            Unlike most new grooms, the man does not immediately leave his bride to rejoin a military unit.  He has not been permitted to enlist because his work as an engineer building ships on the River Clyde in Glasgow is too important to the war effort.  Instead, because housing is in short supply, the newlyweds set up housekeeping with the bride’s parents. 

            Just under a year later, the man and woman produce a son.  Five years later, the war is behind them and the man and woman are living in a flat of their own.  Still, rationing continues, and the man is eager to move to Canada, where his sister reports that there is housing, work, and no rationing.  The woman, who is pregnant again, is not eager to leave her family or her home country.  The man prevails.  The man and woman move to a town near Montreal, where their baby daughter is born. 

            Two years later the family moves again, this time to the United States.  Soon after that, another baby is born in New Jersey, where the family has settled. 

            The man and woman are my parents.  I am the Canadian baby.  The little boy born in Scotland is my brother, Jim.  The American baby is my brother, Ron.             

            And, so, we three children are raised in New Jersey.  We are just like all the other American kids at our American schools.  Sort of.  Other kids have grandparents who don’t speak English very well, but my parents are  different.  Sure, they speak English, but not in the same way that the other kids’ parents speak it.  I am not troubled by their accents---some of my friends ask me to let my mother answer the phone so they can listen to her.  (This was long before cell phones - back when everyone in the house shared the land line.) No, it’s their word choices that set up land mines for me.  My mother says “wee” instead of “small," and “dear” instead of "expensive."  An advertisement is an “advert,” not an ”ad.”  And don’t get me started on “Hoovering,” the word of choice for “vacuuming.”       

            So what’s the big deal?  From my perspective now-- nothing.  But, as I child, I live in horror of saying the wrong word and enduring the teasing that will follow.  I am not a child with the force of personality to start a trend with my word choices.  I am, instead, a child who wishes to fit in, to get by without making waves, to not draw attention to herself.

            Still, my Scottish heritage is important to me.  I enjoy the gatherings of family friends, Scottish immigrants all, at holidays. And as I get older, and become more sure of my ability to use the right phrases in the right context, I become more comfortable with my parents’ use of language.  I even enjoy it. 

            And yet, Glasgow, the place my mother always refers to as “back home,” remains a mystery to me.  I live in New Jersey.  I cannot conceive of any place else.  When we plan a trip to New Hampshire one summer, I overhear the milk man (yes this is a long time ago) say to my mother, “It’s really different there.”  I am maybe 12.  I ask myself, “What could ‘different’ look like?”  My imagination fails. 

            And then I see New Hampshire.  And over the next few years, I visit Canada, where my aunt, uncle, and cousin still live.  And I visit Florida with a neighbor.  And I visit Maine with my best friend’s family.  And I begin to understand what “different” means. 

            When I am 21, I spend most of a summer with an aunt, uncle, and cousin in Scotland.  I learn about really different.  I am delighted with my relatives and my heritage. 

            When I am 24, I opt for different.  No, I don’t move to Scotland.  But I leave New Jersey and move to North Carolina and, a year later, to the Pacific Northwest, where I live still. 

            So that’s the arc – conceived in Scotland, born in Canada, raised in New Jersey, and long-time resident of the Pacific Northwest. 

            But what if my folks had not emigrated?

            I found myself thinking about this last month during a visit to Scotland.  My husband and I looked for, and found, the flat where my parents last lived before they left Glasgow.  

           I stood in front of the building feeling very strange.  I imagined my pregnant mother coming in and out of the basement flat with my brother.  I looked up and down the street and pictured her pushing me in a pram.  I asked myself, What if they hadn’t left?  What if I had grown up with my cousins and aunts and uncles?  What if I had known my grandparents?  Who would I be now?  Clearly, I would have a different accent.  I would have a very different life.  (There’s that word again.)  Another “different” that I can’t quite bring into focus.

          I don’t wish that my parents had stayed in Scotland.  How could I?  I wouldn’t have the kids that I have.  Or the husband that I have.  Or the friends that I hold dear.  The places of my conception and birth notwithstanding, this is my own, my native land. Home is where I have put down roots and centered myself.  I feel it every time that I fly home to Portland from somewhere else, and cross the bridge over the Columbia River into Washington State.  I am home.

            And yet. 

            And yet, I know that I am also a Scot.  And that if it weren’t for my father wanting something different, I would live in Scotland still.  I would say “wee” and “adverts.”  And I would be quite at home. 

            And that would have been a good life as well.