Remembering Doreen

On this, the 25th anniversary of the day my mother died, I thought I'd provide a bit of a memorial to her in this, my most public of private places.

My mother was born Isabel Hambrooke on March 21st, 1926. She didn't enter the world alone, however, as her fraternal twin sister Marion arrived just moments later (or was it earlier?). The two of them brought the sibling total in the family to eight, as they joined three older sisters and the same number of brothers.

Two or three years later, after a long bout with illness, Mrs Hambrooke died. Faced with the prospect of raising eight children on his own, Isabel's father put the youngest three up for adoption and returned to his original home in England with the oldest ones. As my aunt always told it, the older children were considered by the despondent man to be "of working age, or at least self-sufficient" (9 and up). It may, in fact, have been the youngest four who were left behind, rather than just the three (that detail's always been blurry in my mind).

[Update 5 years later: Since posting this in 2009, I've learned from Mom's twin sister Dorothy that their father did not take the oldest children with him back to England as I'd thought.  Instead, he abandoned them to fend for themselves, even though some were not even in their teens yet.  It seems inconceivable that a father would do that, and yet that's what exactly what he did.]

While the adoption agencies of the day wouldn't hesitate to split up siblings in their efforts to find abandoned children new homes, they apparently drew the line at twins. As such, my mother and aunt were adopted by a childless couple (the Wilsons) who would rename them Doreen Isabel Wilson and Dorothy Marion Wilson, wanting the pair to have names that welcomed them to their new family (Wilson) while both respecting their original parents' wishes (Isabel and Marion) and more clearly reflecting their relationship as twins (Doreen and Dorothy). I've always loved that part of the story and could never write anything nearly as poignant in any tale that I might concoct!

The pair were in parental limbo for long enough before that happy event, however, that each formed strong memories of their time in the orphanage that would last them a lifetime. My mother developed a strong aversion to tomato soup, for example, because apparently it was served both with great regularity and an overabundance of water. This was, after all, the start of the Great Depression, and if we look at pictures from the time and shudder at the destitute straits of the average family, then just imagine what life must have been like in an orphanage in which meeting ends was a struggle during the best of times! The tomato soup that I grew up enjoying (and which is still a part of my limited diet today) has never been half as diluted as what my mother had to eat every day, though... a fact for which I'm very thankful! (And I don't believe I ever saw my mother partake of a bowl herself, presumably on account of the bad association it still held for her even decades later!)

When the twins were roughly 20 years of age, one of the older brothers came looking for them. Their adopted father had long since passed away, but their adopted mother had tried desperately to keep the girls from learning anything about their biological family. I used to wonder at that, but as I've gotten older it's become easier for me to understand just how insecure she must've been: widowed, with only her two dear girls to love, and the constant threat (in her mind, at least) that at some point they'd throw her over for their original family. Of course it was a completely irrational fear on her part, as anyone who's ever known my mother or aunt would recognize they each would've always had more than enough room in their heart for two families, but I can at least appreciate now just how delicate a position she must have thought she was in.

And so it was that their brother, Lionel, had a tougher time getting in touch with his "baby sisters" than he should have. Eventually, though, the pair would meet him, as well as the other sister (or two) who had gone into the adoption process, and even some of the older brothers and sisters. One had died in World War II, and I would, years later, get my middle name (Linton) from him. Mrs Wilson died a few years after the reunion, but despite her fears, she never lost the affection and devotion of her two girls.

All of this, of course, happened long before I was on the scene. The fact that many of the details about those events are cloudy (both in my memory and in my re-telling of them) says as much about the indifference of youth as it does about the aging process of the brain. Although the material was certainly there for it, I didn't grow up in an atmosphere of "You think you have it rough? Well let me just tell you about what I went through at your age..." while being raised by my mother. She didn't have a bone of that sort in her body. Rather, it was only on those rare occasions when I'd show the slightest interest in those long-gone days - you know, "when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth!" - that Doreen would provide some insight for me into how different our childhoods had been (despite both of us experiencing relative poverty within our very different cultural and social safety nets). Twenty-five years later, of course, I curse the fool that I was back then that I hadn't been more fascinated by and appreciative of the adventure that had been my mother's life before my arrival. Such are the stupidities of youth and the regrets of the middle-aged, I guess.

Because the twin sisters were so close, it should come as no surprise that my aunt Dorothy has always been among my favourite relatives. The bond that existed between the two of them was almost palpable at times, and therefore if I've ever had the luxury of a "surrogate mother," it's been through Dorothy. While she's had a wonderful life herself (still going strong at 82 as I type these words), which has so far included 55 years of marriage, 3 sons, umpteen grandchildren and recently a few great-grandchildren, I'm fairly confident that the worst day of her life coincided with mine, and happened 25 years ago today.

Despite only being 20 years old when my mother died, I still tend to believe that most everything I know about how to live a decent life I learned from Doreen. She made the most of whatever hand she was dealt, and provided a loving and upbeat home for my brother Richard and I even when there was barely enough money to pay the bills or put food on the table. If she felt the hardship of her situation - our family income was below the poverty line for most of the years of my childhood - she certainly never showed it. She taught me that you do the right thing because it's right, and because if everyone behaved that way it'd be a better world. Our situation was never an excuse to cut corners, take advantage of others, or play the pity card.

And when cancer finally got the worst of her, on the evening of January 19th, 1984, she even managed to show me how to die with dignity. As her strength waned and the pain running through her body ratcheted up, she remained more concerned with how her loved ones were going to get past this loss than how she was going to face it. She filled Dorothy's ear with advice on how to help "the boys" through it, and similarly tasked Richard and I with making sure that our aunt didn't succumb to the natural grief with which this turn of events was going to burden her. A very clever woman, my mother: she turned our attention toward each other at a time when all we wanted to think about was her and how each of us was ever going to handle our own pain in trying to get through "life after Doreen." I wish that I had half her smarts; and I can only hope that, when my time comes, I shuffle off this mortal coil with a tenth the class that she did.

It was early on a Thursday evening that she died, after several of us made the decision to take her off the ventilator (in accordance with her wishes, as she'd expressed them earlier). Of all the various reasons why I still remember after all these years that it was a Thursday, here's the stupidest: when I got home that night, and saw that my favourite show (at the time) was on TV, I wondered how it was that Hill Street Blues had suddenly become so meaningless and trivial. The program itself hadn't changed, though... I'd simply grown up a little bit on that cold day in January of 1984.