Gail L - Artistic Director, Bowen Island, BC

My mom always told me to imagine her with flowers. She would encourage me to see her taking care of her flowers and, in that moment to capture a mental image of her, because that is how she would like me to remember her after she dies. I think that it is a beautiful thing for mothers to nourish their daughters with a sense of themselves alone on this planet after their mothers pass. It really is so hard to consider being in this world without the woman who gave you life, so a bit of fortitude feels essential and appropriate. I love how my mother still takes care of me in this and many other ways even though I am now in my 40s.

Dodie W, Bob W - in Ottawa and Vancouver

Wanda on Mother's Day 2007. Taken an hour before she died.

Dodie W, Bob W - she wrote it, he submitted it, on their mother

Wanda Woodham, a charming, gifted and gregarious, Brazilian woman, died on Mother's Day, May 13, 2007, just one month less a day before her 93rd birthday.

She was fiercely independent, well educated and fluent in Portuguese, English, French and Spanish. She won a scholarship to attend an American university and obtained a degree in science in her second language.

When she shared her scholarship news with her family, her uncle expressed shock that her father was allowing her to go to the U.S.A.

First of all, her uncle insisted, good Brazilian families never allowed unmarried women to go anywhere without a male family member as chaperone and second, to go to the United States of America alone when everyone knew there were no virgins there, was just plain crazy.

Her father disagreed, saying that his daughter had earned the right to choose her own path and she had his blessing. This was unheard of in the Brazil of the 1930s.

In 1944 she married a Canadian and went on to become a high school teacher and later a school administrator and consultant. Her first child was born in 1945, her second in 1950. She lived in Canada for more than 50 years but never lost pride in her Brazilian roots and cultural heritage.

She died while at a special Mother's Day luncheon, with family and friends by her side. She was all dressed up in her best party attire. She was happy, smiling and waving to friends. While waiting for lunch to be served, she put her hand to her chest, turned to her daughter and commented that she felt peculiar. While holding her daughter's hand, she looked up, leaned back, and died.

A good life, a good death. Goodbye, mom.

Jane S - in Vancouver missing her parents and the woods of Ontario

My mother is sweeping the woods. Crazy as it is, the sound fills my heart. She is right outside the log cabin walls and ready to be greeted and teased. We arrived late and she is preparing Birch Rock for our first glimpse of water through trees, of the loon with its baby in the bay.

The woods look fine now, but together we remember the summer that caterpillars ate up all the leaves of the forest canopy, how she felt it was her own life being nibbled away at so quietly. She brags that she’s been out in the laser already and reports on the song she sang on the lake for any early swimmers who might have been listening. Rake set down, her arms lift as she sings it for me—“Oh he’s out with Kate and Jane, then he’s off to sea again, Ship Ahoy ... the naughty boy.” The wind might die down, she says, “So go now. Enjoy yourself.”

My mother is eighty something, and I can barely keep up. I absorb her encouragement and scoot out onto the lake, tacking and looking back at the hillside I dream of in winter. The lake wraps its thick and thin horizon around me, a flowing green arm that comforts and never holds me too tightly.

Once in my confused twenties, I sat fuming on the big rock until my mother squatted beside me, respectfully ignoring the heavy air around me, and she said, “I used to watch you four from up here, your perfect limbs in the sunshine. And I thought how beautiful, how perfect ... and how disappointing that you’d have to grow up and grow warts and get ugly.” She smiles, brushes the path, and leaves an opening for me. With my own babies, I have remembered this moment — remembered that joy is also sadness, that our comings and our goings are one and the same. We show one another the path, saying, “Go now, enjoy yourself.”