Kay

My mother-in-law Kay died. Howard's mother, The Boys' grandmother.

She was 97, although she was a true girl after my own heart as she never admitted to anything older than 92. She didn't like getting older, not one little bit.

She had lived in Victoria for many years but for the past year or so she had been living in an assisted living home in Parksville, "just down the road" from us, so I've been able to see her much more often than before. Up till now we've never lived in the same province, and at times not even in the same country. For the past 7 years, it hasn't been easy being so far away.

I knew her in the last third of her life, and in past days as I've been sorting through the boxes of belongings I've been looking through all the pictures, searching for images and clues to the life she lived before I knew her. Even though it's fleeting and I know I'm making things up, it's been fascinating.

In Kay's final days and hours, I sat in her room thinking all the time about my own mother and her death, as well as my father who died even younger. Leafing through the photo albums and the piles of unsorted snapshots in the proverbial shoeboxes, I have been struck by how similar all those pictures were to those of my mother. The same clothes and hair and background living rooms, and families in front of the family home with the street number prominently displayed in the background. The family dog occasionally taking center shot. The black and whites, edged with wide bands of white, glued or placed in little corner triangles on thick black paper. Same poses. Most of the photos had people in them and they were invariably lined up in some way, all facing the camera. They made me smile, especially the ones from youth. Four or five young people, boys and girls, posed in front of a car by some kind of scenery. Pictures of young women in bathing suits, poses on rocks, face up to the sun shining on the sides of their faces. Pictures of Aunt Gay, curious and adventurous, as a young woman reminds me of Maristella.

Kay and her sister Gay (who died about 6 years ago at the age of 89) were great beauties and right up to the end of their lives had very upright, almost proper demeanors, hair always done, manicured, smartly dressed with jewelery. I found pictures of them as children, more of them as young women, newlyweds, in Kay's case a young mother. I identified their own parents and started picking them out of the pictures (one look at their mother and you could see where that "demeanor" comes from), and saw many many more faces, most unlabeled. I found the story in pictures and documents of a beloved younger brother who went off to war at age 19 and was killed the following year in Europe. Letters between the father and the military show the anguish and the need for answers and recognition. Lives with laughter and great sadness as well.

It has helped me tremendously to look at these photos and to visualize these younger lives. Whatever works, I suppose. I feel like I have a hole in my heart and I know from experience that that hole never ever goes away.  And it doesn't matter what age you are (or I am) when you leave.

Katharine Mary (nee Heming) Brown - 1914-2012