“Bye, Mom. I love you. See you in two weeks.” With a hug and kiss I left my 87-year-old mother sitting in her recliner, feet propped up in an effort to ease the edema that had caused her legs to swell to double their normal size. It didn’t occur to me that those would be my final words to her, that in two days I would be giving my consent for a do not resuscitate order by telephone.
“Isn’t it strange that you mentioned your mom in a column last week,” commented a friend on Monday. The peculiarity was not lost on me, particularly after I had spent some time looking through a box of photos that included early pics of my grandparents, whose emigration history was the subject of my last telephone chat with my mother.
Mary Eckersley was born in Michel at the tail end of the Roaring Twenties, growing up poor in a grubby mining community that divided ethnic groups — Italians, Slavs, Germans, most tended to live in clusters, probably because they spoke little or no English when they arrived. Grandpa Bath came from a family of coal miners in Northumberland, but being English was his only advantage. With no other work skills to draw from, he, like his father before him, spent his working life underground, blasting coal seams and loading tramcars to send the bituminous coal to the Earth’s surface.
Mom, her older brother Ron, sister Ada and little brother Harry, grew up in the Great Depression, when miners were lucky to get a day of work a week. Grandma Bath kept the home together, her great joy coming each Saturday afternoon when she sat by the radio to listen to CBC Radio broadcast Metropolitan Opera performances. She sat listening and reading along with the libretto summary that she got in the mail. Ron headed off into the great unknown when the Second World War broke out and Mom, a good student, put her energy into the piano lessons that her family somehow maintained.
She graduated as the war wound down and headed off to study nursing in the Provincial Normal School in Victoria. She was a quick learner and soon realized that a life of dealing with blood and illness was not for her. She stuck out the first year, then transferred over to the education department and graduated as a teacher. She often reminisced about her first job. Billeted with a family in Newgate, just north of Montana in what Elk Valley residents referred to as the South Country, she taught all grades in the one-room school. She started early on winter days, when a wood stove had to be stoked to heat the classroom.
Mom was teaching in Fernie in the early 1950s when she met William James Eckersley, a miner who had moved on to work at a sawmill — the opposite path taken by his dad, who had started out operating a portable sawmill before eventually heading down into the mines, where he would work until retirement. They married in 1953 and gave birth to me a year later. In 1956 they packed up and headed for Calgary, where a friend helped dad land a job with Alberta Government Telephones. The hours were regular, the pay decent and, most importantly, the work safer than in mines and sawmills.
I think it was to her regret that Mom didn’t get her teaching licence in Alberta. Raising a family in a working class neighborhood ate up Dad’s salary and Mom’s time, but eventually she took a job as a kindergarten teacher and she was exceptionally good at her work.
There was never a time when my sisters and I weren’t her top priority and, when Dad sunk into one of his lengthy bouts of depression, she was steadfast and strong. We grew up knowing we were loved and cared for and her life with dad got better after he retired. I have no doubt that their last years together were their best.
When Dad died, she came to live with us in Creston, then spent some years back in Fernie before returning to Calgary four years ago.
I think the great gift that we received as children was in having a safe, loving home and a mother who always welcomed our friends. Any of them who had problems at home knew the Eckersley residence was a safe place to be, a caring and non-judgmental respite from some occasionally ugly situations.
We learned our values not from lectures but from her actions. My sisters and I have friends whom to this day think of Mary Eckersley as an angel, a mother figure who was there when they needed her most. Auntie Ada, when I called with the bad news last week, also used the word angel as she struggled to accept that her older sister was gone. I can think of no better tribute.
Lorne Eckersley is the publisher of the Creston Valley Advance.