My father died in 1985. He was fifty-nine years old. The way he died felt like an accident engineered by fate’s cruel hand: a short tumble down the basement steps, a sharp crack against the leg of a wooden chair, and then a slow bleed inside his head that the doctors tried to ease by cutting him open. For three days, we waited. For three days, we watched monitors beep their measured refrains, hoping, bargaining, wondering. And then, on the third day, he was gone.
In those first nights after he died, what I remember most was not grief—it was quiet. The kind of quiet that seeps into a house like smoke, winding itself into the walls, under doors and slipping through the weave of curtains. For years I had grown used to another rhythm: the crash of a slammed door, the thick slur of words drenched in liquor, my mother’s nervous footsteps down the hallway as she bolted the door to my room, both of us hiding until the storm passed. The silence, when it came, felt wrong, almost obscene. I thought it was the silence my mother had been waiting for. Freedom. Safety. Relief. It was easier for me to admit that it was the silence I had craved for a few years and I wouldn’t be made to feel guilty about it. But when I asked my mother, trying to wriggle something out of her that would affirm we were both feeling the same thing, she told me something I could not understand: she had loved my father. Loved him enough to remember only the man who sang folk songs on Sunday mornings, who danced with her at family weddings, who had been the life of family gatherings, and the man who pressed fresh figs into her palm as though gifting her a jewel.
I was angry. How could she erase the years of fear, the shouting, the sour smell of homemade wine that clung to him? How could she speak of him as though his violence had never been? My memories were sharp and brittle; hers were smoothed by time, worn down into something soft and shining. We were remembering different men.
She was only forty-six when he died. A widow. She wore black in the old way, mourning not just a husband but a whole version of her life that was suddenly cut short. Yet she kept going, almost mechanically, piecing together this strange new existence. She had her work at the hospital, which she loved. The women she worked with—Maria and Christine—became her daily companions. And there was family. Always family.
Toronto’s Portuguese enclave was stitched together by kinship and narrow streets. My grandmother lived a few houses down. My mother’s brothers and sisters were never far—on the next block, at the corner house, across the laneway. Our door on 57 Palmerston Ave (We had moved from 55 Palmerston, next door, when the house got too big for us) was always left unlocked. My Tio David or Tia Maria Jose would simply announce their entrance with a “Whoo hoo, Georgina!” They’d have coffee or some homemade cookies, talk about the fish or vegetables that were on sale at Kensington Market, make plans to gather at someone’s home later that night to watch the telenovela, Dona Xepa, on Omni television or get up to speed about family back home and neighbours. Family was an anchor, heavy and sure. My sister had married and moved away, but even then, it was family that carried my mother, that wove her into its web so she wouldn’t drift. I had convinced myself this would be a new beginning for her, a second chance. A life without fear. A life with possibility. But I was only eighteen when my father passed and life, I was beginning to learn, doesn’t hand out second chances so neatly.
When my mother turned fifty, soon after she was just getting her footing in her new life without my father and not long after, came the diagnosis. Multiple Myeloma. A name I had never heard, a cancer that would teach me the contours of despair. Her blood, her bones—her very marrow—had betrayed her. I had been angry before, but now my anger felt unharnessed and spiteful.
At first, it was hard to believe. My mother still bustled through her days, her dark dresses swishing and her slippers slapping at the back of her heels as she moved between kitchen and garden, between work and family gatherings and church. She was not the kind of woman who got sick. After working at St, Michael’s Hospital over thirty years she had only taken one day off in all that time, and it wasn’t because she was sick. (My mother, sister, and me were Sunday dressed, sitting at Old City Hall to see my father take the stand for D.U.I. The day is seared in my mind) She had endured life in her village in Lomba da Maia, São Miguel, had crossed an ocean with little more than hope stitched into her hem, had found herself in a relentlessly cold place alone, raised children through years of hardship and alcohol-fueled chaos. She was strong. Indestructible. Or so I wanted to think.
The treatments began. Hospital visits. Pills that left her mouth dry and a sourness in her stomach. Needles. A weariness that seeped into her bones. She told me not to worry, but I saw how she folded herself into bed earlier each night, how her hands trembled as she tried to mend a hem, how she winced when she bent to pick up a pot or bend down to pick up the dirt she swept from our front walkway.
And so began our new life together. I was stranded, yes—but not unwillingly. There was anger but no bitterness in it. If anything, I felt strangely called. She had carried me, and when others my age were finishing school and getting on with their lives—moving into apartments and getting away, I would remain. I would carry her.
Those nine years stretched long and short at once. We learned to squeeze joy from small things: a cousin’s birthday, a trip to the Azores she swore would be her last, the smell of sweet bread rising in the oven on Easter morning. When my sister’s children were born, my mother held them with the kind of reverence usually reserved for relics. She kissed their tiny foreheads as if sealing them with her blessing. Her brother David was her anchor during those years. They had always shared a bond that seemed unbreakable, forged in the fields of their childhood, tempered by immigration and labor. When he walked into the room, she brightened, no matter how sick she felt. With her sister, there was laughter, gossip, the shared solace of food. They carried her. We all carried her.
The cancer advanced, slowly at first, then with a speed that frightened me. Her body betrayed her more and more, until the woman who once marched down Palmerston Ave every morning in her sturdy hospital shoes at 5:00 am to board her Queen Street streetcar to get to work could barely shuffle from her bedroom to the kitchen table. Her skin grew sallow, her eyes shadowed. And yet, she still insisted that I get on with my life, marry the woman that would become my wife. The world didn’t stop for her or for anyone else. Wearing black, as though she were still mourning, she urged me to move forward. “In this country, I’ve learned many things,” she’d say, “You’ve got to put one foot in front of the other. The minute you stop, the snow will gather around your feet and turn into a block of ice.”
Sometimes, late at night, I would hear her whispering prayers in the dark, her voice low but steady. I didn’t know if she prayed for healing, or for release. Maybe both.
In those last months, our lives shrank to hospital rooms and transfusion chairs. The hospital smelled of antiseptic and burnt coffee, the air heavy with resignation. My mother would sit in a recliner, a blanket tucked around her shoulders, her arm outstretched with the IV threaded into her vein. The blood bags hung above her like dark fruit, dripping life back into her. I sat beside her for hours, listening, sometimes in silence, sometimes to the quiet chatter of our own making. She spoke about her childhood in Lomba da Maia, of climbing stone walls to steal figs, of washing laundry at the age of five, of the hunger that never seemed to end, and of the difficult days when she first arrived in Canada. She spoke of my father, too, but more gently now, as though both memory and forgiveness had softened him into something bearable. But what I remember most about the solemn minutes and hours spent by her side . . . she spoke about how she had lived her life the best she could—without regret. “Who could ask for more,” she’d say. “I did what I could,” she told me one afternoon, her voice thin but certain. “I loved as best I knew how. I worked. I raised you and your sister. I loved a man who did not know how to love back in the same way. I endured many things and I kept the family together.”
I wanted to argue. I wanted to tell her she deserved more—that she deserved safety sooner, that she deserved joy untainted by suffering. But she silenced me with her eyes, dark and steady, the eyes of a woman who had already made peace. Those hours in the transfusion ward taught me a different way to love. Love not as possession or demand, not as anger for what was lost, but as presence. Simply being there, steady as the drip of blood into her veins, unflinching, uncomplaining.
I often thought back to that day my father died. The relief I felt at the silence, the anger I felt when my mother spoke of him with love. I realize now that her ability to remember only the good was not weakness. It was strength. It was survival. She had lived through chaos and chosen memory over bitterness. That was her gift.
I was not so forgiving. I carried the jagged glass. But through those widow years, and especially in those final months, I began to see how love and grief often fold themselves together, inseparable. She was the reluctant widow, not because she wished to remarry or because she clung to the past, but because she never wanted this role at all. Widowhood had been forced on her. And then illness. And then the slow dwindling of everything she had fought so hard to build.
I remember the last summer with clarity. The roses in the backyard blooming pink, the morning glory climbing fences and telephone poles. The sound of children riding their bikes or playing in the laneway. My mother sitting in the backyard shelling peas, thin and tired, but smiling as my niece traced circles on her arm.
“You see?” she told me. “God still gives us sweetness.”
Looking back now, I see those nine years as both a burden and a blessing. I was given time—time to know my mother not just as a parent, but as a woman. Time to understand her strength, her contradictions, her stubborn faith. Time to witness how a woman who had lost so much still managed to love, to forgive, to remember only the good. I used to think her widowhood was a kind of prison, something that shrank her life. But I see now it was also a testament. To endure loss, to hold fast to family, to live with courage even when the body betrays you—that is its own kind of triumph.
The reluctant widow. That is how I will always remember her. Not unwilling to love, not unwilling to live, but unwilling to let death define her.
“Love as presence”. She understood that and it moves me deeply. I think she knew your father’s soul and held it. Regardless of the hardship. We seem so quick today to shed disappointing loves. Maybe this is a shortsighted reality that has us miss out on much that life can truly offer.
What a moving tribute to your mother Anthony! This one, among many other of your explorations of your ancestry, brought me to tears. She was remarkably full of grace… and taken too soon. I’m convinced that our immigrant parents were made of a stock that we (or at least I) will never fully understand; we’re left to marvel at their resilience, courage and strength. Thanks for sharing.