Ihave lived much longer without my mother in my life than with her. Yet she continues to have a huge impact.
There are times when the absence of a mother leaves the same impression as the presence of one. Perhaps an even greater one.
I visualize her as the perfect grandmother to the grandchildren she never got to meet. We would have been the best of friends. I remember the good about her and ignore the sad. I can be everything I don't think she was or ever could be.
I was 17 when she died, leaving my father, sister and me. We were already a small family, and this made us even smaller.
For the last 10 years of her life my mother was ill and depressed, and spent a good deal of her time sitting in the exact same chair in our living room, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee, Coke or rum and Coke.
She was an intelligent woman with a near-photographic memory. She had a keen interest in reading, learning and following what was happening in the world. She even played the saxophone in a marching band when she was in high school.
My mother had a hard time staying healthy or happy in the years that I remember her. I don't recall her doing anything extraordinary with her life, but she was brilliant at making me feel I could do anything I set my mind to. I still find myself searching for that person who can replace the feelings she gave me.
I was always so excited to run home to tell her of something I had accomplished. And I spent a good deal of my time as a teenager trying to motivate her to do the things that made her happy.
Some days I returned from school and she wasn't in her regular chair in the living room. I would often find her in her bedroom with the curtains drawn.
She was sick with fairly serious illnesses on and off for years. Did she get sick because she was depressed or was she depressed because she was sick? If a drug such as Prozac was available then, would her life have been different?
Even now, I cannot sleep in the middle of the day or sit in the same chair too often, and my sister has a habit of opening curtains and blinds wherever she goes.
My father was an entrepreneur and we had a roller-coaster life of financial highs and lows. One day we would have a strange parabolic mirror fitted into the roof of our car above the driver's seat, and the next day someone would drop off a slab of granite on our lawn for another project he was working on. One day we would have money and the next - not so much.
This drove my mom crazy. She craved stability from a husband who was not capable of living that kind of life. It wasn't until she found a way to take control of her life by finding financial independence, gaining the confidence to upgrade her job, that she became more active and seemed happier. She even managed to quit smoking.
It was in this final, happy year that she was diagnosed with cancer, at Christmas, 1981.
She said she was going to fight it and maybe she tried, but it seemed too little, too late.
She died three months after being diagnosed with cancer of the bladder (probably caused by smoking) on March 27, 1982.
She had said to me, "It was so hard to quit smoking - I shouldn't have bothered."
One of her good friends recently told me she had taken her to the hospital the day she found out about the cancer. My mother's first thoughts were of my sister and me. "What am I going to tell my girls?" She was sobbing.
I missed her at my high-school graduation, my university graduation, my wedding, Mother's Days and the births of our four children. Christmas is still a tough time of year.
Yet everything she gave me - through what she did or wasn't able to do - has stayed with me, helping shape me into the person I am.
I never sit still for long. I never went near cigarettes. I prefer wine to rum and Coke, and I run marathons, climb mountains and tried barefoot waterskiing for the first time after I turned 40.
I do things that scare me and I am there for my kids the way she was for me. I delight in their accomplishments the way she did in mine. I have fun doing things with them so they'll think I was a cool mom if I have to check out early.
After she died I felt she might be happier in the afterlife she seemed to believe in. I refused to feel sorry for myself - I had met many people who had lost their mothers earlier in their lives. At 17, I felt I had grown up. I would be okay without her.
Now that I am a mother I see clearly that she gave me the greatest gift of all - she believed in me, and now I believe in me. I hope I can instill that same belief in her grandchildren.
Perhaps I am not really motherless after all.
Katie McLean lives in Toronto.
