Social activist. Feminist. Mother. Adventurer. Born Dec. 8, 1920, in Johannesburg; died Oct. 23, 2016, in Ottawa, of pneumonia; aged 95
My mother loved to laugh uproariously as adventures unfolded. Who among her children can forget the camping trip to the Maritimes with forgotten tent poles? And the mother who convinced a machinist to fabricate new ones so we could get back on the road? Or the stream of wild animals that we sheltered? Or the bike trips with siblings, because no one else in the neighbourhood was allowed to ride so far?
Dorothy was a mother who read to us every day at lunch from The Wind in the Willows or Swallows and Amazons. I don't know anyone else who came home from school and got a story with their meal.
Between the adventures and the animals, Dorothy was devoted to social justice and fighting inequality wherever she encountered it. Perhaps her social conscience stemmed from growing up in South Africa and seeing as a child how inequitably whites and blacks and coloureds were treated around her. She credited her railway employee father with giving her "socialist club" literature, which helped her to interpret what she was experiencing. She also had an aunt active in a group that was a precursor to the Black Sash, who demonstrated to Dorothy an alternate way to operate under apartheid.
These formative experiences shaped a life of service that included a postwar market garden in England and, in Canada, parenting five children, leading our Brownie troop, singing in the church choir and working with refugees.
As we grew up, Mum made sure to visit all her children wherever we lived: Helen in Costa Rica, Nick in Jamaica, Bridget on Canada's West Coast, Simon in Ottawa and Tim in small-town Ontario. Her own life included tragedy – her first child, Ruth, drowned as a toddler in 1945; her son Nick was killed in a small plane crash in 1989. I believe these experiences deepened her determination to make the world a kinder place.
Dorothy went back to school in her 40s for a BA in sociology and then worked as a social worker with the Children's Aid Society for 16 years. She took a pragmatic approach, eliminating bureaucracy wherever possible. She was devoted to her "client" children and families.
The list of organizations Dorothy served with is lengthy, but they include Advocacy Centre for the Elderly, which produced the first forum on elder abuse and a rights manual for all seniors in residential care, and Older Women's Network, which opened a co-operative housing building in Toronto. She also worked to save Medicare, expand Pharmacare and improve long-term care facilities.
Dorothy also received a list of awards as long as your arm. Of course she didn't think she deserved them, she was just keeping busy, doing what needed to be done to make a better world. I think Mum was proudest of the Agnes Macphail award from East York for contributions for women's and seniors' rights, which she received in 2003. It represented everything she believed in.
Even after death, Mum was still making herself useful. Her body was accepted for research in a medical facility.