Rebecca, David and Jonathan's Tributes

I am pleased that all three children wrote something for the Memorial Guestbook for their mother, my beloved Wendy. Jonathan wrote something almost as soon as the book went on line, and says now that he will add to it. David's eulogy appeared on December 4 and Rebecca's on December 5. Here they are in the order they appeared:

Jon: November 22, 2010
I will always miss my mothers humour. Driving around with her we could keep each other laughing all day long, as we did before she became too fragile to go out driving with me. While I was looking for land to buy she would point out places like a tiny island in a beaver swamp and comment on the solitude, the one rock to sit on, and the tiny tree to shade me. Even while joking she could make very wise comments about the properties I was looking at and always gave supportive and excellent suggestions. I'm glad that her sense of the bizarre and funny still carries on in the family.
~
Jon Last,
Ottawa

David took longer, gave careful thought to what he should say, and how:

David, December 4, 2010:

I will be very happy if my children and I can live our lives as well as my mother lived hers. She exemplified the fundamental virtues of human decency and care for others, the necessity for hard work and humility, and a constant desire to improve herself and to serve others.

At many points, her life was not easy but she was tremendously grateful for life’s blessings and took joy in friendships and little moments of beauty, particularly in gardens. My earliest memories of her are associated with a blue-tongued lizard in the garden in Sydney, vegemite sandwiches on sun-bleached wooden benches at a tennis court, being corralled on wet London buses, feeding pigeons in Trafalgar Square on a misty day, a little garden with a pond behind a row house in London, and looking for stranded flying fish on a rolling ship’s deck. If the fish were alive, she would throw them back rather than let them be grilled for breakfast. The smell of diesel on metal still takes me back beyond armoured vehicles in Germany to being cared for on a pitching ship by a mother as sea-sick as us kids. In cold, damp Edinburgh, she sat up on many nights coaching me through breathing exercises to deal with coughing, hacking, and shortness of breath.

I associate my mother not just with tender maternal care, but also with mental and physical toughness, with self-denial, self-discipline and self-deprecation. We were not always good children, and we sometimes got what we deserved. We were urged by example to assume that we were not perfect, and needed work—lots of work. My mother exercised daily throughout her life, restrained her love of sweets, kept a journal, wrote letters prodigiously, forced us to do homework, and challenged us in ways we didn’t always understand at the time. It seemed odd that she could be unfailingly kind to others, yet often tough with us. When we arrived in snowy Edinburgh, I was sent to my first day at a rough public school in Colinton Green nattily attired in blue plaid long trousers, to be introduced by the head mistress as a “wee boy just arrived from AMERICA”. The ensuing experience toughened me up considerably! I think many aspects of my mother’s life were hard, and she understood well that life was more difficult for those who were not tough, and those who shrank from challenges. When I was twelve and a bit of a loner, she told me I was wasting my life and had to get out and do something with it. Discovering scouts, cadets, and the army opened up opportunities for service of which I thought she would approve.

The church in mum’s life is a bit of puzzle to me. She attended regularly for most of her life, despite being married to a devout atheist. In New Zealand, she had been raised in the Anglican Church. In Edinburgh, we lived a short walk from a Church of Scotland, whose dour minister’s hell-fire and brimstone sermons surely reinforced a self-defensive work ethic to justify our existence on this earth in light of eternal suffering awaiting those who fell short. She would put on the roast and drag us down to church every Sunday morning, but often did not seem to enjoy the proceedings much. In Canada, both my sister and I were dragged to St. Matthias Anglican Church, and forced to endure confirmation classes, because she had promised that we would be raised in the Christian faith. “Once you’re confirmed, you can make your own choice, but I made a promise.” We were confirmed, and for me it began a life-long spiritual search, sometimes desultory, which has been a source of richness in my life, for which I must thank her.

Although the Church of Scotland and the Anglican Church in the Antipodes and Canada are all very much part of the establishment, my mother’s sympathies were always with the poor and disadvantaged, and I think as she got on in years, she lost patience with the aspirations of faith and prayer, and focused more and more on the need for good works rather than fine words. She had no affinity for the comfortable hypocrisy of the moneyed middle-classes, lighting candles for the sick but supporting tax cuts. For many years she kept a prayer on her kitchen wall: Thank God for all you have, Ask God for all you need, Trust God for tomorrow. It disappeared after one of the moves, and I sometimes wonder if that marked a turning point, or if she continued to find God within. Like her, I get teary eyed at church services, with the beautiful language of the King James Bible and magnificent old hymns in battered blue hymnals, with tunes that remind me of polished wood and old stone, and generations past. Like her, I miss the lost community of the congregation, but perhaps she knew by the turn of the century that that old world could not be recaptured in churches, and she found it instead in the people of the Museum of Nature, of the Jack Purcell pool and in the communities of the old, the handicapped, and the poor to whom she tirelessly ministered. The “salt of the earth,” the “soul of the community,” and the very best of the “Anglican Church-women” are expressions that were made for Wendy Last.

There was a small service at St. Matthias, but there will be no funeral, and perhaps that is fitting. Mum gave her body to science, and medical students will have a chance to learn from that tiny, tough old body that seemed so much less than all that she had meant to us for so many years. Tin foil and plastic bags were never thrown out, but reused again and again in our house. Styrofoam meat trays became insoles for winter boots. Old wool was unravelled and re-knit as hats for the needy, and sheets or towels that wore out were sewn together to give them years of new life. We would sometimes mock this thrift, which she took in good humour. As I learned to say before I knew what it meant, and as I often said with some reservation of belief, I can say truthfully today that I believe in life everlasting, as she did. I know she lives on in the good works of her life, and in the good lives of those she has left behind. We will miss her, and remember her.
~
David Last,
Kingston and Toronto, Ontario

Finally, Rebecca's tribute appeared the next day, December 5:

December 5, 2010
We moved a lot when I was growing up. Until we arrived in Canada, I attended a different school every year. That meant adjusting to a lot of new neighbourhoods, sometimes whole new countries. Throughout this time, Mum was a fulltime home-maker – our personal “ice-breaker” and bridge-builder for each new location where my father’s itinerate career landed us. Bright spots in my memory fragments – I was 4 – of a grey, poverty-stricken year, living my Dad’s meagre scholarship in London, England, include our Christmas tree. Mum found a nicely-shaped branch, she painted it white and showed us kids how to decorate it, shaping the tinfoil caps off milk bottles into silver bells by pressing them onto a lemon-squeezer. That branch sat in a bucket of damp sand with its glittering bells for long enough that a minor miracle occurred; the branches started to sprout new, green leaves!

In Vermont, she signed me up for pottery classes and a summer workshop of Martha Graham-style dance, where I imagined my 6-year old self very graceful and glamorous, twirling brightly coloured chiffon scarves. My brother David and I had swimming lessons in Lake Champlain during the summer and learned to skate on its glassy surface that winter. Arriving in Edinburgh at age 7, Mum enrolled me in ballet class, which was quite fun the first year. I dropped out the second year when a strict ballet mistress took to rapping protruding body parts with her cane. Subsequently, I rejected Mum’s suggestions of piano lessons – I had no interest in practicing, and Brownies (I didn’t like the idea of having to make my bed regularly to earn a merit badge). Instead, Mum enabled possibly the best kind of childhood. David and I were allowed to wander alone or with friends along the banks of the Braid Burn, a little stream that ran through the sizable park that was, literally, over our back fence. The only provisos were that we stay within the park boundaries and come when we were called. Calling us involved Mum climbing to the top of the compost pile at the bottom of our garden and, summoning a deep breath, blowing an antique coach horn, which reverberated down the valley, sounding rather like a particularly sonorous fart.

Mum was endlessly patient with all our childhood enthusiasms. She lent her oven to an ill-fated attempt to make our own pottery from clay we found along one stretch the Braid Burn. She allowed me a small patch of garden and some radish seeds for my very own first experiment in gardening. She taught me how to sew, starting with dolls’ cloths and later graduating to make many of my own cloths. She dragged us off to Sunday school every week, where we made friends with kids in the neighbourhood. When we arrived in Ottawa, Mum insisted we learn how to ski and took us skating when the Rideau Canal opened for skating each winter. The winter we arrived in Ottawa, Mum signed me up for Girl Guides. Two of the girls I met there remain my close friends to this day.

Mother-daughter relations are often fractious and ours was no exception. If there were times that Mum despaired I would survive intact to adulthood, or become a productive member of society, she never let on. And she always found creative ways to teach me important lessons. I had a large bedroom as a teenager and was not very good at keeping it tidy. One day, I came home from school to find my belongings scattered on the driveway and Mum, fed up with nagging me, tossing more of the detritus from my bedroom floor out the upstairs window. When I got over being furious with her, I started laughing at what a clever way she had found to teach me the value of my possessions. After that I was at least slightly better about picking up after myself.

One day, as quite a young teenager, I remember asking Mum how she could stand to spend so much of her time cleaning house – a task I still dislike to this day. Her answer was that she used the time to day-dream. Her favourite fantasy, she said, was a great big funeral – her own, where everyone would be terribly sad because they missed her so much. Well, we do, Mum, we miss you terribly.
~
Rebecca Last,
Ottawa, Ontario


I can add a footnote about that prayer, carved into a battered piece of plywood with a faded biblical scene pasted along the top -- a scene so faded it was illegible for many years. When we were packing to move from our row house on Waverley Street to the cottage on Echo Drive, Wendy actually threw out this homily. I saw it, retrieved it, and tucked it end on where it wouldn't be seen, in the large wooden box we had acquired somewhere in our ramblings. a junk shop in the Scottish Borders I think. So far as I know, it's still there.

Here too is what I wrote, on November 17, two days after she had died:

Within minutes of meeting her on August 7 1955, I knew Janet Wendy was a very special person. I wanted to know her a lot better than a brief casual chat would permit. Her smile first attracted me, that lovely smile she maintained all her life. Her first remarks to me revealed her sense of fun, her spirit of adventure and her passionate concern for others, whose needs always came first, before her own. By the end of that lovely spring day I had almost made up my mind that she was the girl I wanted to marry and have by my side for as long as we both lived.
Our early courtship by correspondence was a wonderful way for two shy people to get to know each other’s minds before we began to explore each other’s bodies. We were fortunate to experience this reversal of the usual order of things. Perhaps it helped us to bond to each other so securely. We each described our shared journey through life several times; our story is available in several places so there is no need to repeat it here.
Wendy’s life touched many others through groups she belonged to and at an individual level. Her work as a volunteer led to the Governor General’s Caring Canadian Award. Additionally she performed innumerable kindly and thoughtful acts. For instance she sent frequent postcards and short letters to little children because she knew what a thrill it is for a small child to get a letter addressed directly to them. The recipients included our three grandchildren, Sonia and Raman Kumar far away in the Himalayan foothills, some of the children in her New Zealand family, and others too numerous to mention. She visited sick and dying and housebound friends, bringing meals, books, words of comfort.
She described her childhood vividly in the collection of her selected works. I’m sad that despite much urging and encouragement from me and others, she never wrote a similar vivid and coherent account of her fascinating years as a nurse, which included heart-warming and hilarious experiences as a student nurse, a period of nurse-midwifery in a Maori community, hospital and private nursing in Scotland and in England, pediatric nursing in Perth, Western Australia, plastic surgery nursing in New Zealand, and finally while we were courting, more pediatric nursing at the Adelaide Children’s Hospital. She never returned to nursing after we married, other than to nurse our children or me through episodes of sickness, but she described some nursing experiences in her diaries.
She kept a daily diary of the events in her life from before we met until her fingers were too weakened and clumsy for her to write. I have never read that diary – it is hers, her private record. I am looking forward to reading it now. She says it’s a humdrum, boring record of her daily life but I know it is more than that and I am sure I won’t find it boring.
Wendy and I were both children of the great depression of the 1930s. That conditioned us to be frugal, to make do with what we had and not fritter our money away on unnecessary trivia. She outdid me in this in our most impoverished year when she and I and our two small children survived in London for a year on a scholarship stipend intended for a single man. Every week she walked miles to a street market, taking our toddler and his 4-year old sister, often both of them in our rickety old stroller, coming home with the two kids perched atop the cauliflower, potatoes, carrots, mincemeat, and other cheap, nourishing food she had carefully selected.
My life will be lonely and empty without her, but innumerable happy memories of our 55 years together will sustain me for the rest of my life.