A Celebration of Wendy's life

Here is the text on which I based my remarks at the Celebration of Wendy's life, on Friday February 11, 2011, a few days before what would have been our 55th wedding anniversary.

Wives usually outlive their husbands, so widows are left to tidy up. I did a gentlemanly act, allowing Wendy to go first: I spared her the dismal work of clearing up when half of a long, loving partnership dies.
Janet Margaret Last, known as Wendy (recalling her maiden name, Wendelken) had no funeral, because – in a final altruistic act – she donated her body to the University of Ottawa. No funeral, so instead we have this celebration.
There is plenty to celebrate. Wendy’s life celebrated humanity: how an altruist can unobtrusively make life better for individuals, communities, society. Her acts made a difference for the better, to a great many people.
She lived 85 productive years. Most were spent doing really good and useful things. Hers was a productive life in many different ways, and her actions touched the lives of many others through her commitment to volunteer work and innumerable little private acts of kindness and words of comfort.
Self-discipline gave her the strength of will to continue some activities when a lesser person would have given up. One of her volunteer jobs was to read books for the blind. These weren’t classics or novels, but textbooks and specialized manuals not available in the vast library of books on tape. She used to come home from one series of recording sessions in a state of gibbering twitchiness. She had been working through arcane instruction manuals for radio operators: not only Morse Code in all its infinite variety, but far more difficult to describe, the circuitry of radio equipment that radio operators had to understand and pass exams in before they qualified.
She could express complex concepts in simple language, and under trying circumstances. When David was about 4, we were in a crowded second class railway compartment a few minutes before the train was due to leave Liverpool Street Station in London, for Cambridge. Without warning, out of the blue, David broke the silence to ask that important question all small children ask, “Mummy, where did I come from?” She took a deep breath, looked at me with an expression I’ll never forget, and told him, in simple words, that Daddy had planted a seed in her tummy and he’d grown from that seed. He asked, still in the silence of that crowded carriage with all the other passengers listening, fascinated, “How did I get out of your tummy?” So she told him that too, in the same simple plain and truthful language. No nonsense about storks or gooseberry bushes, just the facts.
Nobody’s perfect. Wendy wasn’t. If provoked beyond endurance she could erupt like a volcano. When we lived in Edinburgh, a favourite Saturday lunch was pancakes. One wintry Saturday, concerned about my increasing girth, I opted out. Soon one, then another child came into the kitchen to ask what’s for lunch today, said “None for me, thanks,” and when the third to do so said, “Oh, no, not pancakes again!” She tore off her apron, screamed, “That’s it! I’m leaving this ungrateful family!” and stormed out of the house, slamming the front door behind her. But it was winter, bitter cold, and she hadn’t stopped to put on her overcoat. I recall a stunned silence, then tears from at least one of the kids. I grabbed her coat, jumped into our VW camper and took off to find and bring her home. I caught up with her, shivering and blue with cold, a few blocks away, still obstinately walking – striding briskly – away from home.
In 54 years she had only about three culinary disasters. She made some superb feasts and day-to-day meals that were consistently excellent. Her Pavlovas were renowned, light, fluffy, garnished with exotic tropical fruits and with a meringue and cream base that melted in the mouth. She had a rich and varied repertoire of appetizing biscuits, she cooked roast chicken with stuffing and all the vegetables to go with it. Ah! Those chocolate cakes! And rich fruit cakes not just at Christmas time, but all around the year.
What an imagination! She kept the tastiest home-made cookies, the ones my father called “compressed haggis” (crushed plain biscuits and walnuts with rich chocolate icing) in a tin labeled “RAT POISON.”
She excelled at all the essential home-making skills, especially dress-making. In 1962 I bought her a heavy duty portable Singer sewing machine; we got a 110 volt motor for it when we moved from Australia to the USA, and put the original motor back when we moved on to Scotland; then restored the 110 volt motor when we moved from Edinburgh to Ottawa. Now that sewing machine is 49 years old. We had to fiddle with it a bit after it turned 40, but it still worked fine last time she used it, which was 3 or 4 months after her diagnosis. All our married life, she made most of her own clothes, including her own wedding dress, and the children’s clothes too, when they were young.
The volunteer job closest to her heart was working with handicapped adults in the hot swimming pool at the Jack Purcell Community Centre. She helped to undress these paralyzed and usually heavy people, helped them into bathing suits, moved and massaged them in the water, and hardest physical work, helped them shower and get dressed in street clothes again. Her work didn’t stop there. These were invalid pensioners, very poor people. She brought home their fragile swim suits and tattered underwear, spent hours mending it, adjusting it to fit. She was a volunteer at the Jack Purcell pool for over 25 years.
Since her death I’ve been exploring her private space. From 1953, perhaps earlier, she kept a daily diary almost every day of her life until June 2010 when her fingers became too weak and clumsy for her to continue. These diaries recorded her life for almost 60 years. While she lived, I respected her privacy and never looked at her diaries. Now I’ve begun to read them. Many of her entries describe humdrum housework, the weather, a neighbor coming by for a cuppa, but it’s a measure of her self-discipline that she kept it up year after year, even if the most exciting event of the day was that she did the weekly wash, or the grocery shopping. Quite often there were days when there was something worth while to write about. It’s sometimes frustrating when she spares only a sentence, or even a phrase, to describe life-changing events like the decision to leave Edinburgh and come to Ottawa. After dipping into many of her diaries, I know her better and I have more love and respect for her than ever. I realize too how hard she worked.
I am in awe of her energy, her methodical, yet unobtrusive management of my life as well as her own. I think of the fluke, the way we met (she was one of two hitch hikers I picked up on the outskirts of Adelaide one sunny spring day in 1955). It so easily might never have happened, and what a transformative event it was for both of us. It led to 55 years of living, loving, laughing, that she wrote about in a little poem for my 70th birthday.
We are members of a very lucky age group. We traveled widely, met and befriended wonderful people all over the world. We’ve never been rich, but except for a brief period of real poverty when I switched careers from family doctoring to public health sciences research and teaching, we’ve always got by.
When she fell ill with motor neuron disease (ALS) family and friends rallied to provide material and moral support. The ALS Clinic staff, the ALS Society, and a community-based team of experts made her life comfortable. Rebecca's husband Richard provided gourmet dishes in pureed form when swallowing became a challenge; David came from Kingston to make large batches of nutritious soups. Her personal care workers Sharon Morrison and Sara Kerrigan, her occupational therapist Courtney Henderson, her visiting nurse Jodi Gannon, and the entire team at the ALS Clinic, especially Sue Geis, Sue McNeely, Elaine Cawadias, Margo Butler, and Frankie Nadeau, and a dozen or more others, helped make her remaining time as pleasant as possible. Her palliative care physician, Louise Coulombe, provided a perfect blend of competent, compassionate, common sense care in her visits to our home.
When ALS attacks early in life it is a devastating calamity. In the mid-80s, it is a gentle way to leave this life. It is quite painless and there is no interference with the working of the mind; Wendy just became increasing tired, slept more and more, until two days before she died, she went to sleep and did not wake up again. The worst thing was losing her speech, but we had a fancy electronic speech synthesizer which partly compensated. I can’t find adequate words to say how beholden we are to the charismatic, superbly competent, always helpful professional staff who cared for her.
We’ve had happy lives. I’m certain we owe that happiness to Wendy and her irrepressible spirit, her tolerance, her sense of humour. The comfortable apartment we shared is full of reminders of her presence and I never want to leave there. Wendy’s physical presence has left us; but her spirit lives on, and always will while I live, and I think also while our children and grandchildren live.
Blessings on you, Wendy my dearest, my lover, my best friend, my partner in life; and thank you for everything.