Our mother, Diane Johnston, died on June 26 at 9:39 at night in South Muskoka Memorial Hospital. She had battled Parkinson’s Disease for the last 7 years of her life, and often did so, with a smile that could be easily brought to her face and with a chip on her shoulder. She wasn’t happy about how her final years shook out, and she was honest about that and made the absolute best of unbelievably hard circumstances. As you can I see, I do not know how to correctly write this, but my mother loved my writing. She would read thought my notebooks with laughter and pride, never with judgement or criticism. Now, the thing I find so easy to do, I struggle with. How do I summarize my mother’s life for all of you. I’m going to tell you all this: If in life we get what we deserve, then this cliché makes no sense in the context of my mother. She did not get what she deserved, but she fought for it.

I don’t know what my mother’s greatest achievement would be. Is it the degree she worked towards achieving via correspondence and mail into her senior years? As she pushed into her fifties, living on the outskirts of Gravenhurst on Winhara Rd., she took no pleasures in technology. No measure of her life was spent giving attention to the internet and how others were living their lives online. She was an actual Luddite, not a sentimental one. She would write her research papers by hand, type them up, and mail them. Spent hours in the Gravenhurst Public Library. Professors remarked on her originality. From her we took the lesson that you’re just never to old to do exactly what you want to do.

Would a greater achievement be the little farm she had in her backyard? To walk around the corner of her house was to see and hear birds zinging from feeder to feeder, to see a flock of laying hens following at her rubber booted heels, seeming to listen to the subtlest of her utterances. Beyond their roost, a garden that could feed plenty. These are spaces and places she loved. She loved the outdoors, but not like an alpinist or a mountain climber or some other adrenal activist. She loved the sun on her face, the clouds over her head, the earth beneath her feet, the simplicity of a chair under a tree and a quiet conversation with the universe.

Would a greater achievement be the day she gave me God? I grew up in the church. I had already listened to thousands of ministrations, but one day, a conversation in the basement of our old home, gave me the light that refuses the dark. A thousand more ministrations, a thousand more churches I sat in across this globe, and it was the voice of my mother who implanted the calm in my heart. No formality in her words, no vanity in her preaching. You do not have to be scared.

Would her greatest achievement be my sister? She is solidly formed. So completely herself. In spite of everything that has happened along her journey, she has not backed down from the hard settings in which difficult conversations, difficult conflicts, have taken place. She is not scared. But, gosh, that’s old people talk. Maybe she would be my mother’s greatest achievement because growing up my mother’s teenage stories were all of her and her best friend, Clarke, travelling the province, hitchhiking from one town to another, treating the world as though it could take nothing from them, but give them everything by putting a simple thumb up in the air. In our childhood home, there was one picture my mother cherished. It was a fixture in her bathroom of Clarke and her sitting on lawn chairs, laughing about something only they knew. She injected the value of friendship into us, her children. My sister mimicked her stories. Forty years later, it was my sister’s thumb up in the air, unafraid, taking on life with the best of her friends, in the identical fashion of my mother, but hitchhiking further and laughing all the louder.

Would her greatest achievement be that she had the blistering courage to restart her life, over and over and over again. Who of you out there has dared to do that? Who of you has said, this life is not working for me and rather than speaking of changing it, I am going to do it now? For outsiders, it is impossible to see my mother’s life as a predictable narrative with a beginning, middle and end. For her, there has been multiple beginnings and multiple ends. And I can’t share them all with you because they are painful and personal, but one is so worth shouting from the mountain tops. When Parkinson’s started to make its way into my mother’s life by tiring her, making speech hard — “It sounds like a have marbles in my mouth. People will think I’m drunk.” — she recognized that her life was not what she wanted it to be. She was cut off from a world that wanted to love her. How often do 65 year old women pack their bags and leave for the wider world? Struggling to walk, my sister picked my mother up and her bags from the side of a Muskoka road. An end had come, and along with it a new beginning. Maybe her greatest achievement is the example that sets to those of you reading this, young or old, her age, that it is never beyond you to transform your world. That you have the power, or better, the light, to guide you out of the darkness. Maybe her greatest achievement is providing me with this story to share with my daughters any time they claim that life is too hard and they don’t know what to do. Try hitchhiking to freedom at 65.

Would her greatest achievement be the impact she has had on her community, the children she’s guided and loved through their early years, and the parents who found relief in her caretaking of their kids. The stories, the comments, that have always been showered my way for decades upon decades. “Diane is your mother!” “She is so amazing.” “She is so special.” “I love your mother.” There are kids she has taught, now grown adults, who speak of her as though she was magical like Julie Andrews touching down at their front door. Anytime I came to visit her at work, there were kids for me to meet, colleagues for me to talk with, parents for me to be introduced to. I know what a blessing my mother’s influence is on a child. I know what it means to have her wrapped around your early years.

My mother was my absolute best friend through the first 14 years of my life. That is not a cliché, I mean it literally. I came home to see her. I waited up for her at night. My teenage self would refuse to go sleep until she came to my room to lie with me and talk. I waited on the other side of her bedroom door, pacing, to let her know that she wasn’t getting out of that nightly ritual. When friends were hard to come by, she was always mine, swooping me away for a drive to somewhere, windows rolled down and music loud. Like so many mothers out there, like so many of the best possible ones, she threw all of her needs in the gutter, watched them swept away by a hard rain, so she could better attend to unebbing demands of her children.

Okay, so I’m going to tell you. No more rhetoric. My mother’s greatest achievement was the core of who she was as a person. Imagine her heart was of paper. Now, unfold it, slowly, as though it were origami. Be delicate. Be careful. We are going to look inside. Flatten out the creases, not roughly, with grace. Here it is. Here is her heart. My mother was kind to everyone. Mean to no one. She recognized you all, saw that you too were like her, human and with a heart, so treated you as you ought to be treated. She modelled this for us, day in and day out. Just a basic fundamental love that she allowed to expand outward, that she offered to others, even when they were at their worst. My mother was sincere. She heard you when you spoke. She heard you before she heard herself. She put you first. So rarely, so forgivably, did she put her needs ahead of others. My mother was creative. After she restarted her life for the third time, the walls of her small apartment were filled with artwork that she painted. Birds. Trees. Skies. Her love of nature. My mother was a rebel, a fighter. She did not give up. She worked hard to do well for others, and took great risks to do well for herself. She did this up until the moment she died. My mother was beautiful. She had a beautiful heart. And, if this is a universe that serves the deserving, then be it St. Peter at the gates that examines her heart as we did, or some other force of knowing, then paradise is her next step. A world of big skies, warm winds, water and earth, and loving people.

I’ll share this, then I’ll close up. My mother died in the Bracebridge hospital. The nurses worked so hard for her to make sure she was taken care of. We can’t thank them enough. For treating her as she treated others. She was moved out of Emergency to a private room which we wanted because my mother needed a window. She needed clouds and birds whisking by and the soft indigo evening light. She smiled before she died. She held hands with the people she loved. She heard their voices. She didn’t go quickly. She didn’t go easily. But she went. And I am so proud of her for the example she set and who she sculpted me into being. Her spirit will live on through her grandchildren — Mila, Eli, Zara, Kolton and Norē. They, too, are lovers of nature, creative, rebellious and kind. She will be missed by her community and family, but if anything, let her live on by using her as an example. Do not be scared. Freedom is a decision to made. Move through this world with kindness. “Feed the birds.”

Any donations in our mother’s memory should be non-perishable items for the Gravenhurst Salvation Army Food Bank.