For Mom

I am the luckiest son in the world.

I've said that before — wrote it to you on your birthday, in the book, in a hundred different ways across the years. I'm saying it again on this Mother's Day because some things deserve to be said more than once. Especially the true ones. Especially to you.

This letter is from all of us. From me. From Mark. From Carrie, Kelsey, Brandon, and Mackenzie. Even from Chewy and Solo and Stormy, who, while not strictly capable of writing, would like the record to reflect that they think Grandma is wonderful. We are all here. The whole family, rooting for you on this day that belongs to you.

I want to start where so many of my best memories live: in the place we went every single year.

Wilderness Village.

You took us there. Year after year, you took us. That little corner of the world is woven into Mark and me so deeply that I don't think a summer goes by where I don't think about it. The smell of the trees. The lake. The cabins. The sound of so many people somehow all gathered in the same place, all of us happy, all of us yours.

The swimming pool. The archery range. The bikes we rode until the sun went down. Going out to Crimson Lake. The telephone booth — stuffing as many of us as humanly possible inside, holding our breath, trying to win a prize. The strongman competitions. The stories around the fire when it got dark. The bingo in the hall with all the other camping weirdos, calling out numbers and laughing. The wake-ups in the cabin with that specific back-to-nature feeling — cold air, pine smell, the whole day ahead of you and nothing to do except be a kid in the woods.

And the hailstorm. Mom — you remember the hailstorm.

August, 1986. We were in the cabin — you, Grandma Tilly, Mark and me — and the sky cracked open. Hail. Not rain. Hail the size of marbles, then golf balls, piling up against the cabin door so high we almost couldn't open it to get out. We were trapped, just the four of us, in the loudest weather any of us had ever heard.

And four hours away, the same storm system was tearing through Edmonton as a tornado — the Black Friday tornado — and it touched down less than a mile from our actual house. We didn't know it at the time. We were in the cabin with the hail, safe with you, while a tornado was crossing within a stone's throw of where we lived. You made it feel like an adventure. That was always you. You had the gift of making the strange and the difficult feel like part of the story instead of something to be afraid of.

And then there were the bear stories.

Around the fire at night, with Mark and me and the cousins — Shaun, Chad, and Amber — all wide-eyed and hanging on your every word, you would tell us the bear story. The one where a bear came up to the cabin in the middle of the night and you, Simone, in your bravest and most cunning hour, pulled the elastic out of your underwear and used it as a slingshot to scare the bear away and save us all. You told it dead serious. We believed you. We absolutely believed you. And then we would all crack up laughing — the kind of laughing where you can't catch your breath — because of course we believed you. Of course you would save us with your panty elastic. Of course you would.

That story is one of the funniest things I have ever heard in my life, and I still tell it. You should know that. The panty-elastic-slingshot bear story is part of the official lore of this family now. You wrote it. The cousins remember it. It's never going away.

You didn't just take us camping. You built memory. You knew — long before there was language for it in our family — that the small repeated rituals of being together in beautiful places were the things we were going to carry with us forever. You knew. You were quietly building a museum inside us, one Wilderness Village weekend at a time.

And the family reunions. You have always believed, deep in your bones, that family is better when it's bigger and crazier. More cousins. More aunts. More chaos at the table. More chairs pulled up. You never let our family contract. You always pulled it wider, made it more, gathered everyone in. That's not a small philosophy. That's a whole worldview, and it shaped me. It shaped Mark. It shaped how we both raise our own kids now.

Here is something Mark and I have only really come to understand as adults.

There were years — long stretches of them — when you didn't have much. Years that were harder than we knew at the time. The MS came in your mid-forties and rewrote everything. Your body. Your plans. Your sense of what you could count on. You fought it while raising two boys, while a marriage was unwinding, while life kept asking more of you than seemed fair.

And then came the hardest decision a mother can be asked to make — letting Dad become the primary caregiver because your body would not let you do it alone anymore. I want you to know that Mark and I understand now what that decision cost you. We didn't, back then. We were kids. We had no real idea what you were carrying through those years — the hospitals, the days you couldn't get out of bed, the grocery shopping we had to figure out on our own, the loneliness of being too sick to be the kind of mom your heart wanted to be. We didn't see all of it. But we see it now, and we want you to know that we see it.

And here is the part that still astonishes me when I think about it:

When you couldn't work anymore — when you yourself were surviving on social security, when you had every reason in the world to turn inward and let someone else carry the weight for a while — you didn't. You started volunteering. You helped families who had been hit by disasters. You showed up for people who had even less than you did. You used the energy you barely had on people you didn't even know.

That's not charity, Mom. That's character. That's one of the most extraordinary things I have ever watched a human being do, and you did it like it was nothing. Like it was just what you do.

You volunteered. You taught. You counselled. You showed up for other people's kids the way you'd shown up for your own. You worked with people who were hurting and you made them feel seen. You did it because you genuinely believed — and still believe — that humanity is bigger than it appears on the surface.

That belief is one of the most important inheritances I have from you. The conviction that people are worth helping. That the world is worth improving. That the small daily acts of showing up for someone actually matter, and add up, and change something. You taught me that not in a sermon. You taught me by living it, year after year, in front of me — and on your hardest days, you taught it loudest.

I see it in the way I try to build things now. I see it in the way Mark moves through the world. We both carry it with us. That's you, Mom. That's pure Simone.

Your faith has always been bigger than any one tradition could hold.

Yes, the Catholic faith you raised us in — the candles, the church, the rituals that gave structure to our weeks and our years. That's part of it. But it's not the whole of it. What you really gave Mark and me was something deeper than denomination. You gave us spirituality. You gave us the felt sense that there is more to this life than what we can see, that there is meaning underneath the meaning, that the universe is not random and that we are not alone in it.

You taught us to be bigger. To be better. To look for ways to improve humanity — not as a slogan, but as a daily practice. You taught us that being good is not the same as being correct. That kindness is more important than being right. That love is the actual unit of measurement, and everything else is just commentary.

I am still learning what you taught me. I expect I will be for the rest of my life.

That's all of us — gathered around you, the way it should be on this day. Me. Mark. Carrie. Kelsey. Brandon. Mackenzie. The animals too — Chewy underfoot, Solo doing his quiet observing thing, Stormy probably yelling about something.

We are the family you built. Not by yourself — but you are the root system. You are the one we trace back to. You are the keeper of the memory that holds us all together.

I named your character Auntie Mnemonics for a reason. Memory has a keeper. Family has a matriarch. And you are ours. Always have been. Always will be.

Mom — thank you.

Thank you for Viking, where you came from. For the farm-kid strength that never bent. For surviving things most people would not have survived, and still asking us how our day was. Thank you for Wilderness Village. For the cabins, the campfires, the bikes, the bingo with the camping weirdos, the telephone-booth-stuffing contests. Thank you for getting us through the August hail and the Edmonton tornado with Grandma Tilly and making it feel like an adventure. Thank you for the bear story. Thank you for every family reunion where you pulled the table longer and the chairs closer.

Thank you for volunteering when you had nothing. For teaching when nobody was paying you to. For counselling people who needed a steady voice. For making the hardest decisions of your life because you loved us more than you loved your own comfort. For your faith, in all its shapes — Catholic, spiritual, human. For raising Mark and me to look for the bigger version of being alive, and to leave humanity a little better than we found it.

Thank you for never taking a day off from loving us.

Happy Mother's Day, Mom.

We love you, Grandma. All of us. Forever.