When my mother announced that she would be moving to Toronto, I was uneasy. For more than forty years we had been living in separate cities. I could not imagine having her nearby. “What kind of daughter are you?” demanded the voice in my head. The reproach was familiar, for I often feel remiss when it comes to my mother. But there was a new urgency to the question, summoned by her imminent move.
My mother and I are similar in looks. We both reach around five foot two, and our brunette hair has never been dyed. Only relatively recently, at age eighty-five, has she gone silver at the temples. So far, I seem to have inherited her remarkable resistance to grey.
For over two decades, following the death of my father, my mother had been content to live alone. She was independent, stayed active, and enjoyed a wide social...
Ruth Panofsky is a professor of English at Toronto Metropolitan University, where she specializes in Canadian literature and culture.
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