I’m not exactly sure when the roles reversed, but sometime during the past fifteen years my mother and I changed places and I became her caregiver. It became clearer after my father became ill and subsequently passed away, but the process had been underway long before that.

These days my mother lives her life in a fog of vascular dementia and physical deterioration brought on by a brain that is failing her. Despite all this, she seems reasonably contented and remains more aware than many who live with Alzheimer’s Disease (which she does not have). When asked how she is, how her day has been, how she enjoyed her meal or the company of her caregiver, the unfailing answer we receive is “OK”. Not great, not awful, just OK. The infernal OK.

It pains me to see my mother as this pale shadow of her former vivacious self. Once she was young, beautiful and full of life. She was lively, quick and had an insatiable curiosity that drove her to read on many subjects and later watch documentaries and endless nature shows. Her repository of knowledge was once astounding. To this day, my mother’s neurologist comments on Mom’s intelligence.

She was in many ways a truly remarkable mother who pushed my sister and me to always do our best, while instilling us with the confidence that we could be anything we wished to be. As the mother of two girls, we received contradictory advice like “Wait for the right man” but also “Never be dependent on a man.” And then there was the slightly menacing “Be careful that you don’t ruin your reputation!” She was forever full of quotations and aphorisms, some of which I still dredge up today and quote to my own children. Two of my favorites continue to be, “As long as you keep a secret, you have power over it; once you share a secret, it has power over you” and “Oaks grow strong in contrary winds and diamonds are formed under pressure.”

Born in Germany two years before the Second World War broke out, my mother grew up on a small family farm before moving to a nearby city after her father returned from the war. As the eldest of three daughters from a family of limited means and modest ambitions, she was sent to secretarial school upon graduation from school at age 17 to learn typing, shorthand and bookkeeping. In other circumstances, she likely would have attended university.

Early on, my mother discovered her love of the arts, especially classical music and theatre, despite being the only one in her extended family to pursue these interests. She would attend opera and theatre performances several times a week, always buying tickets to the “cheap seats” – which actually meant standing throughout the three-hour performances. Knowing her love of fashion, I am quite certain that she wore her stilettos to every show. Her father, the domineering force in her life, viewed her pursuits with suspicion and contempt.

As it turned out, this wasn’t the only area in which her father and she did not see eye to eye. When my grandfather decreed which man she was to marry, my mother rebelled – she refused to marry a man she did not love. At age 22 she was unceremoniously kicked out of the family home and went to live on her own in a small rented room. When, a couple of years later, she finally did meet the man she wanted to marry, it followed a whirlwind courtship of one month before getting engaged. Marrying my father not only meant defying my grandfather (who didn’t meet his new son-in-law until after my parents had been married for nearly two years), but involved the great leap of faith of moving from Germany to Canada to be with a man she barely knew.

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Even as a small child, I recall my mother’s high standards and expectations. She was a fanatic about etiquette and good manners. My sister and I were expected to be exemplary children – seen and not heard. Schoolwork was expected to be completed to the highest standard possible and the report cards we brought home had to be stellar. Failure to meet the expected scholastic achievements led to expressions of disappointment, dissections of what we had done wrong, and exhortations to work harder in future. Our achievements were very much her achievements.

In a similar vein, our extracurricular activities became hers as well. She would often stay and listen to my music lessons – and then provide me with her feedback during the drive home. She took it a step further with my sister: when my sister became a competitive swimmer, Mom pursued her own ambitions and became one of the first female Master Officials for swimming in our province. Apparently a lot of the other women were nervous about using the starter’s pistol – which involved using a gunpowder cap and required a steady hand and a sharp eye to catch any false starts. None of that intimidated my mother. In fact, I think she rather took a perverse pleasure in shooting the pistol and cracking the whip!

My mother was always a stay-at-home mom, but, despite the evident love of her children, that didn’t fully fulfill her. And so she became a tireless volunteer, with officiating at swim meets being only one of her pursuits. In the mid 1970’s, my mother and a friend co-founded a German Language School, which held classes on Saturdays. She was awarded a Queen’s Silver Jubilee Medal in 1977 for her efforts. And my sister and I were rewarded with years of German lessons! In that tried and true cliché, I hated it then and am grateful to her now.

Mom stoked and fed our curiosity. We would have lively discussions over dinner or weekend lunches about the events of our day or world news and politics. Countless times she’d get out the encyclopedia to check a fact or pull out the dictionary to look up the correct definition of a word. She was a relentless grammarian and came to speak and write English more accurately than many native speakers – she often proofed our homework (in English and German) to ensure it met HER standard before being handed in to our teachers.

She imparted her love of the arts to her girls. Our house was always full of books (in both languages) and she successfully encouraged us to read. Classical music played constantly in our house, which I think sometimes drove our father a little crazy! She took us to churches, art galleries and museums. Even as small children, we accompanied her to orchestral concerts and ballet performances. On one long ago occasion, she even arranged for us to tour our local city hall and sit in the mayor’s chair!

But my mother could be a purveyor of “tough love” as well – her father’s stern lessons had not been completely lost on her. I clearly recall standing in front of my mirror as a fifteen-year-old, fussing over a pimple on my face. She walked by, saw me and said, “Who do you think you are that you are so important that everyone is staring at you?”. It was perhaps a little harsh, but also a good lesson on having an alternative perspective and learning my place in the world. Obviously I have never forgotten that moment of hard truth. Many years later she paid me the ultimate compliment when she told me I had a “backbone made of steel”. I no longer recall the specific incident that led to that mother’s gift, but the memory of it has gotten me through many tough moments in my life.

Perhaps the sweetest memory of my mother occurred when I was six or seven. On that day, as usual, I came home from school for my lunch break and headed down the hall to the bathroom to wash my hands. En route I walked past my bedroom, into which the sun was shining brightly. And, low and behold, where that morning had lain a threadbare and scratchy faux Oriental rug, now lay a brand new pink and fluffy carpet! It wasn’t my birthday or any other special occasion. I knew instinctively that it was simply a gift that my mother had purchased because she loved me and wanted to make me happy. My little girl self was thrilled.

Enraptured, I went and lay down on that pristine pink rhapsody. And after a moment or two, my mother discovered me there and got down onto the rug beside me. We lay there facing one another, just looking at each other, while the sun shone in on us. It was a moment of pure perfection and peace between us, a beautiful shining pearl on the intertwined strands of our lives.

And so now when I am feeding my mother her dinner or wiping her nose because she can no longer do these things for herself, this above all is the memory I will hold on to for both of us because she herself can no longer recall it. And I remind myself that she was once so much more than just “OK”.