Flora Dobbie

The reward for a long life is die without peers to mourn you. So it is our job today, and no doubt for longer, too, to thread back together the details of 95 years lived simply and honourably. To make a statement that a good woman walked through this world and we loved her.
As near as I can figure, it went something like this.

Flora was born on August 31, 1913, the youngest of seven children, to Janet and Alexander Crawford, who lived in a little house on Castle Avenue.

When she was quite young, perhaps 5, her mother took her to Scotland for an extended visit with her family. Also when she was a little girl, she suffered a serious struggle with Rheumatic fever that had her hospitalized and in isolation for several weeks.

As a young woman, still living with her parents, she worked in the shoe department at Eaton’s. In fact, for a period, she was the only breadwinner in her home during the Depression.

Judging by her old autograph book, she was a popular girl, which is no surprise; we’ve always known her to be sociable. She had a couple of girlfriends named Peg and Jean, who had a brother named Alec.

About the only thing I know about the courtship of Alec and Flora is that Janet had cause at some point to chase him down the street with her broom. Presumably he persisted, for they married in 1938 and he became my Grandpa. She wore a royal blue velvet dress that she showed to my sister and me some time in the seventies. We were mystified by how tiny she had been.

Glenn was born in 1940, with Flora living in her mother-in-law’s house and Alec away serving in the Navy during the war. Caring for a baby was no mean feat in those days: she had to rise early to wash and boil diapers, sterilize bottles and cook formula, all before the senior Mrs. Dobbie needed the kitchen.

Now, Flora was an attractive enough lady, but she must have had a special charm; some supplies were hard to come by in 1940, but the grocer secured and squirreled away a whole case of condensed milk for her. She mixed that with corn syrup to feed her baby. Apparently that’s what they did in those days.

Alec came back from the Navy and the three settled in their little house on Moncton, where they welcomed Jim in 1947. In that tiny, two-bedroom house, they lived for the rest of their 50 years together. Flora raised two challenging boys, cared for Mrs. Crawford in her old age, and produced thousands of breakfasts, lunches and dinners in a kitchen the size of most bathrooms—with the same amount of counter space.

I understand there were some wild parties in that house, too. Something about a person named Madame Red kicking her shoe through the front window?

Much of the summers were spent at Alec’s beloved cottage at Betula Lake in the Whiteshell. Grandma liked the creature comforts, and she was never a big fan of the cottage. She had a wide social circle at Betula, though, and spent many pleasurable evenings playing card games—31 and Chase the Ace—with the Perrys, the Pickens, the Forbes, the Gravesteads, the Nicholsons and the Wrights.

During summers in the city, she kept a garden. There was a big bleeding heart by the front door. Along the sunny side of the house, toward Mrs. Lily’s, she planted annuals every year: petunias, snap dragons and pansies. On the other side, where massive trees—well, they were massive by the time I played there—there were tiger lilies and, I think, phlox and Shasta daisies. At the back there were great lilac bushes, a magnificent stand of peonies and a big patch of rhubarb from which she would make rhubarb jams and pies. All rhubarb, not tamed by strawberries. Sweet and tart and delicious.

Flora and Alec were generous parents-in-law. They welcomed Glenn’s wife Dorothy into the family with their own special brand of understated warmth. Jim hadn’t been gone long before Flora started taking care of Lori, their first granddaughter, on a daily basis. Four years later (after Dorothy had me and was able to stay home for a year with the two of us), Flora had two little girls to look after every day. Not long after that, Linda became part of the family, and the ranks at the Christmas dinner table swelled to 8, where it held steady for a few years then increased by three over three years with a second wave of grandchildren: Kevin, Amanda and Melissa.

The milestones after that are numbered by significant celebrations and tragedies. She and Alec celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in 1988. Alec died, at the cottage, in 1989. I think it was that year at Christmas that we got her a puppy, Patches, who was her companion for the next decade or so—fat, spoiled and utterly loyal to her.

She travelled all the way to Kingston for my wedding in 1990, and I have to say that she was the one who actually sanctioned me getting married away from home. Lori had had a big beautiful wedding the year before, David and I were living in Kingston and had only 3 months to plan the wedding because we were moving to Japan. As well, there were religious differences with his extended family in Winnipeg… it was easier for us to get married in Kingston. But my mom and sister were arguing with me after dinner one night—Grandma was there—and I was reacting petulantly, as only the baby of the family can. Grandma, who never messed in our family disagreements, smoked and listened for a while, and when it was time she offered, quietly, “You just do what you want, Shaun.”

Well, the discussion was over. Though she never lacked an opinion, Grandma wasn’t one to meddle. So when she spoke, gentle as it was, it was a decree and it was heeded. Now, I don’t know if it was the right or wrong decision to get married so far away, but Grandma knew it didn’t matter in the long run but that young brides are emotional and have their whims, and it’s best to give in to those whims.

We held an 85th birthday party for her, hosted by Lori, and a 90th in the restaurant at the top of her seniors’ apartment complex on Oakland Avenue. The guest list of her peers shrank from the anniversary party to the 85th, and more between the 85th and 90th. Now, five years on, the numbers in this room do not begin to tell how dearly and how widely she was loved. They indicate, instead, the determination she had to hang on to life. She was not bold or brazen, neither was she timid or retiring. But she was tenacious.

If old people are birds, Grandma was a sparrow, tiny and fragile but strangely hardy. At the end, there was no fat left in her flesh—I’m not sure there was flesh left in her flesh—and to see her narrow frame under a thin sheet of skin was to shiver at the length of life. But when she was awake, even in these last weeks, her milky blue eyes were bright, and her laugh, low and hoarse, came readily. Although she meandered between truth and fiction in her head, she never missed a joke or ironic twist. And she could fake her way through confusion, like a politician in a crowd: she never would come right out and say, “Do I know you?”

I have been at a loss for rational explanation at the intensity of my grief. After all, there is no better end than a peaceful one at 95. I am both frustrated and awed by the futility and nobility of a long life lived. Incensed that this tiny voice will have been a dim flash in a vast universe. Impressed by how those sparrow fingers, bent sideways with arthritis and dumb with Parkinson’s-like twitches, clung so steadfastly to life. Even as she strained against the soft bandages that bound her wrists to the siderails, anxious to pull away the undignified accoutrements of her endgame, she would not let go until she was good and ready, until she was sure.