Marion Woodman, Conscious Women, Conscious Lives
On Mothers and Daughters
A mother is the truest friend we have,
when trials, heavy and sudden,
fall upon us; when adversity takes the
place of prosperity; when friends
who rejoice with us in our sunshine,
desert us; when troubles thicken
around us, still will she cling to us,
and endeavor by her kind precepts
and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness,
and cause peace to return to our hearts. ~Washington Irving
An Everlasting Farewell
My mother, Alicia Jane Phinn was born on the eleventh day of the first month of the new twentieth century. Daughter of an Irish mother and a United Empire Loyalist father, she carried in her bones the determination to face her own conflicts, find her own truth, and live her own life.
Inured to hardships in the pioneer life of Ontario winters and immigrant loneliness, Alicia found her own voice singing for soldiers during the
First World War and for the veterans who languished in military hospitals when the fighting was over. The raw horror of that war burned in her eyes and voice when she sang, “There’s a silver lining through the dark clouds shining.”
Her own brother had been a pilot in that war, when planes were new and “splashed on the ground like buttermilk.”
Every Sunday night when my father was with his congregation at the church, my two brothers and I sat with our mother around our piano singing war songs, holding back he tears.
At eighteen, Alicia decided to become a nurse. Knowing her parents would reject her stepping out of her home, she bought a trunk and prepared her uniforms, caps and cape for her profession.
Her parents got wind of her plan, forbade her leaving home, and gave her a job in a new thriving family business.
Early twenties was the era of the Flappers. With her own money, she bought stylish clothes, a Packard car, dared to be
the first to bob her hair, became the soloist in her church, all within the restrictions of her family home.
When my father Andrew, a handsome young minister, arrived in Askin Street Church to preach his ordination sermon, soloist and minister looked into each other’s eyes, and knew they had found their destiny. Not an easy destiny for either.
Mother, a young woman with classy shoes, classy hats, classy dresses and bobbed hair, drove into a small town in her own Packard car and found herself hated by all the mothers who hoped Andrew would choose his bride from among their daughters.
When we (my new presence did nothing to ease her outcast state) moved to another town, her first task was to persuade my father to help her return the mattresses, couches and stuffed chairs to the barn where they had come from that afternoon when the
Ladies Aid was preparing the furnished parsonage for the new minister. Mother faced them when they arrived that evening to see if everything was fine.
“No,” she said. “I am not used to sleeping with mice, nor with a ragged Union Jack for a tablecloth.” A new bed arrived the next morning, but that was the repeated narrative of my mother’s history with Ladies Aides. She fought to live her own style and her own values.
Often as we washed dishes together, she would suddenly stop, put down the sponge, fasten her hands on the sink, and gaze out somewhere beyond the window and say, “Marion, what do you think is out there beyond the clouds?”
I would be struck by her beauty, pale skin, blue eyes, Irish curly hair.I felt her prison. I cried her tears alone.
The depression in the thirties bound our family into deeper dependence on each other. I now had two younger brothers and my mother had developed glandular tuberculosis from tubercular cows.
For many months the congregation was unable to pay my father’s small salary.
I don’t remember deprivation so much as the fun we had together collecting nuts – hickory, beech, walnut – for the winter; every thanksgiving picking cherries, strawberries, peaches, freezing or canning them.
But it was hard work. My mother’s condition became serious. A lump the size of an egg developed on her neck.
The doctors told her they could cut it out, but she would loose the nerves on one side of her face. She would never smile again.
We three children sat in silence and terror while our parents discussed what to do.
(We all knew well enough what death was because the graveyard was close at hand. Our mother there!) Mother stood up, “Andrew,” she said, “put some boiling water in that bowl.”
She brought a five-inch darning needle, sterilized it in the boiling water, and stuck it deep into the lump in her neck.
Green oozed out with noxious odors. Intuitively, she had guided that needle around arteries, veins, nerves and hit her mark.
From that moment I knew she would live.
These stories are essential to understand the healing, the mighty gift my mother gave me forty years later.
Age was wearying her; her life-partner was gone. Stronger glasses were needed and a hearing aid.
Frequently, she would phone, “Marion, that poem your father used to quote, something about ‘Farewell Brutus,’ can you quote it for me?”
And she would write down poem after poem that she loved.
When I returned from my studies in Zurich in the summer of 1975, I realized how unwell she was.
Together we went to several homes for the aged, where we saw only too clearly what lay ahead.
Her proud spirit rebelled when a helpful aide pinned a pink bow in her hair and called her “Dearie.”
She said nothing, but I felt her ultimate ‘No’. When we returned to the car she said, “You will never put me in a home. Promise me that.”
“I promise,” I said.
When Ross, Mother and I were on our way to the airport the following October as I was returning to Zurich, I knew in a flash that we would never go to the airport again together. “I won’t go, Mother,” I said. “You need me here.”
“Marion, if you can be free, go.” And forty-five years of our history together passed before my eyes.
The freedom she fought for, the consciousness she so desperately sought, she was giving to me.
One month later, Ross phoned me in Zurich. “I’m in the hospital with your Mother. Here she is.”
“Mother I’ll be on the next plane. We will have tea together to-morrow night.”
“Wouldn’t that be lovely,” she said. I knew instantly that tea was out of the question.
On the plane I dozed.
I felt myself going up a canyon, following my glowing Mother who was going ahead with a lamp lighting my difficult way.
I followed for some time, then had to concentrate on the sharp rocks.
When I looked up for the light, it was gone.
My body convulsed, scattering everything on my tray. Unconsciously I knew my Mother was dead.
Consciously I did not accept it.
On arrival at the airport, I asked Ross to drive instantly to the hospital.
“She’s gone,” he said. I knew it, but it took months to know it.
Later in my despair, I said to him, “She could have waited. People can stay until their loved ones reach them to say good-bye.
Why did she choose to go before I arrived?”
“Your mother chose her death,” he said. “She said to me, ‘I lived for my father, for my husband, for my children. This death is mine. If I’m here when Marion arrives, she’ll care for me. I’ll be a vegetable. She won’t return to Zurich. This will take about two hours.”
Those were her last words. She began her journey into light. At the moment she died, my body convulsed on the plane.
The immensity of her gift to me – BE FREE – is etched into my soul.
When Ross and I went to her apartment, we found the poems I had quoted pinned inside her petticoat, so they would be immediately available to her.
Among them, “Therefore our everlasting farewell take: For ever, and for ever, farewell, Cassius! If we do meet again, why, we shall smile; If not, why then, this parting was well made. ~ Marion Woodman, Conscious Women, Conscious Lives, -Page 121-126
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