June 18, 2026 was the ninety-fifth anniversary of my mother’s birth. She died thirty-one years ago at the age of sixty four, as a resident of Riverview Hospital in Port Coquitlam.

It’s been so many years without her in my life in any meaningful way that she feels more like an ancestor to me than a parent. She never was any sort of parent; she was mostly a funny, strange, loud, laughing, crying grown-up who was probably more childish than her own children.

As I became an adult and started to understand her condition better, she became kind of objectified and detached from my heart. My image of her changed from a mother to just “Angela”. I’m sure that symbolic change was a survival instinct on my part. I couldn’t call her “mother” – the role never fit her anyway. Her alcohol-induced brain damage and the regime of antidepressants she was on in hospital rendered her almost non-communicative and constantly fidgeting in her wheelchair. She gradually became ever-more distant to us over the fourteen years she was hospitalized.

Each time I visited her, I felt the need to re-introduce myself as her son John. I could never tell if she recognized me or remembered me. It was hard to tell if anyone was in there behind her downcast eyes. She gave me no clues, but once in a while, getting a moment of sustained eye contact felt amazing – like winning the emotional lottery.

By about forty five, it seemed like Angela had given up even trying at life. Her world may have died when her father did, or her relationship with my father had become so warped from fear and mistrust that there was nothing left to hold them together anymore.

I kept trying to visit her because I thought nobody else would. I hated the idea that she might ever be forgotten or abandoned. I carried an unnecessary burden of guilt for her captivity and her isolation from her family. I tried to resolve my fears by visiting her.

There are a multitude of images of Angela preserved in our photo albums, plus the faint, fleeting glimpses that flash through my mind’s eye. I can see an elegant, beautiful woman with movie star looks. I can hear a singing voice like a broadway star, and see energetic keyboard hands that flashed across the keys like Oscar Peterson.

At her height in life, she shone like the brightest Star of Tomorrow in the heavens. I’ll praise her in memory of that dream, the dream she once almost achieved.

Her fall was not some Icarus-like failure. She’d been falling all her life, struggling with manic depression and an addiction to the alcohol that she used to tamp down the mood swings.

We’re all falling really, but some of us just fall much faster and hit the ground a lot harder. For me, she gradually rose again as a beautiful posyhumous ideal, earning her Angel’s wings in the end.