Cousin Mary will be missed

By Lethbridge Herald on July 12, 2024.

LEAVE IT TO BEEBER
Al Beeber – Managing editor

A couple of years ago after connecting with a cousin from our B.C. Whitelaw clan – no relation that we know of yet to former Herald managing editor Bill – a couple of other family members reached out to me to introduce themselves and welcome me to their clan.

I knew little of the B.C. family except for my cousin Susan who I hadn’t seen since we were kids and of course, cousin Penelope from Kelowna who I wrote last year about reuniting with when she, husband Steven and daughter Tanya made a trip to Alberta from Eugene, Oregon and Seattle respectively.

And when I connected with Susan after she did an Ancestry DNA test, she told me of the time she watched one of her daughters make a drawing of some strange human-like figures when she was a child and asked who they were. 

The daughter told her “the mysterious Beebers,” Beeber being a name that was known vaguely  to family out in Vancouver and area.

One of the cousins who reached out was a woman named Mary and along with cousin Lorraine Whitelaw we began corresponding mostly through jokes. And the three of us realized quickly and perhaps giddily we shared the same sense of humour, which others might not consider funny at all.

In recent years, we’ve shared what we think are some pretty funny jokes among us. But Mary, possessing absolutely no filter, posted material that wasn’t considered all that hilarious by others, such as social media administrators. 

She is the only person I know personally who ever got kicked off both Twitter and Facebook – and for jokes. Nothing serious, just her humour. 

Mary disclosed awhile ago she’d been diagnosed with cancer, which she always said was not as bad as Lyme disease, something she had also endured. 

Even when the cancer reached Stage 4 and she was in serious non-stop pain, Mary told us it was nothing compared to Lyme. 

A few weeks ago Mary and her husband Bob made the long trip from Chilliwack to Warner to visit a close friend named Sherry. She apologized to me for not stopping in Lethbridge to meet, saying the pain from the cancer had her relying on hydromorphone to get by and I completely understood. I also feel perhaps she didn’t want the severity of her illness to be widely known. And her privacy deserved to be respected.

A couple of weeks ago, Mary’s jokes stopped. She had told a couple of us she was basically living in palliative care at home. 

On July 2, we learned that on Canada Day after precious time spent with family saying her goodbyes, Mary left this world with the help of Medical Assistance in Dying. She’d been scheduled to visit a doctor on July 2 to see if radiation would help with her pain but a CT scan apparently showed it wouldn’t do any good.

So Mary, who I knew was determined to leave on her own terms, did just that, leaving us who in our hearts knew, but didn’t want to believe the end was so near, in shock and at a loss. 

We knew how much she wanted to live, we knew how hot the fire of her spirit burned, but Mary reached the point where she couldn’t take the pain anymore.

To go out her way takes courage. And thanks to MAID, those whose lives can’t be saved by medical intervention, who are suffering extreme pain that can’t be relieved, can take matters into their own hands and end with help their suffering.

Some in this country feel MAID is immoral, that people have no right to kill themselves to put an end to their suffering. They don’t feel people who can’t live life without suffering should maintain their dignity and not spend their final months, weeks or days in supreme agony.

MAID is a blessing for those with no hope for relief and as much as we are all going to miss cousin Mary, I know we feel relief she’s no longer in pain.

But I also wonder how much pain she had to be in to say those last goodbyes to her husband and kids on Canada Day, how hard it had to be when she wanted so badly to live. 

I can’t imagine the grief her family endured as the clocked ticked down to the second she took one last breath.

That takes courage. And I’m proud of her for living and dying on her own terms. 

When my grandmother Molly, a former nurse, was in hospital here in the early 1990s getting a laparoscopy she told me as she pointed to the patients lingering in hallways that if they were animals, the world would have no problem ending their lives if they were in misery. 

But because they were humans, they were allowed to suffer and that really bothered Molly, who in her 90s was probably older than most of the people she was talking about. 

Molly believed in humanity and she didn’t see it in a health care system that kept people alive even though they had no hope of recovery or enjoying a life that would have any meaning. 

I think Molly believed in MAID before it was even a possibility here. My dad felt the same, because he told his own doctors before he died in hospital that if he couldn’t continue to do the things he loved – boating, fishing, camping in his fifth wheel – that if he was going to be forced to live a certain way, he didn’t want to live at all.

MAID gives people an option that others didn’t previously have. It shows humanity and respect to those who are suffering, to those who feel their ability to live life the way they want to live it has reached the end.

Mary had just turned 72 when she died on July 1 and if not for the cancer, she would be getting suspended from Facebook for many years to come. She would be bringing joy to family and friends with wild abandon.

 She was a person who pulled no punches with her jokes, who could make a person laugh on the darkest of days.

Until I came across her and cousin Lorraine, I knew nobody else whose sense of humour was a mirror image of my own. Lorraine figures it’s a Whitelaw thing, which makes me wonder what was in the water at Carberry, Manitoba where the family first established roots in Canada before heading to the left coast. 

But whatever it was, I’m glad it lingers in my DNA. I’ve never known anyone as blunt as cousin Mary, as funny as cousin Mary, as courageous, as unapologetically inappropriate and so passionate about life as she was.

She’ll long be missed and her jokes long cherished.

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