From Te Karere, May 1948 –

Dearest Mother

By Estelle Webb Thomas

My first impulse on returning from the funeral, was to go to your room and tell you all about it. That second thought which shows me your empty chair, your glasses lying so pathetically on your Bible, is the one that stabs me so. But I have carried all the interesting items and bits of gossip to you for so long, that I cannot miss telling you about this — this really big thing that concerns you so vitally. That is the reason you would have enjoyed it; for one of the hurts of old age was that you felt so unimportant — so unnecessary! You, who for so many years had been in the thick of things, the centre of attraction in any group where you happened to be, found it hard to adjust yourself to the backwater of an octogenarian’s life.

You were lonely these last years, too, with a loneliness we could not reach, and could scarcely sense; the tragic loneliness of one who sees no contemporaries, who longs achingly for a lost generation. But you would not have been lonely today, dear. On every face, and the old hometown church was full to overflowing, you should have seen tears of loving remembrance. Tragic that these reunions must so often wait on death! How I wished that you were present, to see and hear the tributes paid by these who had known you longest and best; and though I am not at all sure you were not, I am going to write you all about, just as I have always done when you were away.

You’d have gloried in the flowers. We were glad for all the gorgeous wealth of them. You had never had enough flowers in all your life. One of the speakers — the doctor — spoke of your endless struggle with the dry, unfriendly desert soil — your pride and happiness in your few hard-won blossoms. It was he who dwelt on your love of beauty, and your lifelong efforts to bring it into your own life and those of your family and friends. (Oh, I hope you have it all now! All the beauty and peace and perfection you spent more than eighty years striving for!

But I understand now why you had to work so hard for everything you had. You loved it that way, dear. You were a pioneer woman, child of pioneers, to whom life was a real and glorious struggle, and whose appetite for it was sharpened by the toll it took of their strength. That was why your father, on his seventieth birthday, drove the first wagon over a precipitous mountain pass in the wilds of a new country, leading a hardy colony of home-seekers to a new haven. And that was why, on the morning of your own seventy-first birthday, you started out so gaily on one of your missions of mercy. That was the dreadful winter of ’33, and we had begged you so unavailingly to give up the hard and (financially) profitless work. Now, remember how unhappy you were when we finally persuaded you (aided by age and failing health) until you found some other means of service, I’m glad you were wiser than we. But on that occasion I could see nothing but that you, seventy-one. and frail as a reed, were starting on a fifty-mile ride in a blizzard, through snow-blocked roads; starting out in a sleigh, with a young boy for driver, with a hake-kettle full of hot stones at your feet, on the feeble chance of catching a bus on the roads where buses conld still run. Now I realize the adventure and the sense of accomplishment which followed, the gratitude of the parents when you ushered in the new life safely, were lull compensation for it all.

The doctor mentioned, too, his long and unique association with you. For you were first, his very youthful teacher and later, in what you called your second life, his most trusted nurse. It was the older speaker who made a point of your active intellect and the many, many youths to whom you and Father had opened the magic doors of the mind. He spoke of those days when you were pioneers of education, helping to establish a high school in a raw western town where an elementary education had been considered full equipment for life, and the Fifth Reader the ultimate accomplishment. He remembered your flashing wit and charm, and how you were always the centre of community life. The amateur theatricals in which you, with your dark-eyed beauty, were, as a matter of course, always the leading lady, from Black-eyed Susan to Little Nell. He told of the boys and girls, in whom, throughout the years, you had discovered so many hidden talents.

It was the high school teacher who mentioned your personal charm, your warm comradeship, your tact. Your way of making a gala occasion of some small and ordinary trip. (How will we children remembered and loved that in you! Darling, we never know, in our happy, carefree childhood that we were poor, often desperately so — you made life so rich in the intangibles!)

But it was the people, the women you had cared for during a whole period of child-bearing, the under-privileged, to whom you had opened vistas of hope and escape, the black sheep to whom you had reached a helping hand, who crowded around us in the churchyard to whisper brokenly what you had meant to them. Those were the tributes too intimate and precious to be spoken aloud.

But I mustn’t forget the response, when the doctor, rather unorthodoxly, as he said, called on the audience for a show of hands by those whom you had a1 Mine time served- I hope you saw that forest of hands!

You’d have loved the music, some of your favourite hymns beautifully rendered, and a touching solo by an old friend; and how proud you’d have been of the six handsome grandsons who carried your casket so tenderly to the spot under the pines where you had long planned to rest. (Perhaps you have ceased grieving for the absent ones busy with the grim business of war in the far corners of the world; probably the world has shrunk from you now, and you see a happy ending to all this.)

You’d have been glad of the resolutions of love and respect from the various organizations in which you had worked, and that your last, most touching public service was not forgotten.

For when age and weakness made you a virtual prisoner in your room, and circumstances removed you from the association of old friends and relatives, you still acted as a missionary for your church; and though often weary unto death, never failed to hold the weekly knitting class you had organized to help the Indian women among whom your lot w r as cast. Their affection for you is something to remember happily now, they say they celebrated your last birthday, the Indian trinkets they brought as gifts.

You used to grieve, in your more depressed moments, over the failure of your youthful dream to materialize. You had been so well equipped by nature for a rich and thrilling life. Instead, it had a long record of hardship and poverty and often, unappreciated toil. But, dear, it was adventurous. Can’t you see that now? Though, as you mourned, you never saw a great picture, heard a great musician, or travelled abroad, you lived your life to the utmost. I hope from your seat, “at His right hand,” you can see now how rich and full and glorious it was !

And now, good-bye. I have felt for these few minutes I have been writing this, that we were talking again, in the old familiar way. It will be the last letter I shall ever write you. But how many times I shall have to check the impulse to run to your room with some incident I have heard or remembered that might cheer or interest you, mentally censoring the sordid or depressing bits. I shall have to learn to save the good things until I meet your sweet smile and outstretched hands again.

May God permit you to know how much we love and miss you.