Rina
15/12/1931 to 7/05/2011
On May 7 2011 we received the sad news that Mom J had passed away. She had been getting ever more fragile over the past year and since July 2010 had been in the 24hour nursing care / frail unit. Her quality of life had dwindled to barely passable so we are both relieved for her and sad for us.
She was a most resilient person, bearing the burden of watching her siblings die young through tragedy and through cancer. She was a caring and exemplary teacher - I can easily say that not one Grade 1 or 2 child ever left her classroom without being able to read. She is one of those teachers that you will always remember from the handful of those who made a difference in your education.
She was always up for learning new things and loved doing 'firsts': I remember her first sushi bite - not one that she would repeat, but at least she tried. She had to experience Canada in winter: threw her first snowball, screamed with delight as she hurtled down on a toboggan behind a delighted grandchild, and how she relished being able to "walk on water" on an iced-up lake. She played tennis into her sixties and I think if they had let her she would have bungee jumped in New Zealand when she went to visit her grandchildren there.
Photographs to capture every momentous occasion were snapped with abandon - which meant every restaurant visit, every new place she visited and each annual celebration of birthdays, graduations, awards, births and weddings. Thousands of photographs were fervently placed in photo albums and picture frames for posterity and were pored over - she took advantage of every opportunity to reminesce and tell stories of who, what and where. Probably her favourite introduction was "When I was in ...."
A remarkable lady who has left her mark.
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