I write very little about my mother - because I feel so sad when I think of her. But I want this recorded.
My mother, Leonie Feldman Rubin, was a very loving mother. She was a great cook. It seems to me she was always sad and angry. I wish now, all these years later, that I had been able to talk with her about her memories, her thoughts, her feelings. I couldn't, and that is tragic.
I was deep in my own problems. My darling husband had died. I had cancer. I was bald and grieving and scared - scared for my life, scared of the treatments, scared because I had no home of my own and no way to take care of myself. I had to behave in a manner that would not cause my parents to send me away. I helped with the cooking and the laundry and offered to pay rent out of my welfare cheque. But Pop refused. He said it would complicate his taxes. I think Pop just wouldn't take money from his daughter.
Before my mother became totally reclusive - I don't know why - she liked to talk to people, to help people. She spent hours on the phone comforting and encouraging and giving good advice to people. A mentally troubled young man who worked at our store, Metropolitan News, Willie Robitaille, called her often. He was strange and alone and he called my mother,"Ma".
My mother would have my Pop buy huge bags of birdseed mix and she would cover the front stoop with it summer and winter. Dogs who lived in the neighbourhood knew my mother well. They would stop by regularly and wait at the front door of our home at 4995 Prince of Wales in NDG for my mother to pat them and talk to them lovingly and feed them treats.
My mother was a good woman. I wish she hadn't spent so much time sulking alone at the kitchen table without trying to tell me why.
And then Dawn McSweeney came, and disaster followed.
LOVE POEMS TO GRANDMOTHER SHE ROBBED
MOTHER FEARED DAWN MCSWEENEY
OUR AGED MOTHER DISAPPEARED MTL. POLICE REFUSE TO INVESTIGATE
THE RAPE OF A JEWISH FAMILY
"MRS. CARTER'S RIGHTS WERE VIOLATED THREE TIMES. "
MARLENE JENNINGS, M.P.
CRUCIFIED BY DAWN MCSWEENEY, BURIED BY THE MONTREAL POLICE
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