“Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, hold the horse ’til I get on…” (Mom’s chant one day, at age 56, during a particularly intense episode)
1919: Gwendolyn was born in Brandon, Manitoba, youngest of eight children.
People who knew and loved my mother in later life remember her as a compassionate, no-nonsense kind of woman who cooked marvelous dinners. Only I, as her only child, was privileged to know that beneath this gentle exterior, she was an adventure-loving pioneer with a tiger inside her.
Multipe sclerosis is a neurological disease that attacks the nerves. Now considered one of the autoimmune diseases, there haven’t been any major advances or cures in the six years since Mummy died in 1998 at age 78. Even before that it was considered a mystery. Doctors agree however that people with MS should try to reduce the stress in their lives as much as possible.
Her name was Amy Reeve. My brother Richard called her “Mummy” or “Mum,” but to me she was always “Belinda”, after a cartoon character named Belinda Blue-Eyes. She was born around 1899 in Tasmania, and was the youngest of four daughters and one son. At least, this is what I thought until a recent internet search revealed that she was actually born nine years earlier, on February 3, 1890, and was the fifth of six daughters and one son. Perhaps only four of the girls survived, and that is why I was never aware of the other two. I recall Belinda telling me that her father, a surgeon named Charles Frederick Reeve, was a Baron from England, who met and married my grandmother in Australia.