MORALES, Waltraud (nee Scholz) - Born August 30, 1929 in Temuco, Chile, died September 17, 2021 in Toronto, Canada.
To give sense of our mom's ancestry: her grandfather, German immigrant to Chile, did not believe in Christmas. So his wife, and his children born in a new country, celebrated after he went to bed. Until one Christmas night the man stayed at table, and one young son, her father, blurted out, 'Here we sit and have nothing.' And her grandfather stood up, and went silently off to bed.
Our mom was born in Temuco, but it was Pucon, by a lake and an active volcano that sometimes cut off the only road out, our mom loved, as her childhood home. Summers spent with cousins, rowing, playing cards, the one time her youngest brother, practicing his shooting, ricocheted a bullet just past his ear, turned white as the proverbial sheet. But high school, later university pulled our mom away, for she was an intelligent girl, read her father's library, and even young was trusted with responsibilities past her age.
Our mom's years at the University of Chile in Santiago, the capital, were probably her happiest. She was part of a gang of girls who screamed themselves hoarse at any referee who dared call a foul on the university's soccer team, and as hoarse protesting the 'tin cans' (surplus warships) the Yanquis were peddling to a government that needed to help the people of a poor country more. Not to add, the scolding our mom gave a traffic policeman who whistled at her. In the middle of the busiest intersection of the city.
But even at that happy age, premonitions about our mom's health. She remembered the older woman who offered her seat on a trolley. Telling her, 'My dear, you have a weak heart.'
She taught mathematics to Catholic high school girls who, she complained, only wanted to know how to find a boy with a motorcycle. And she remembered visiting her best student some years after. Who already had a toddler and a fussy baby, and complained ironically, for this she had learnt so much mathematics? Our mom herself married late, and had children late, by the standard of the day. But her natal horoscope predicted it: Mother. With a capital M.
How fiercely she loved us, how exacting her standards for us, how hard she worked for us but kept an eagle eye: homework first, before fun. But she let fun, and our freedom to roam. The "small house", the "large house" later, she was the constant that made home, made family, pulled us back from our roamings. Despite the ongoing argument with her son: why does cabbage soup even exist in this universe, my cry.
We couldn't see it, first excited by the prospect, then excited by learning a new country. Canada. Which welcomed us with the largest snowstorm in a decade. And became our mom's largest challenge. Quelques arpents de neige, Voltaire had complained. Some winters, one had to agree. But as a mother less fluent than her children in new languages, English, French, and not knowing a new society itself quickly changing and evolving, our mom was less able to help us, guide our way into Canada. We came for only two years, her reminder. But we stayed.
What our mom could read, she absorbed. Time, Maclean's, La Presse, her windows. Even her son's Playboys and Penthouses. For the articles, exactly as her son claimed. And her taste for English writers. Agatha Christie. But later, Hardy, Eliot, Trollope, Thackeray: our mom seeking authenticity, what rang true about human beings. She aced her citizenship test, only missed one question, thinking about Laurier. An intelligent woman, a knowledgeable woman, a cultured woman. And such a fan of les Habs, she had to leave the TV if nos Glorieux were losing, but turned on the radio in the kitchen. But alone until she started to take courses, tried to engage with a country that barely knew her. Preparation for her bravest leap into unknowable: divorce.
It was too hard, in the end, in the mosaic with invisible divisions that was and still is this country struggling towards inclusiveness. Though our mom had her adventures, learned to speak French as well as she read it, appeared in a student film where the young director wanted her face in nearly every shot, helped a small organization that helped newer immigrants. Before our mom moved again, to live with her son.
She had a few years of exploring and learning a new city, a vacation by train into the Muskokas, another to Cape Cod, the taste of New England clam chowder soup she always remembered. Before that weak heart gave way, and our mom had a heart attack so severe she wasn't expected to survive the year. But she did, and so many more, for the sake of her children, her first and only grand-child, the family joke was, she was dying of the same heart attack for thirty years.
Her children are still measuring our mom's impact on our friends, neighbors, and colleagues who came to know her. Her humour, her strength, her intelligence, even how she terrified her children with her expectations for us that we did our best to meet, but served us as guidestone all of our lives with her.
Our mom stayed true to her student protester days, supporting any government that helped all of us more than it helped any powers that be. And stayed true to being Mother with a capital M, to her end too blind, too debilitated to want to live to the hundred years everybody who knew her, wished for her. When she called us her poor son who did his best to help her across so many hospitals, her poor daughter, her poor grand-daughter. Even her poor 'son out of law' as we call him, who always called her 'Robocop' for her indomitableness.
Knowing we loved her, underneath everything, as fiercely as she loved us. Knowing the immense space in our hearts she leaves, reserved for her.
Arrangements are entrusted with Giffen-Mack funeral home, Danforth chapel, Toronto.
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