RIP Dorothy McQuillan

It is with a heavy heart that I write this letter from Beijing, China after receiving the phone call I had hoped I would never receive. One joke of our family was that Nanny would outlive us all. I’m not sure I ever believed that I would see the day that she passed on.

Every time I drink a rye and ginger, or see a box of Miltons, or pass a Red Lobster, I will be reminded of Nanny. I will serve my children Nanny eggs and I will tell them about the matriarch of our family that we lost. I will tell them about the woman who lay in the hospital bed, fiery as ever, telling jokes and making fun of the nurses. I will remember the ailing woman who, barely able to lift her arm, gestured to my brothers and me and said jokingly “and what’s wrong with you?!” because we had not yet married or added to the brood of great grandchildren that she has left behind. She was of the generation of children that walked uphill to school--both ways; a life-long care-giver and seemingly everyone’s grandmother.
She was a woman unable to understand my choice to live in Asia but sympathetic to my penchant for travel. She was a stubborn and strong woman who didn’t take lightly to being bed-ridden and helpless. The nurses soon learned what we all have known, that “Nobody puts Nanny in the corner!”

Now we must move on to new endeavours as she would want us to. Marcel Proust once wrote of mourning: “People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad.” Although Nanny left her family to work out of the home, and left the country to travel countless times, she always came home. In the end I will choose to believe that Nanny is just traveling on another adventure, like myself, happy where she is, waiting to come home. And when she does, she will tell an exhausted family story like when she came to visit my family in Markham when I was very young, creeping into my bed in the middle of the night. In the morning I woke up and exclaimed, “I waked up and therrrrrreeeee was Nanny!” Perhaps, then, we are both traveling and one day we will meet again.