Flowers are laid down outside the British Consulate General after the death of Britain's longest-serving monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, Friday, on September 9, 2022 in New York.Yuki IWAMURA/The Associated Press
This is the weekly Amplify newsletter, where you can be inspired and challenged by the voices, opinions and insights of women at The Globe and Mail.
Marsha Lederman is the Western Arts Correspondent.
Perhaps it is a little early to write this (I will anyway), but the Queen did not mean a whole lot to me personally. I did not cry when I learned the news, or even have a moment of self-reflection, as so many of my colleagues did.
I’m sorry for the loss, of course – especially for her family, but also her nation. From what I can tell, as a commoner way out here in the provinces, she seemed to be very good at her job: a stable force who put her duties ahead of her personal and family life (at least according to my viewing of The Crown).
Still, her death triggered an unexpected reaction: a deep longing for my mother.
It took me a while to figure out why. Queen Elizabeth was not exactly an important figure in our home or our lives. We were not British, not even close (although I suppose you could argue that being Canadian is somewhat close). We didn’t collect dishes with pictures of the Royal Family on them, or have the Queen’s portrait hanging anywhere. And we certainly did not live the kind of life that would have put us in any sort of potentially royal-adjacent situations. We lived our quiet European immigrant lives far from ivory towers, or castles, of any sort.
Still, I knew that my mother had a thing for her. She regarded Queen Elizabeth with more than respect, almost a kind of awe. I might even say that she loved the Queen. She got excited when she would come on TV or if there was a story about her in the newspaper.
I hadn’t thought about this much – or really at all – until the Queen’s death put a surprising pit in my stomach. Why did losing the Queen bring up the loss of my mother, who died 16 years ago? And also, why did my mother feel for her the way she did? Where did these connections come from?
Was it because Queen Elizabeth was the official head of state of the country that had welcomed my parents as refugees, given them a new shot at life? Or because she led the country that had helped liberate Europe after the Second World War – giving my parents actual life? Did it mean something to my Holocaust survivor parents that young Elizabeth had actually joined the women’s branch of the British Army?
Maybe. But I think it was actually something a little less profound. Something generational. To my mother, Queen Elizabeth radiated grace and importance – at a time when being graceful and important mattered. The Queen was impressive to an immigrant family like mine – and she exemplified a kind of life we could not only never achieve, but would never even think to aspire to.
And for my mother, she was a peer. Not in the royal way, but in the age way. They were born a year apart on the same continent, if into vastly different worlds. I wonder whether my mother measured her life against the experiences of this other woman’s – the age of their children, their husbands. They used to carry the same shape of handbag, wear a kerchief the same way around their heads. Maybe it gave my mother a bit of a kick to think they had these teeny-tiny things in common.
I recall how my mother delighted at the grainy photograph I managed to take of the distant Queen at the opening ceremony of the 1976 Olympics in Montreal. And in 1990, when my mother and I met up in London for a few days, she oohed-and-ahhed like a schoolgirl as we approached the gates of Buckingham Palace. She was unironically, uncynically, wholly impressed with the wonder of being outside a palace where the Queen sometimes lived. She displayed a reverence that I in no way felt, or could tap into. My mother’s feelings for the Queen were pure – an innocent admiration in a way that we no longer automatically regard people in high places. (Which is good! Critical thinking is essential. But I miss my mom’s sweet, if naive, veneration.)
I think a lot of this had to do with my mother’s cohort – who grew up with the Queen, or at least at the same time as her. And I think some of this had to do with Elizabeth herself – a woman who was never supposed to be Queen but rose to the role nonetheless.
I can’t see my mother feeling this way about Charles.
Then again, I’ll never know. Because she will never know.
Shortly after my mother died, I was in a newsroom, watching the opening ceremony of the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin. And I remember feeling this great sadness that she would never make it to Italy, a country she had always longed to visit. But also that she would not be able to experience the spectacle of that opening ceremony. That she would never be able to experience anything, ever again.
That faded eventually; I stopped thinking “my mother will never know about this” every time a major event happened – in the world, or to me. But when the Queen died, another connection to life on this Earth as it was when my mother was on it, was also gone.
What else we’re thinking about:
With the days getting shorter and my brain feeling fried pretty much all the time, I have been watching a lot of TV lately – sometimes on my own and sometimes with my son. Alone, I have become obsessed with Bad Sisters, the excellent how-dunnit cocreated by Sharon Horgan, who previously won my heart with the excellent series Catastrophe. Like these sisters, this series is dark and hilarious and smart and wonderful.
On a lighter note, my 13-year-old and I are binge-watching an older series, Superstore. We have fallen hard for this group of workers in the Walmart-like store Cloud 9 (where customers are told to “have a heavenly day”), led by manager Glenn Sturgis (Canadian Mark McKinney of Kids in the Hall fame) – kind and Christian, but not the sharpest knife in the store. With each episode, we debate which character is the funniest (I usually go with Dina, played by Lauren Ash) and which scenarios are the cringiest (too many to list). We laugh a lot. We are very often amused.
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