A Pilgrimage to Oshawa

I made a pilgrimage last week back to Ontario, or, it may be better called a “sentimental journey home.” It's the place where I have had the most loved ones and whose people with whom I can most easily identify, even though I've never had a legal address there.

Robert Frost's famous definition of home as “the place that, when you go there, they have to take you in,” has always seemed a travesty to me and I've often wondered why people quote it or think it's funny or something.

There was one grave site in Oshawa in particular where I prayed during this pilgrimage that felt like real home. This was the grave of a lady who lived a very difficult eighty-four years of hardship capped off at the end with a few years of Alzheimer's. She had no formal education, no money, no worldly fame nor power, but she did the true things all along the way and was utterly humble. Whenever I pointed out to her the magnificence of something she had done for someone, she would reply something to the effect that God had just put it in her path to do, that no credit was due to herself.

She adopted an infant whose parents had died shortly after his birth and raised him alone, as well as caring for many other children. It's a long story of many difficulties, but of a true woman. She taught me so much.

Here is a photo of her that I took one day when we went for a pilgrimage back to her own childhood home shortly before her death. I would take her places in my big truck whenever I was in Oshawa, even to church, and she was never embarrassed by it. I always found it very refreshing that she never felt embarrassed by me, who am distant from respectability and rich people.

She was only about four years old when her mother died and often thought of her mother as she went through her difficult life. I think she silently hoped that they would meet again on the other side. I trust it's so.