EDITOR:
There are things you can and can't say when you arrive back to your hometown after being gone for 40 years. Things you surely couldn't say when you were a young sad teenager roaming the streets of Charlottetown.
What you can't say about your hometown after being gone for 40 years is that your mother lived her adult life in a place where women’s voices were disregarded - even rebuked - with impunity. And that she (unwittingly or otherwise) supported the very people and institutions that deprived women of agency and voice.
Not surprisingly I came to see in 2018 while back in my hometown that salespeople, relatives, information clerks and priests still feel they can either respond to a woman's voice or they can roll their eyes if posed with a problematic question.
It’s still a choice in Prince Edward Island, you see.
I can't imagine how difficult it must have been for my mother to live her entire adult life in this way. She welcomed death the way anybody would welcome sleep after a long truck through a tough and thorny patch.
I can only hope the people attending my mother’s funeral mass gave some thought to this: How this one life was connected to something bigger.
I'll never know because I wasn't there. I boycotted my mother’s funeral mass and have no concerns whatsoever that anybody in Charlottetown will actually hear that.
Carole Trainor,
Halifax, N.S.
