Mother's Day will be a time for many to treasure the memories of one of the most important people in their lives, writes SHEILA WAYMAN
After Anne McCormack got the news last September that her mother, Inez, had been diagnosed with colon cancer, which had spread to her lungs, liver and breasts, she knew she had a wedding to organise.
“I told my boyfriend he was getting married and he very kindly went along with it,” says Anne (36), the only child of Inez and her husband, Vincent. “We’ve been together for 17 years but never thought it [marriage] was necessary for us.”
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However, with her mother terminally ill, they thought it would be a good way of gathering people.
“It meant all our family and friends could come together for a happy occasion. And it also meant Mum could think of something positive rather than cancer all the time.”
It was a gamble as 69-year-old Inez, the Belfast-born rights campaigner and trade union leader, had been given a shocking prognosis of a little as two to four weeks to live. But a date in early November was as fast as Anne and Mark Drummond, who live in Scotland with their two children, could arrange their wedding in Derry, where Inez was in the Foyle Hospice.
Anne says she thinks Inez felt quite panicked initially at how little time she was being told she had left.
As founder of the Belfast-based organisation Participation and the Practice of Rights, building on a lifetime of campaigning on behalf of the marginalised, Inez wanted to make sure she was passing on the torch.
“She still had quite a lot of stuff she wanted to do,” says Anne. “We very quickly set the date for the wedding and I think she decided in her own mind that she was going to be around for that.”
They were all determined it was going to be a happy day, with no tears shed in sadness. Inez’s only sibling, Terry, was able to travel over from South Africa with his family.
Something bright
When planning what to wear, Inez told her family to dig out the red cloak she had worn at her friend Mary Robinson’s inauguration as president of Ireland in 1990.
“Mary had said ‘wear something bright so people will see you’,” explains Anne. “She wore it again, so people would see her as mother of the bride.”
Anne is so glad they had the wedding. “We have great memories and great photos of her and the kids and everyone looks happy. It worked.” Inez made it through to the New Year and died on January 21st.
As anyone who has grieved the loss of a close relative or friend knows, the first year after death is full of keenly felt milestones. Talking one month to the day her mother died, Anne says there are lots of moments to devote to memories of her – not least this Sunday when, for the first time, she will not be able to pick up the phone and wish Inez a “Happy Mother’s Day”.
“We didn’t really do cards,” she explains, but she always phoned her mother, who was often in the US at this time of year at meetings tying in with St Patrick’s Day delegations and celebrations.
For as long as she can remember, Anne shared her mother with the wider community. Her tireless campaigning against injustices rippled out from their home in north Belfast, to the whole of Ireland and beyond.
Inez’s work life was very integrated with home life. Anne, who was brought to her first trade union meeting when she was just two weeks old, remembers going to creches at conferences and playing with toys under the table at meetings.
“She worked so hard. The phone was always going at night and people were always calling at the door.” Holidays abroad were very special as it was rare, undisturbed “off” time for just the three of them together.
Inez’s many career highlights include being a signatory to the MacBride Principles (a fair employment code for US companies doing business in Northern Ireland) in 1984, working behind the scenes in the peace process and becoming the first woman president of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions in 1999.
Having grown up in a lower middle-class Protestant family near Holywood, Co Down, Inez met and fell in love in 1967 with Vincent McCormack, from a working-class family in Derry’s Bogside. It was a turning point in both their lives when they participated in the People’s Democracy march in 1968, which was attacked by loyalists at Burntollet. Her relief at seeing police officers turned to dismay when she realised they were supporting the attackers of the students.
Sense of injustice
That sense of injustice and determination to do something about it was to inform much of her work. A powerful English politician once told her: “You are loathed in high places and loved in low places” and Inez reckoned that was about right.
However, her endearing personality meant she made friends, particularly with women, wherever she went. Anne recalls overhearing a telephone conversation between Hillary Clinton and her mother not long before she died.
“Hillary momentarily shrugged off the cares of the world, and Inez brushed aside her cancer as the pair of them laughed and giggled like schoolgirls.”
Inez was one of seven women leaders around the world whose inspiring achievements are celebrated in Seven, a documentary-drama devised by seven playwrights that has been performed in 16 different countries, but not Ireland.
Anne says it was one of the “most extraordinary” events of her life to see Meryl Streep playing her mother in a New York theatre, to mark the opening of the Women in the World summit in 2010.
“When Meryl Streep came on stage she was kind of dressed like my mum and her turn of phrase was like Mum’s. She must have done a huge amount of work capturing her – she wasn’t just reading a script. She had spoken to Mum on the phone.”
It was gratifying for Anne to see her mother being affirmed for all her years of selfless work – “she didn’t get that a lot at home”.
“It was nice to meet a lot of the women at that event who just thought she was fantastic and loved being with her.”
Inez tended to be portrayed in the media at home as very professional, hard-working and a “firebrand”, says Anne, “although she was all those things, she was always very warm”.
“She was a great hugger and a great one for laughing – and I think that those are the things that I remember. We always enjoyed a great laugh – me, her and Dad always shared a good sense of humour.”
When Anne became a mother herself, she gained a deeper understanding of the stresses and guilt of juggling motherhood with full-time work.
Inez adored her two grandchildren, Maisie (six) and Jamie who will be two next month.
And it is Inez’s voice which is in Anne’s head as she sings the same songs at night to her children as her mother sang to her, in an echoing of love across the generations.
'My mum was always full of life, full of energy . . . but over-riding all of that was a want for family'
All Gillian Freedman ever wanted on Mother's Day was a bunch of flowers – freesias in particular.
"You could have gone to a huge amount of effort getting anything else but what my mum loved was the life of the flowers in the house," says her son Andrew (31).
It says much about her life, both as an artist with a special eye for colour and as a Jewish matriarch presiding over her warm and welcoming Dublin home. Her early death from cancer at the age of 63 last November has left a gaping hole in the lives of her husband, Dr Derek Freedman, and their two sons, Andrew, a film producer, and Michael, an oral surgeon.
This Sunday, Andrew will be helping his 17-month-old daughter Mia celebrate Mother's Day with his wife, Tiffany Hodder-Freedman, at their house, close to the family home in Ranelagh.
"It is only when you become a parent that you really, honestly value what goes in to being a parent," he says. "I feel so bad now looking back on all the abuse I would have given. It now makes sense how patient she actually was."
He is very grateful that his mother and Mia, her first grandchild, had a bit of time together. While his daughter isn't going to remember it, "for my mum it just meant everything. And for me, Mia has been one of the best ways to handle, as a distraction, what followed."
Focus on art
As a child, Andrew recalls that when he came home from school, the first thing he always wanted to do was hang out with his mother as she worked at her loom in the bottom floor of the house, weaving rugs and tapestries.
She could focus on her art while they were at school and then she often worked late into the evening too. He remembers lingering with his younger brother at bedtime for as long as they could possibly get away with – the more absorbed she was in her work the better.
Her art room turned into Andrew's bedroom when a purpose-built, light-filled studio was built in the garden, where she worked for the last 10 years or so.
"At the house, family was front and centre and she was definitely the backbone of that," says Andrew, who remembers an open house, full of people. In the great tradition of a Jewish home-maker, family and friends were encouraged, "primarily by food", to come together.
"It is amazing how correct some of the clichés can be," says Andrew with a laugh of Gillian, whose ancestors came to Ireland from Riga in Latvia in the 1840s. Anything she cooked tasted fantastic but "in true Jewish style her chicken soup was always pretty amazing." Derek's family was also Jewish, with roots in Eastern Europe.
Andrew says his mother's main goal was to protect the family, the relationships, and make sure that the key elements of their identity – even if they weren't practised – were ingrained in her sons for future generations.
"I remember my mum's mum – they would have been very alike in lots of ways – and she would have put that on my mum. She would have been the heart of the family as well and would have made sure my mum and my dad honoured that."
Core values
Although both did their Bar Mitzvah, Andrew says he and Michael would have been regarded as Jewish boys "only in a very casual way". Yet he feels he has held on to core values.
While Gillian may sometimes have come across as a bit quick with people – "if you were looking for a reaction you would get it, an artistic temperament" – but in fact, he explains, she had great patience in doing much good behind the scenes.
He believes his mother's artistic strengths lay in "her absolute amazing use of colours – she always had a spark for how to mix colours together and that stood to her and her work". She liked to look at the extraordinary in the ordinary – which has turned into a bit of a tag line for his film production company, Venom.
Simple things like, for instance, drains in the street would spark ideas and end up in photos and papers all over Gillian's studio.
"You would go in and think 'wow, how could anything be done here?' and then it would all start to merge together."
Compassion and hilarity
Andrew was producer of Ken Wardrop's award-winning His Hers, a documentary exploring women's relationship with men over the span of life, that provokes tears of both compassion and hilarity.
"At the time I remember it really made me think you have to make the most of what you can and embrace the things around you at the time you have."
Gillian was diagnosed with cancer about six months before she died – she had a sore back but no other symptoms. It turned out cancer had gone from the lung into her back. Medication seemed to keep it in check for a while but it went into the spinal cord "and that activated it a lot quicker", Andrew explains.
Now the warmth and vibrancy of his mother are just memories – but also characteristics that will live on through her children and grandchildren. "My mum was always full of life, full of energy, full of spark but, over-riding all of that, was a want for family and a want to help people," Andrew adds. "A wonderful person."
