Wyona on Wyora for Mother’s Day

... Wyora with her second child, Earl ...
1941

I left Calgary in 1965 and came back 40 years later in 2010.

People would come up to me at church and say, “You are a Pilling, aren’t you. I knew your mother, Wyora. She was the loveliest person I was ever privileged to know.”

Other people would come up to me and say, “You are a Pilling, aren’t you. I moved here after your mother passed away. I have heard so many stories about her. I wish I had known her.”

I left to take a summer semester in 1964 at BYU one year, and I took two courses. One was a psychology course and the other was called Achieving Success in Marriage. We had to write an essay on our parents’ marriage.

“Redo this,” came back the comment from the professor. “You can’t talk about only the positive things. You have to think about the negative things as well.”

I wrote back and said I couldn’t think of any negative things.

He wrote back and said, “You must have had amazing parents.”

Everyone loved my mother.

... Doral Pilling with his Scouts on Sunday at the Crescent Road Chapel ... 
 (undated, perhaps 1941)

Those who knew Doral and Wyora together loved them.

Half loved Doral dearly and the other half had no use for him.

They had to endure him to have access to her.

He was everyone’s best friend, but he was blunt.

Everyone must look at themselves in the mirror. Doral was that mirror. The half who disliked him had  access to a mirror into which they did not want to see.

It was two decades after my mother’s death, that I stopped crying when someone would speak to me about her.

By that time, you are a mother yourself, and you are crying over your own stuff.

Wyona Bates