Bill's Memories

This is a rendition of my speech at her memorial....

I feel like she hasn’t left, she’s still here, and I’m speaking at her 70^th birthday party.  Now remember I was 16 years younger than Faye.  So when I was 5, she was 21.  My first memories of her was dragging me around shopping.  Army and Navy and Woodwards in Vancouver is a clear memory.  We would walk off the CPR ferry and get going.

This is also when she started dressing me up in weird clothes.

Dressing me up:

Kilt (okay, the kilt was cute, she brought this back from Scotland for me, along with lederhosen and a cap from Switzerland, but then it got really weird). 

Wedding outfit.  She farmed me out to her friends who were getting married.  "Billy will be your ring bearer."  Each outfit was more effeminate than the last.  To this day people tell me I was in their wedding.  I don’t even know who they are.   

She loved it when I dressed up like a female.  She was the secretary at my elementary school when I was in grade 7.  I’m sure it was her Idea that I enter a drag queen contest called Miss Seaview School.  She had all the accessories.  I lipped synced a Cher song alongside maybe 3 or 4 other guys.  What was I thinking?  In college she helped dress me up like a nun, and helped my friend Dave dress like little bo peep.  To this day some people in the music business in Vancouver still call me sister Bill.  I was just saying, “I need a costume for Halloween”.  She would basically say, why don’t you dress like a girl?  She thought it was funny.

Babysitting.  I was 14 or 15 when her children were born.  I was a teen ager, and was starting to have a life.  Driving around in cars with my friends, playing music in bands and partying.  We didn’t get along at all when I didn’t want to babysit her children.  That went on for years.  We didn’t really get along back then.

I was really getting serious about playing music, and she kept pulling my leg.  She bought me piano gifts for birthday and Christmas.  Way too many gifts for way too long.  Scarves with piano keys, a piano calculator, piano t-shirts, piano toque.  It bugged me and she knew it, but, she thought it was funny.  She kept buying this junk for me.  Just to see my reaction.

We kind of went our separate ways for a long time. Then when mom got sick with ALS, all of us kids wanted to help, and that meant we had to work together.  It was difficult.  We are very different individuals.  When mom passed away, Faye divorced not long after.  She had hit rock bottom.  At a birthday party for dad at the Nanaimo Golf Course, she announced she had been to the Edgewood counselling centre in Nanaimo, and that she was doing well.  I didn’t believe her.  Without getting into details, we didn’t see eye to eye back then.  I really didn’t believe she would change.  Maybe I changed too, but from that moment, we started a great relationship.  I think her judgement of others disappeared.  I mean, you could still talk off the record about people, but generally she really had taken a turn for the better.  She started to fill her house with self help books, and Oprah Winfrey was number one.  She even went to see her show in Chicago.

What all of this meant was that she was totally a giving person from that time forward.

Have you ever known her to miss the birth of a baby in the family?

Giving: She co-signed the mortgage on my home when I was going through a divorce.  I was going to lose my home, and I had nowhere to turn.  She helped me.

I stayed at her house every Monday night for years when I came over to teach piano at the college.  We had fun.  We would go to the film festival, dinner at Earls, or just try to help manage our father’s care.

Just in the last month she continued her practice:

She was throwing up from chemotherapy and asking Craig if the kids are okay at her house, and worried  that they don’t fall down the stairs.

Every day this month Olivia, my daughter is opening up the doors of an advent calendar that Faye gave her.

I’m so happy that we told each other we loved each other just last week at her birthday when I was showing her the videos of the birthday dinner she couldn’t attend because of her illness.  She paid for that dinner by the way.  She will always be a force and strength in my life.  I love you Faye.