July 10th would have been my mother’s 104th birthday, so it seemed like the perfect day to do a Celebration of Life. I want to share the moment here on the blog, largely because this event was my focus, if not my actual obsession over the past few weeks. We had a small gathering of family as a moment to share our memories.

I just wanted to share some simple concrete images. In my eulogy I did a kind of “show and tell” about my mother. I will mention a few things from that day as I seek to preserve this moment, already a few days ago. I have been obsessed, as I have anxiety about remembrance, fearing that so much of her life is long ago, that I shall forget, even as I recognize there are huge parts of her life that I never knew.

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At one time (when the family used to go to a cottage) my mom used to collect heart-shaped stones she found on the beach.

Sometimes the resemblance to a heart was not very strong. As a kid I thought it was funny. But I see now that SHE could see the heart. It suggests the strength of her moral imagination: that she saw the resemblance to a heart, on the beach. She could see the heart in others.

My mom crocheted finger-less gloves in multiple colours.

I put the blue ones on because blue was her favourite colour.

I showed a photocopy of a school assignment that my daughter Zoe wrote long ago. The title is “A Person That Has Influenced Me” and you see she’s talking about my mother’s resilience. You can’t read it easily, but that’s not the point. It matters to me because it mattered to my mom, who kept this copy by her desk as a keepsake, among her own most precious items.

It reminds me that my mother used to babysit Zoe half days during kindergarten (with my brother Peter’s help making the pickups). My mom who was an artist would do art with Zoe from an early age.


And of course now Zoe is an adult artist influenced by my mom. At the far end of the room from the grand piano where I stood delivering my eulogy I have the huge painting by Zoe that I use as my Facebook profile pic.

Impressive as it appears here, in person it is even more breath-taking.

Another keepsake of my mother was a precious book in Hungarian, that reminds me of a chat I had with my mother back in 2020. (follow the link for the details)

In my 2025 eulogy I only said this book was a prize possession of my mom, a book rescued from a bombed out Budapest bookstore back in 1944, that she had given to me. I mused on the way memory works, how romantic that she would re-read poems that long ago my father Jozsef had read to her. This book serves as a pathway to remember both of them, even if my grasp of the subtleties is weak.

I finished my talk, as other family members took their turns speaking: Zoe via smartphone from USA, my sisters Katherine & Margaret, my brother Peter and my cousin Larry.

Peter spoke while I held my phone, playing music from YouTube that my mother loved, Jussi Björling singing Ack Värmeland du sköna, a song associated with a place and a time in her life.

Peter was the one born in Sweden, and the one who was to become the opera singer.

Peter held up a cartoon for us to see, a little piece of comic art my mother created upon her graduation in 1967 from the Ontario College of Education (as it was then known). She showed this (or handed it out? I am guessing) to prospective employers, school principals who might want to employ her, saying the following in her cartoon self-portrait:

“Sewing Teacher
Young, Talented, Enthusiastic
Dependable, Versatile
Shy Modest
Requires employment
goes anywhere in Town

Have Needle Will Travel”

The drawing is signed “KayBee” which would be her Canadian nom de plume, in cartoons & rhyme. And it worked. She met her future boss from Humbergrove Vocational School (as it was then called) in the northern part of Etobicoke, teaching until her retirement.

My sister Margaret brought a cake including a picture of my mom, and decorated with tiny candy ladybugs in the icing. My mother often included the ladybug one way or another as a kind of alias in her signature or in drawings she made, a lifetime association coming from the Hungarian name for ladybug (“katicabogár“, where “bogár” is the Magyar word for bug) and of course her name was Katalin or Kati for short.

It occurs to me now that she switched from the ladybug to “KayBee” in recognition that Canadians wouldn’t understand the significance of the ladybug the way we did.

Once again it raises a question that I wish I could discuss with her: but it’s just one more topic that will have to end with speculation rather than a conclusive answer.

We drank a toast to my mother on her 104th birthday.