by Maralee Mason from Barriere, BC
Jun 13, 15
There were many wonderful things about my mother, but her singing voice is what she was known for. Now I don’t just mean she could carry a tune, I mean my mother could sing. Her voice had the power to stop you in your tracks. When she sang, you felt every word deep in your bones. Her voice had the power to change our family, and one day it did.
It happened at a time when it had become evident that my parents had hit a rough spot in their marriage. They had taken us on a family vacation – to Edmonton, Alberta – and one day we went on a shopping trip to the West Edmonton Mall. As we were walking around that massive mall my mother spotted a recording booth. You could record a song, they would give you a copy and then they would play it throughout the entire mall. So mom got in the booth and did what she did best - she sang. The song she sang was called Just Never Say It Enough. It’s a song about saying the most important words to the one you love. She dedicated the song to my dad.
Well the song and that gesture seemed to change everything for my mom and dad. Things were never perfect, but they did get better, much better.
When we got back home from our vacation my older brother secretly took a copy of the recording to the local radio station. And they fell in love with it.
A few days later, my mom was sitting in the living room and my brother ran in and turned the radio on. To my mother’s surprise they were playing her song. We all danced around in celebration of her radio debut.
The station played her song for more than a month and she became a local celebrity. She had a radio interview, we all got our picture in the newspaper and the phone rang off the hook. Everybody wanted a copy of the recording.
Suddenly everyone knew what I had always known – that my parents shared true love and that my mom had the most beautiful voice in the world.
Sadly my mom passed away a few years ago. But when she did, she did not leave us kids empty-handed.
She left us a gift: the love of music. In every tough situation my mom would do two things: she would pray and she would sing. And that’s what we do too. If you had walked into our house when my mother was sick – all you would have heard was music. Whether it was our CD players cranked as loud as they could go, my brother’s guitar, or just our voices. When life was hard, when pain consumed us, when we had no reason to sing, we sang.
And today, when we miss her, we do the only thing we can do: we sing. Because we know that if we sing loud enough, and hard enough, we will always hear our mother’s voice in ours.