Thread by @davidfrum

Yesterday, my family marked the anniversary of the loss of my late grandmother, Florence Rosberg. I wrote this about my personal debt to Florence on her death in 2005. davidfrum.com/article/ode-to…

Today, we commemorate the premature loss of my late mother, Barbara Frum, who died on this day in 1992, age 54.

Barbara Frum meant so much to so many people - both through her journalism and her innumerable acts of personal generosity - that commemoration of this second sad anniversary cannot be a private act. In her life, we understood: we had to share her. And so it has been ever since.

I talked about Barbara's influence upon me in this interview last year. thewalrus.ca/david-frum-fig… I repeat so many of her sayings so often. I think today of something she once said about her life's work in an interview shortly before her death ...

... the interviewer saluted her as the most influential journalist in Canada. She answered that her influence was that of a drop of water that over time might gradually trace a groove in a rock. But, she said, "I'm a very small drop of water. And it's a very big rock."

But the drop of water still flows even after the source was stilled. When I listen to interviews on CBC, even now I hear her vocal mannerisms reverberating through time, much as - according to Tom Wolfe - airline pilots channel the voice of Chuck Yeager.

The Canadian expectation of honesty and accountability in public life- the Canadian hostility to inflammatory bias in media - that too confirms Barbara's continuing impact on the world. She refused special favors, never cut a queue, and was always first to correct her mistakes.

"Above all things, I hate a lie," she often said. And the lies she hated were not only the concealments of politicians and the distortions of journalists, but the structures of self-flattery that prevent us from seeing necessary truths about ourselves.

My most important seminar rooms were her breakfast table and her dressing room, the places where we had our longest and most intimate conversations. She was often tough. Unlike some other mothers, she used to say, "I'm not a son-worshipper."

When I was young, she would be visibly disappointed in me if she heard me repeat as my own thought something that (as she instantly discerned) I'd absorbed second-hand from some politician or writer or professor. She taught the uncomfortable work of thinking for oneself.

When her loss was new, it was almost beyond bearing. The only way her family coped was that so many others lent a shoulder to help bear it with us. Now, 29 years later, when she might still have been alive age 84, the fellow-bearers are still there. Thank you to all who remember.