Goodbye, Trish: A farewell to an aunt who will always make me smile

You’re not supposed to have a special auntie, but we all do, I think.

I was fortunate to grow up with plenty of aunts and uncles, and wonderful family connections, but Trish Cogswell was the one with whom I had an extraordinary relationship, all through my life.

We said goodbye to her last week, and I’ve been reflecting on a remarkable series of memories … and how lucky I was to have Trish in my life, at its many stages.

Trish was born Patricia Kelly in St. John’s, the youngest sister of the six children in my mom’s family. The gap between Mom and Trish — our family called her that, though she often went by Pat — was a decade, but the gap felt longer or more dramatic when I was growing up: Trish wore jeans! She loved the Beatles! She was cool!

Trish, an early model of what in St. John’s for decades would be called a “good Holy Heart girl,” became a nurse and met a wonderful man from Nova Scotia named Eric Cogswell, a quiet and erudite physician. They settled in Burlington, Ont., raised a family (my cousins Carolyn, David and Stephanie), and made a home for themselves that was well known to me as a kid and then an adult.

For a few summers, Mom and Dad would dispatch me to Burlington and I’d hang out with Trish and the family. I was old enough to mind the kids, and the visits eventually allowed me the opportunity to hop the train in Toronto to explore on my own: a fun prospect for a young teen. I didn’t realize until I had grown up that the vacation for me was also one for my parents!

Trish and I clicked. She was easy-going and curious, funny with words and behaviour: in a hurry, she would take a mug of coffee into the car with her, as is. This was years before auto manufacturers put cup holders in their vehicles. Somehow, she made it work.

Trish also had a terrific sense of humour — and a healthy disrespect for authority. In the summer of 1981, she had had her fill of the hoopla for the royal wedding of Charles and Diana. We were in a bookstore when I spotted a satirical book called Not The Royal Wedding (made by the folks behind Not The Nine O’Clock News, the British comedy show that launched Rowan Atkinson), and she groaned loudly and comically … until she looked more closely. We both howled flicking through it, and after I bought it, she’d ask to take another spin through it. Her laughter was golden: unforced, genuine and raucous.

Years later, my wife Martha and I would visit Trish and Eric in Burlington, and laughter was always on the menu.

It delighted me that Trish — who made a midlife career switch to study English literature and went all the way through her PhD exams at U of T before deciding she didn’t actually want to write a dissertation, thanks — and Martha hit it off, in multiple ways. They loved the same authors, had the same tastes, and both nearly poisoned Eric and me once with excessive use of garlic in a salad. (That was another night of howling laughs … once we got over the initial tastebud attack.)

In 2019, Trish and family made it to St. John’s for a visit. We had a bit of a family reunion on Signal Hill, where their father, Bill Kelly, had worked at Cabot Tower for many years as a telegraph operator. Hard to believe now, but the family (before Trish’s birth) had actually lived beneath the tower in a duplex built for Canadian Marconi operators and their families; they were evacuated when the Second World War broke out, and the Kelly children grew up in downtown St. John’s, primarily Cochrane Street.

In a nice nod to our family history, Parks Canada arranged for the surviving “Kelly girls” to take part in a firing of the noonday gun. It was a kind gesture, and we all appreciated it.

It was a lovely family moment. Later, we learned that it was a moment that would likely not be repeated.

Trish was diagnosed with a type of dementia. This happened some years before my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Eric became her caregiver, and life continued — but we knew that it has irrevocably changed. When I look back now at the years of emails we exchanged, I noticed only this week that the typos in Trish’s final note were likely an indication of what was happening in her brain.

In June 2023, Martha and I made another pilgrimage to their home on Pomona Avenue. Trish was still Trish, and yet had changed, and not just physically. When we sat for the lunch that Eric prepared, I was struck when Trish looked and pointed at her utensils, and told me she could never remember what to do next. It was one of those little moments of heartbreak.

More were to come.

Just eight months later came the shock of Eric’s death. I had steeled myself for Trish’s eventual departure, but not Eric. Even though he was 85, he always seemed unstoppable, and of course he was the one keeping Trish on track.

Last December, when we were visiting friends in Toronto, I asked my cousins if I could visit Trish one more time. By that point, she was living in care. I know that she had declined, and the disease had taken away so much of her away. They arranged for a Christmas lunch at the home where Trish was staying.

In the intervening couple of years, Trish’s affect had changed remarkably. The easy, sunny smile was gone, and on that day, her mood was irritable. My cousins said they had wished she were at her best for our visit, but honestly, it was fine: I knew enough by then about the disease and how behaviour and mood can be affected by tiredness, and that both can change during any day. (I have been writing about my own experiences with Mom and her disease in a series of posts called Alzheimer’s Diary.)

For me, it was a pleasure just to be with her, and to hold her hand one more time.

I knew it would be the last.

Patricia Bernadette Cogswell died June 21 in Burlington, some days after being taken into palliative care. She was 83. Her family was with her all the way through.

A beautiful service was held Tuesday, and Martha and I watched it online. Carolyn and Steph spoke from the heart about their mom, and Eric’s three sisters talked about the influence of Pat — that’s how they always knew her — in their family and their respective lives. It was a beautiful service.

As with Eric’s service two years earlier, the family chose songs that had meaning for them, including Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water, John Lennon’s Imagine and Jann Arden’s Good Mother.

I have so many memories of Trish over the years, and one of them is her playing Beatles records and singing along as she puttered about the house. One of the songs she relished was Hello, Goodbye. It seems fitting, in several ways, to revisit it here.

I have a funny postscript to tell you. Last year, when my niece Beth was visiting the Cogswell cousins, they sent back a mug of Trish’s that made me howl. Here it is:

As mentioned above, Trish was a great lover of coffee, and had a sense of humour that was sharp and pointy, as warm and loving as she was.

When they were going through Trish’s things, they thought of me when they came across the “coffee slut” mug. I truly was honoured! And it makes me smile all the time.

I was very lucky to have had Trish in my life. She brought joy to us through the years, was thoughtful and kind, helped me better understand and appreciate my family ties, and suggested so many good things to experience. She lived her life fully.

I wish we had her for more time, and without having lost her, bit by bit, to that disease.