A kiss, a song, a goodbye

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This article was published 19/04/2018 (2197 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Aina Ezerins is described by her relatives as strong-willed, no-nonsense, private and occasionally goofy.

The Latvian immigrant came to Canada by herself in the 1950s and would rely on all of those qualities to get by.

Aina died March 10 at the Grace Hospital. She was 90 years old.

She is predeceased by her husband of 61 years, Janis Ezerins, who passed in 2015; her parents, Edward and Lisette Vulfs, and brothers, Edmunds and Harry.

Aina is survived by her three kids, Leo, Ivars and Linda; five adult grandchildren, Dillon, Kaitlin, Sam, Anne and Emma; and other loving relatives, like her godson Vilnis Vulfs.

“One of the things that I talked about in the eulogy was she was what I would call a post-feminist, in the sense that she was incredibly strong,” Vulfs said.

“You would laugh at the thought of anyone taking advantage of her. She was just a no-nonsense lady. She really saw things very clearly and she was no one’s fool. She was a force to be reckoned with.”

Youngest child Linda stayed stoic while flipping through old family photographs with a reporter this week and discussing Aina’s passing — much like her mother probably would have. It seems grief hasn’t quite sunk in.

“I’m stone-faced right now,” Linda said. “This to me is like back to back. I’m still trying to get over my dad’s little thing and now this one with my mom. I’m remembering things and old times and you know what? They were all happy times, they weren’t bad times.”

Linda was her parents’ primary caregiver in their last years, living with them in the long-time family home on Valour Road and later visiting them daily in hospital.

Now she’s cleaning out their old house, which has sold and changes hands in July. That means parsing through those happy memories, including the photos.

The handful she shares include shots of Aina sunbathing with her children at the beach; beaming next to her best friend, Dzidra Kuras; decked out in a chic blazer and skirt, during what must have been one of her first walks around Winnipeg; and standing next to a small army of fellow servers at the Holiday Inn (now the Delta Hotel) where Aina managed wait staff in the early 1990s.

Before that, she also worked at the Voyageur Inn, the Northstar Inn (now the Radisson Hotel), the Montefiore Club and a sewing factory.

One of the most recent photos of Aina was taken with her husband, Janis, shortly before he died. The couple looks as though they’re reacting to a hilarious joke, cuddled in a booth at the Half Moon Drive In where they used to enjoy hot dogs.

“When they got together, they were goofballs,” Linda said of her parents.

The pair met at a community dance in the St. Charles area shortly after Aina came to Canada. They bonded over polkas and waltzes.

Janis was also Latvian, so they shared a language on top of their hearty senses of humour. They may have never met had Aina not been forced to flee her birthplace.

Aina’s parents were wealthy farmers in a prestigious area called Zemgale, which means “land’s end.”

Vulfs has been researching his family’s history and said some of the farmhands, who were likely Russian, warned Aina’s parents they could soon be persecuted.

“When the Russians/Soviets/communists invaded Latvia in 1939, Stalin targeted the wealthy and the intelligentsia and anyone who could cause trouble,” Vulfs said. “And the policy was either extermination or (being) sent to a gulag or (being) sent to Siberia.”

Aina’s parents managed to escape with their kids in tow and their lives packed in two suitcases. They wound up in a “displaced persons” camp in Germany.

During the Second World War, Aina’s older brother Harry served as a soldier and died during one of the first days of combat. The loss was crushing and one of the primary reasons, Linda thinks, Aina wanted to move to Canada — trying to escape the heartbreak.

Aina’s eldest son Leo Ezerins (a familiar name as he played 10 seasons as a linebacker with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and Hamilton Tiger-Cats) said there wasn’t much choice for where to go next.

“Apparently, they had the choice of Australia, the U.S., but the only country that would take her and the rest of her family — which was her brother, her brother’s wife and my cousin Vilnis — was Canada,” Leo said.

Aina made the journey first, likely as an “indentured servant,” Vulfs said, arriving where work was available in Winnipeg as a housekeeper.

She never told her younger family members outright why she was the first person to trek to Canada or why she wound up in Winnipeg. Much of Aina’s life before she had kids remains a secret.

“I tried to get that out of her, believe me I did,” Linda said. “I asked her and she couldn’t give a straight answer on that one, why she came first… as far as I know, I think she needed to get away from everybody, a new start away for freedom.”

“There was a lot of pain and so there wasn’t a lot of talk about family, about the reasons for why things happened the way they did in terms of immigration,” Leo said, later describing his mom as “a very bright woman.”

“So if anyone can manoeuvre through immigration and through those logistics, she could,” he said.

Like many families with lost loved ones, the Ezerins still have plenty of questions about their background. Vulfs wrote a list of queries for his aunt, but never got around to asking them.

“So at this point, I jokingly am not in any hurry to ask her those questions,” he said.

Aina’s family held an intimate “celebration of life” for her at the Glen Eden Funeral Home last month. None of them calls the event a funeral because “rather than focusing on the burial part, you’re focusing on the wonder of someone’s life — the beauty,” Vulfs said.

They shared memories of the woman who loved spending time with her grandkids, playing solitaire at the kitchen table and watching The Young and The Restless and Coronation Street.

Aina liked to watch church services on television, too, but only when she was alone, Linda said.

“She would say, ‘Go do laundry or something.’ It was her thing,” her daughter remembered. “And I think it was because she missed my dad and she missed her friend (Dzidra, who died last December).”

Linda was the last family member to see her mom before she passed peacefully in her sleep at the hospital.

“I was there till nine o’clock at night for visiting hours. I knew right away, I could sense it that she was going. So I kissed her on the forehead and said goodbye to her. And then I sang her a little song in Latvian that she sang to me when I was a child when I was sick,” Linda said.

“She had a smile on her face and she knew that it was her time. She was ready to go.”

jessica.botelho@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @_jessbu