A memorial montage by my nephew, Dan Parsons.

oday would have been my mother’s 90th birthday had cancer not tripped her up back in September 2001, just as al-Qaeda was diverting everyone’s attention. My sister and I half-joked that she wouldn’t be too pleased with the crowd at Heaven’s gate, but she’d be able to help some of those New Yorkers.

She’ll always be missed, of course, even as those who live after her keep trying to piece together the bits of life’s jigsaw and make sense of the big picture. She was already well on her way to figuring it out.

My mum was born Dorothy Clough on February 6, 1917, in Burnley, Lancashire, England, and stayed there until my dad came along and talked her into trying the pioneer life in Canada. She would have happily stayed on in Burnley with her hairdressing shop and her piano but Dad was already convinced that there were better jobs and a better life across the sea. His brothers were there to testify to that.

Mum’s sister stayed in England with the piano and their mother, and the only time I ever got to see my grandmother (apart from when I was born, of course) was the first time my mother got to go back for a visit — when her own mum was on her deathbed. Four years went by without them seeing each other.

I never let that much time elapse after I crossed another sea to move to Thailand, and the time always went fast between our reunions, and during them too. My last trip home was also to see my mother on her deathbed.

In between the deaths of two mothers there was a lot of living done. I did a son’s share of giving my mum grey hair but we spurred each other along spiritually. My father had carted her away from the Anglican church to the heavy incense of Catholicism, and she embraced it fully. Then when I was a teenager I brought home a copy of the Bhagavad Gita and she embraced that too. We both veered off into Buddhism, and though I converted to alcoholism for many years, she sped ahead of us all into theosophy and was still doing yoga when she was 80.

It seems odd that my mother never had a middle name, but she never knew much about her forebears either. I did a search on the Internet for traces of the Clough family, but as far as Lancashire was concerned I could only find vagueness, a fog on the family tree.

I read with admiration, though, the webpages of tenacious Tom Lee Clough, who tracked his side of the clan all the way from Edward I and his wife Eleanor of Castile in the 12th century to the king’s 18th great-grandson, John Casper Clough, in 20th-century Kansas.

Edward I — “happiest on his horse with his dogs at his heels and a hawk on his wrist”, so I read — came close to achieving some kind of sainthood in his time, though I’m not sure if that had to do with pacifying the Welsh (he’s the one who started the practice of royal heirs being the Prince of Wales) or stealing Scotland’s Stone of Scone, or something else altogether.

I won’t be so maudlin to call my mother a saint, but she was certainly no sinner. “Dorothy the Good” would be apt. I found it embarassingly easy to appall her.

Clough is of Anglo-Saxon origin, deriving from the Old English cloh (though we pronounce it “cluff”), meaning a ravine or steep-sided valley, and originally used to refer to a “dweller in the hollow”. The name first appeared in Denbighshire in the 13th century, where the family was granted land by Duke William of Normandy for its service in the Battle of Hastings.

This is ostensibly the Clough family coat of arms, but can only be admired with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, the motto here, “Sine macula”, means “without spot”. Dorothy the Good!

What else? Not much. A Humphrey Clough was in Virginia in 1623. That was 330 years before my mother crossed the ocean.