In honour of Margaret Hanna (June 28th, 1937 to April 3, 2026).

Think about all the beautiful fortuitous things that've happened in your life and the ugly scary things that haven't. These are the countless events and nonevents that have given you the gift of being here now instead of not existing at all. Regardless of how resolved you are in your relationship with her, at the top of that list is your mother.

You would not be here to read this if it wasn't for your mother and countless other mothers, grandmothers, stepmothers and aunts. You also wouldn't be here without mine as I would not be here to write this.

My mother lived to see a great many things, including the birth of her great granddaughter Josefina, but she did not live to see her 89th birthday. She passed this year on Good Friday and in many respects it was a very good Friday. She left this earth on her own terms, complete, fully resolved and with my brother and me at her side.

Many of the big things she did in life were entrepreneurial. Muggs, as her older sister and my aunt Dorothy called her, was the youngest of six in a large post-war family from Kenora Ontario. Go West young woman! And West she went, in search of the grand adventure of life, finding meaningful employment and eventually life as a single mother to two young boys.

She kept the wolves from the door and managed to launch two hungry teenagers onto successful paths of adulthood by starting her own business in the middle of a brutal recession. I don't remember a single moment of financial scarcity. I'm not entirely sure how she did it. "Nothing ventured nothing gained" was her philosophy. She taught that to us when we were very young and led by that example rather than the safer "nothing ventured nothing lost". I never even considered getting a job when I was going through design school. Starting my own design firm was preordained.

I ran a very successful design consulting business right up until the moment I didn't. I made a series of ill-fated business decisions (including but not limited to my choice of final client) and ended up bankrupt, divorced and out of the design business. I launched a seminar business out of the ashes of that dumpster fire but depleted every resource I had before making that a go. She had been watching this slow moving car crash and like me began to wonder where rent and child support for her grandchildren were going to come from.

She quietly began to put aside money for my recovery, but in her mind I needed to learn the very crucial lesson of asking for help, so she never told me. I had to figure it out on my own. In the middle of August in 1997 I was completely tapped out. I had exhausted every possible source of cash and I had child support and rent coming out at the end of the month with no way to cover the cheques. I even resorted to looking for change in the couch so I had enough money to buy a package of those small, white-sugared doughnuts.

That was the wake-up call I needed. I buried my pride and asked my mom for help. She gladly gave me the $3,500 I asked for and I felt freer than I had in several years of struggle.

The one asset I had from the seminar business I blew up was a list of 2,200 people who had taken seminars from us. I knew who all the entrepreneurs were and in two weeks I had designed and filled my first monthly coaching program. Relatively flush with cash, I did it again the month after that and the month after that and all the months since then to get me where I am now. I never looked back.

My mother made a great deal of sacrifices along the way, but she managed to create an impressive amount of wealth to leave behind. My brother and I and our step siblings have inherited what she created but the money is by far not the most important thing she left behind.

The business I started is all about giving the very independent entrepreneurs I coach the support they need to outgrow the things that are holding them back. Every impact I've made over the thirty years I've been coaching, I owe to the woman who had the foresight and craftiness to put together a lifeline for her struggling son. If I've made an impact on you at some point in the past, or will at some point in the future, well then, you owe her too.

•••

I asked Brett Kissel to record an informal version of Amazing Grace for my mother on his iPhone. It was her favourite song and I wanted her to hear it before she moved on. He very graciously complied. She had gone into a catatonic-like state and was unresponsive at the end, but I played the song for her. She came back to us for just long enough to give us a little wink. And then she was gone. But we have not forgotten*.

*Feel free to send this to a mother in your life you are grateful for.