This December my Italian grandmother Rena Cormier (nee Barbisan) passed away – it’s always sad when you lose people, but she made it to 95, which is a damned good run. Which was to be expected – she didn’t take crap from anyone, and could always be relied on for verbal zingers and a feisty attitude.

One of my favourite examples: The men in my family (who could all ski at the age of three) have an unfortunate tradition of taking their girlfriends (who have never skied) to the top of the tallest mountain for their first run, and just saying “Go!”

When my father did that to my mother, halfway down the mountain – crying and covered in bruises – she screamed at him and said they were through. My brother’s first girlfriend, a delicate wee girl, had a similarly traumatising journey, probably dehydrated from bawling by the end.

In the 1950s, after disembarking from the chair lift, my grandmother took one look at the treacherous slope, took off her skis, said “fuck you” and just walked down. Naturally, she reached the bottom unscathed.

And she had that spunk right to the end. One time I called her up in about 2008 to say hello, and she asked, giggling:

“How’s life in England Zo?” Rene’s father had moved the family to Nova Scotia from Italy when Mussolini was rising in the 1930s, and the first British folk she ever encountered were the immigrants from Liverpool who would consume five pints of lager at 8am before going to work on the docks. Hence her giggles.

“Do girls still throw up on the sidewalk over there?”

Yes. Yes they do.

She also once broke her leg and walked on it for *six months* before getting it properly x-rayed. And I did pretty much the exact same thing when I broke my tibia in 2015 and walked on it for two weeks thinking it was only a sprain (I probably would have walked on it for many more weeks if my mother hadn’t begged me to go to the hospital, reminding me what my grandmother had done). My dad shed a tear when I told him about my silly mistake, heartened to see that her spirit lives on.

RIP Rene – I will always endeavour to honour your feistiness and your defiance. The world would be a better place if far more women were unafraid to speak their minds and never take shit from anyone.