For more than eight hours on Tuesday, the late Brian Mulroney’s family — wife Mila, daughter Caroline and three sons Ben, Mark and Nicolas — stood in a receiving line and greeted almost everyone who came to pay their respects to the former prime minister — close to 1,000 people.
On Wednesday morning they again took up their stations next to the flag-draped casket, the official portrait and the military honour guard. For four hours (and counting), they’ve been shaking hands with everyone from state dignitaries to former staffers to everyday Canadians, all of them there to offer condolences or share stories about a key figure in Canadian politics.
“I was thinking about how tired their feet must get,” said Tony Bull, one of the people who lined up Wednesday morning.
“But it must be comforting for them to see the breadth of interest of people paying tribute to Mr. Mulroney.”
Mark Mulroney, the second youngest sibling, said greeting the public “was never even a question.”
“It started and people said, ‘Oh, you can go in shifts.’ And my mom says, ‘We’re not going in shifts, these people have waited outside for hours,'” he told CBC News host Rosemary Barton in an interview Wednesday, which would have been Brian Mulroney’s 85th birthday.
“No one said I’m tired or I can’t do this, ever. We’ve loved it. We’ve gotten energy from people waiting in line and the stories we hear.”
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Former prime minister Brian Mulroney’s son says the family has loved hearing stories from the public.
It’s been a joy, said Mulroney, to hear new stories from Canadians about a man he thought he knew everything about.
“And now there’s a whole new book of efforts and things that my dad put out there that we just didn’t even know,” he said.
“Relationships that were created where people met around my dad or, you know, just stories that would have happened even pre-’83 or post-’93, where people said my dad reached out to them, or people said, ‘We were touched dramatically by something your dad did.’ And you’re sitting here just wondering how he had the bandwidth to do that.”
The first person mourners greet in the receiving line at the Sir John A. Macdonald Building in Ottawa has been Mila, Brian Mulroney’s partner for more than half a century.
“My mom actually always viewed themselves, she made the comment right after he passed away, that they were one, they weren’t two, they were one. So how do I remove something from one?” said her son.
“For her, it’s very hard. But my mom, she’s amazing and she’s tough, and you’re seeing it. You’re seeing it in her resilience. Her feet aren’t even hurting her right now.”
Before she entered the main hall, Varsha Dinodia praised that resilience and the family’s “mental strength”
“For any family, losing a loved one is always going [to be] the most difficult time. And then being a wife or kids of a person who is a public figure is all the more difficult, because then you are in the public eye and then you have to be mindful of your own emotions,” she said.
“It becomes really very heavy.”
Mulroney, who was prime minister for nine years between 1984 and 1993, died on Feb. 29 in a Florida hospital. The Progressive Conservative won two majority governments and steered Canada through several momentous — and divisive — policies, including free trade with the United States, the end of the Cold War and the introduction of the GST.
After lying in state in Ottawa, Mulroney will be moved to Montreal Wednesday afternoon, where he will lie in repose at St. Patrick’s Basilica.
A state funeral will be held Saturday morning at Notre-Dame Basilica, with eulogies from his daughter Caroline, longtime friend and former Quebec premier Jean Charest, hockey icon Wayne Gretzky, Quebec business tycoon Pierre Karl Péladeau and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Mark Mulroney’s full interview will air Saturday as part of CBC News’ special coverage of the state funeral.
Source Agencies
