MOTHER'S MINK

The fur coat I inherited reminds me of how I failed her— and yet I can’t seem to get rid of it

- Wendy Litner

MY MOTHER DIED when I was 23, some 17 years ago now, but it wasn’t until being stuck at home during a pandemic that I finally went through the boxes of her things that sat piled in the corner of our basement. In them, I found a glass vase that was easy to give away and a scrapbook of the royals she made in the 1970s (an homage to her teenage crush on Prince Charles) that was easy to sandwich between two hardcovers on my bookshelf. Then there was her fur coat, her disgustingly glamorous fur coat. It’s gorgeous. And horrifying.

As I ran my hand over the soft, brown mink fur, I wondered whether I should keep it simply because it belonged to her, even though I would never wear it. Like many women these days, I’m antifur. I’ve even signed petitions calling out companies for using real animal fur in their winter coats when, in my view, they could just as easily make them with faux fur. I avidly follow Esther the Wonder Pig—a 600-pound pet that two Ontarians have made Internet-famous to promote veganism—and, along with my twin six-year-old sons, volunteer at their Happily Ever Esther Farm Sanctuary in Campbellville, Ont., where we shovel manure.

If my mother were alive today, she would also never wear fur. While she was drawn to high fashion—in the boxes I also have dozens of pairs of her high heels—she was progressive in her politics. And yet, although I never witnessed it, she obviously did go out in fur at some point. As I picked up one of the coat’s heavy sleeves and inhaled its thick scent, I could imagine her as a young woman, dressed up for the theatre, complete with her tinkly earrings and red lipstick. I could see her date slipping the coat off her slender shoulders as she commanded the room with her laugh.