“Come with rain, O loud southwester!/ Bring the singer, bring the nester/” – Robert Frost, from his poem “To a Thawing Wind.”
3:30 pm, 35 degrees, stormy, small craft advisory for southerly gusts to 40 knots. Rough seas and whitecaps. Feels like snow (it is in the evening forecast).
I am just back from Myrna’s memorial service. She was in her nineties and until recently had still been the greeter Sunday mornings at the Presbyterian church, where her smile— according to Pastor Dana was “just right”, not too small and not too much. She was remembered for her love of birds, gardens and her family and friends. Good humor and kindness.
Her son took care of her full-time these last few months, which meant he wasn’t at the lumberyard everyday working with Chip and the crew. Allen broke down when it was his turn to speak during the service. One of his in-laws stood up and thanked him, saying what we were all thinking: what a good son he was.
Becky made us laugh when she said how much she enjoyed Allen’s gourmet Japanese dinners with Myrna. She didn’t think a good Presbyterian elder like Myrna would drink any sake, but when she did, Becky did too.
Pastor Dana reminded us that Myrna taught special education for years, and that is a challenge. Myrna played the flute, and very well, in her youth. She had an adventurous streak. Though she was a hometown girl from an old Haines family– her parents owned a Main Street grocery store and café- She was a free spirit, and once a great traveler. She lived in Germany with her first husband. Traveled extensively with her third. You don’t know these things, Dana said, when you only meet a kindly widow in their “golden years” as he had Myrna.
Then Myrna’s granddaughter, a young woman, introduced herself to most of us, and said she was eleven months old when her mother, Myrna’s daughter, died. She and her father lived in the Lower Forty-Eight, but Myrna cultivated their relationship with visits, calls and cards, and as she grew, annual trips to Haines where she learned to love birds and flowers, shell peas, swim, canoe. Became part of the big extended family. She said she is who she is because of her grandmother.
I wrote the obituary for Myrna’s other daughter a few years ago.
Myrna chose to be good humored and kind. She chose to love this world.
White haired Marilyn, who teaches bible study and Tai Chi, walked up to the pulpit during the shared memory time. “Myrna was my friend”, she said, noting there are different types of friends. Some talk a lot and and go places together. They were friends that sat next to each other in church every Sunday– or on a park bench, or at a dining table– in car on a drive, “I can’t see much and she couldn’t hear much,” Marilyn said. Myrna would point to a bird, Marilyn would say, “Where?” and Myrna would reply, “What?”
Marilyn said they kept company in silence. “We were quiet together. We wanted to be in each other’s presence, and that was enough.”
