.....final act

Yogis,
My mother-in-law Marion passed away last week, three months after celebrating her ninety sixth year on this planet. Her funeral was held Thursday and as the sayings goes, weddings and funerals are what bring everyone together. This one was no exception. Fifty of us made our way to a town just outside the Philadelphia line to remember a life well lived.

I remember vividly the day I met Marion. We had traveled to her house to announce our engagement. I was so nervous, but she welcomed me with open arms and insisted on making me a ‘nice sandwich.’ She was kind to me that day and continued to be so throughout the forty years I have called her family.

One of the themes of the service was that we are given the gift of birth and will inevitably leave here through the passageway of death, but what lies between those two markers is up to us. A life is defined by our moment-to-moment choices. A story is left behind for others to recall and recount. Hers was a good one.

Marion was the baby among ten children. She became a mother to seven children who then went on to give her 12 grandchildren who up to now have produced 17 great grandchildren. And they all loved their Nan. The matriarch. Some people casually say that family is important, but Marion lived and breathed family.

When she first moved into an over 55 building in her early eighties she told me that everyone wanted to get to know her but she didn’t need to make new friends. She had her family and that was enough. Of course, being the social creature that she was, friends were inevitable, but it was the frequent visits from daughters and grandkids that lit up her day.

She was also a role model for being happy and content in a world which tries hard to convince us never to rest there. Within a few months of each of the moves she had to make, due to injuries or the need for more care, she would declare that ‘this is the best place I have ever lived!’ And in a journal found after her death an entry from 1999 expressed how much she loved everyone and how happy she was with her life. She found beauty in the simple.

A love for the ocean flowed through her veins and was passed down to her children, making a leap over to me in the early days. Our annual trip to Stone Harbor, which is still going strong, began in 1985 as a way to surround her with family in her favorite place. At times I would look around and find that she had quietly snuck away, sitting alone at the edge of the water, book in hand and toes in the sand. I took that lesson and find myself doing the same when life becomes a bit too loud.

She made a mean chicken soup, could clear a table in a good friendly (well….usually) game of poker and how she loved the sun on her face.

Surrounded by the extended family on Thursday I saw and felt the connections, joy and love in everyone there. A happiness of being together. This final act of her story was the perfect enactment of how she lived. She would have absolutely loved it!

Funerals remind us to revisit our own story to be sure it is the one we want remembered.

Om,
SARAH