the passing of Margie

 

We Circle In Love

tonight the creek flows, oblivious to our cares,

the trees are bare against a cloudy sky,

the rhododendron only partly bowed to the winter

that is just now coming back to beset us with cold & ice,

the world seems still and waiting,

tomorrow one of the greats in my world

will be mourned, celebrated, and buried,

a woman who lived love and joy with every breath

until the breaths could no longer come,

I can imagine the dark in which I sit

recognizes how diminished we all can feel

with her gone beyond what we can know in this life,

I sleep and get up before dawn,

as I watch the sun awaken the clouds over the mountain into a bright glow

I remember Margie’s laugh,

her laughing with Mother

and not even being able to say through the tears why they were laughing,

her sense of the humor within everything,

even within the pain and diminishment age brought to her,

I love the story of Margie and her family’s uniting at the cabin,

less than 3 months ago:

laughing, eating, singing, playing,

enjoying who they were together

and how much Aunt Margie made them who they are,

Margie and Bus reprising in picture at the top of the mountain

their dedicating to each other with a ring so many decades ago,

before that trip to the cabin we feared she couldn’t rally

but doctors & family & Margie herself

found how to climb back to be fully present

so that we all could push back our fear

of how soon would be the time for the curtain to fall,

Christmas, and the spirit still animated bright the flesh,

the body that still held but faded,

a fall before Christmas a foreshadowing

of the frailness of the vessel

within which the grandness of her spirit could no longer abide,

heart and lung fought the good fight

but could not hold any longer

and she slipped away from us,

visitation & the viewing, the funeral & the interment, supper together,

so many of us drawn like moths to the flame of her being,

none of us ready to move forward in our lives

without the lessons Margie taught with every moment of her being,

we hold her within us as a compass

but we miss the flesh-and-blood guide

who made everything better 

as, through her,

God called out to us to be our best,

I loved the pictures, the stories, the memorabilia,

also the pain in eyes washed by tears offered in her honor,

and just before the visitation one long moment I was privileged to share

as Bus, Elizabeth, Eddie, and Bob held tight to each other

in a circle striving to be unbroken

and intoned the Lord’s Prayer deep from their souls,

and in the time that they touched each other

they reached to feel Margie both beyond and with them,

and they reached to God who holds us all

and we are one and back together

in the greatness of that love.

by Henry Walker

January 17, ‘07