Soapbox

Yesterday, a year and a day after her passing, we finally gave up on “some time when we can gather in person” and had an on-line memorial service for my cousin Margaret Hawk.
Ted put together a slide-show set to the music of “Sing You Home”, which I had always thought I would sing for Margaret, since she said she wanted me and Byron to sing for her funeral. I suggested the song because it refers to that- but it worked best paired with the pictures. (and anyway: it wasn’t the Tracy show. That’s why I ended up not singing anything at all).
I was asked to go first with my remarks/eulogy/whatever and though it wasn’t my first time writing an obituary/eulogy, I struggled with this one. I worried that it was too hokey or preachy or just… I don’t know. In the end I think I did alright. It was sincere, anyway.

I felt a little anxious when members of the Hawk family startted logging onto the Zoom meeting- not that my remarks said anything even indirectly about how badly some of them treated her. I funeral is no place for that crap! I was glad that one of them went to the retirement home and helped Aunt Patty watch. I just really hoped that they have forgotten I exist- and then there I was on the screen.  Oh well. Not the Tracy Show!

Since I still have her ashes, I was asked to make a little altar of sorts and have it in the picture, as it is traditional to have the loved-one’s remains “there” for the service. That turned into a whole thing involving taking pictures off the kitchen wall and hanging up a big piece of orchid-colored fabric, dragging over a corner cupboard that was the right height and covering it was a swath of black velvet (its sometimes handy to have a crate of fabric in your basement).
I put the decorative box with ashes on the cupboard top with a candle and a tiny vase of tiny flowers on top of that. In front of the box I set a nice geode that had belonged to gramps and which Margaret gifted to me before she died, and the rock I painted with a butterfly which Margaret chose and said she liked to hold in her hand while she was praying.
I think it was nice.

I also got dressed up (well the top half of me anyway, which was all you could see) and even changed my earrings for the first time in a year! I put on a litle mascara- and my eyes felt weird and heavy the whole time and I took it off again right after it was over. One year without and you realize you dont need that crap any longer! Plus I’m old and no one else cares.

I enjoyed seeing the names I remember from long ago at New Creation Church popping up as they logged on. I think there were about 40 “attendees”.
Afterwords about 15 people stayed on the call and chatted for a little while, until Tucker came in and positively glared at me to let me know he wanted to be fed. When I excused myself, that seemed to be the signal for everyone to log off.

I’m glad we did something at last. Such a lovely, loving person deserved a send-off. It was so unfortunate that her passing coincided with the perfect storm of the pandemic lock-down. Someday “when we can travel safely” (which will be never if the Covidiots in this country have their way!) Elizabeth is going to fly east and take Margaret’s ashes to the tree where the ashes of Margaret’s partner Stephanie are buried, so she can join her there.
Maybe I’ll sing for her there.

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Hello everyone. My name is Tracy and I am Margaret’s cousin.
I would like to talk to you about what Margaret was like as a child, but I can’t, because I didn’t really know her then. I know we met occasionally as kids, but I really have no memory of her other than as the owner of the box of hand-me-downs that our grandma would sometimes bring.
It was my great good fortune, however, to get to know Margaret as an adult. We discovered that we both had a love of rocks and geodes inherited from our grandfather and shared memories about our grandma’s thrifty ways and her amazing whole wheat raisin bread.

I wish I had been able to run and play with Margaret the cousin, but my life was immeasurably richer for knowing Margaret the woman, and Margaret the pastor and shepherd of the flock.
I came to New Creation once, at my sister’s suggestion, just to say hello to my cousin- and I stayed for years. It was easy to stay because the church community was a wonderful place where I felt accepted and welcomed… but the reason I stayed was Margaret. Every week she said something that really resonated with my life and in my heart, something that kept me coming back for more.

She was blessed to have a lot of wonderful and talented people to lean on for help in her ministry; still I don’t think I mis-state when I say that like Peter, Margaret was the rock upon which that church was built for so many years.

After a time, when my kids were in school and I was looking for something more to contribute to the world, she asked me if I would be her office assistant for the salary of “consider it a tithe to the church”, and I did. I kept us stocked in paper, figured out the weird paging system for printing out the bulletins we had back then, and spent a lot of time deleting icky spam email that got sent to the church.
Eventually I was given the grand title of “Music director”, choosing hymns and rehearsing & leading our “Choir” which usually consisted of between 3-5 people. That job was a wonderful gift to me, because I have an undergraduate degree in music which I had written off as a waste of time and something I would never use. Margaret found a way to turn that “frivolous” education into something useful, and joyful.

She was like that.
Margaret was patient and kind, cheerful and usually able to stay calm when things were boiling over around her.  Now I’m not going to paint her as some kind of saint: that would make her sound boring, and she certainly was not! Like anyone she got sad and lonely, frustrated and angry, but always seemed able to put that aside when someone needed her.
She gave of herself unsparingly, but hated to ask for help from others. When things got tough she always tried to make a way out of no way and pull herself through.
In a life with so much difficulty and loss, she knew despair but never surrendered to it.

Because what she was most of all, I think, was faithful.
She had faith in the many, many friends that she helped and who were there to help her. She had faith that life was still worth living if you just let it be.
She had faith that there was a greater love encircling her, promising not that there would not be storms, but that she would not be swept away and lost in them.

Her faith allowed her to be both a realist and an optimist. Her faith shone out in her eyes and echoed in that chuckling laugh she had, in the kind words and steady strength she always seemed to find in times of crisis. Her faith radiated warmth and it kindled faith in others.

Because Margaret believed in the transformative power of love, she transformed others.

With all that she suffered and lost in life Margaret never lost sight of the fact that she still had in abundance that thing that matters most: Love.
Margaret gave love by listening, by laughing, by giving advice, by praying for help, and by rolling up her sleeves and giving it, by standing up for people when they felt weak and by speaking truth to power.

She did a lot in her too-short life. But it’s not those many kind and important things that Margaret did which have us all here today (at our computers in our homes around the country) to remember her.  It’s the love she felt, and made us feel: a love that inspired her to do those things, which calls us here today.

All we are in this world is love.
All we are, when we come to the end ouf our days
Is the people who love us and the ones that we’ve loved.
All I’ll leave when I go is love.
all we are I this world is love.

Margaret left behind her great love. It is right that we gather to celebrate Margaret and talk about the reasons we loved her, because the love we felt for Margaret helped to make her who she was, just as her love for us is now forever a part of who we are, and who we will always be.

I miss her.
My life is better because I knew her.
Through her love of us and our love for her, Margaret lives on.

It was a solemn occasion, I realized.

Yesterday Ted and I drove an hour south to Logan to get our first Covid-19 vaccine injection from a pharmacy there that started booking appointments for our age group before local ones did. It was a sunny day and an easy drive so we decide to just get it done.

That morning I dressed more carefully than usual. I chose a colorful shirt, my nicest jeans and my good black suede boots. I even put on a little bit of eye make-up.
I laughed at myself as I was doing it, joking that we are all such shut-ins these days with so few chances to go anywhere that I was even dressing up to spend 5 seconds getting a shot. How silly!
I even moved my wallet into my best small purse.

On the drive down, chatting quietly and listening to music, I found myself oddly touched with- awe, I guess, over what we were doing. The two of us, embarking together on our part of this step to… change the world.
I took Ted’s hand and said how amazing it actually is that humans, many of whom are too stupid to come in our of the rain, have been able to unlock both the secret of how something as tiny as a virus works and causes illness, and figure out how to stop them. Polio. Smallpox. And now Covid-19.
In a year the best minds in the world solved the puzzle and in doing so, changed the world.
And now we were about to be part of the change: part of the growing herd of “Humans Who Do Not Have to Hide in Our Houses Because the Covid Virus Will Not Harm Us.”
Incredible.

And I realized that this was why I had dressed with such care that morning. It wasn’t that I am such a shut-in that even going to get a shot felt like an outing. It’s that this was actually a very solemn occasion. One dresses nicely for the rituals of life.

The last time I got dressed up was last April when I went to the crematorium to collect my cousin Margaret’s ashes. I knew I would speak to only 2 other people there, and we would both be masked and standing on opposite sides of the room, but, with no funeral or memorial service possible for her at that time… well, it was kind of her funeral. One shows respect by dressing nicely for a funeral, and so I did.

Yesterday, although we just sat in an almost empty room, got our temperstures checked, arms swabbed and then (after a 15 minute wait to make sure we weren’t going to have an anaphylatic reaction to the serum) sent on our way, we were taking part in a rite of passage, of sorts. One that, at that very moment, people all across the globe were taking part in, or waiting for their turn to take part in.

 

Except of course for the agitators, bioterrorists and just plain fools who will not: because freedom! Because conspiracies (it implants a government tracking device!) and ignorance ( it will alter your DNA and you won’t be human!) and just general “if those people made it: if they are for it then I won’t take it, even if deep inside I know it will save my life” cussedness.
It’ll be hard to get herd immunity when 40% of the herd refuses to get immune and instead rips off their masks and goes to bars and gyms and parties while Covid-19 is still out there killing people at a somewhat reduced but still alarming rate.

The people who never criticized the Orange Idiot (who said that windmills cause cancer and maybe we should drop a little nuke in hurricanes to blow them apart and Covid is just like the flu and it will magically disappear soon) when he basically ignored the pandemic, allowing it to claim hundreds of thousands of lives, are now criticizing Joe Biden because people are still dying.
As if “red” states lifting all Covid restrictions in the name of “not letting the government tell us what to do” has no part in that. As if the Covidiot mask-deniers who charge maskless into stores that require masks and attack staff and patrons who try to remove them aren’t trying to undo all the good the new administration is doing. (We’d rather die than let a Democrat help us!)

Thanks to the Biden Covid team, we are now on track to have enough vaccine to innoculate *every* adult in America by the end of May!! The trick is getting it done, of course. That’s a big job and the $7B earmarked to help state and local authorities set up and staff more vaccination sites is being blocked by the Republicans who… want more people to die, I guess. (What other explanation is there? They also tried to yank health insurance from millions of people during a pandemic so clearly their “Pro-life” policy doesn’t extend to any actual, living people)

But those of us with functioning brains and human decency are wearing our masks and lining up for our shots and dreaming of a day when we can just run into the store for a jug of milk, hug our kids and eat at a restaurant again.
Until the next one comes along– and it will. Hopefully when it does we will not have a narcissistic sociopath in charge and won’t play politics while a half-million people die.

I took a few pictures and found myself thinking about making a covid memory box, with some of my masks and my mask bin and my vaccination card, to tell the future that I was a part of this.

Yeah definitely I should hang on to a bunch of those masks…