Margaret (1)

Her photo is lying on the bookshelf, it needs to be placed in an album. She sits in an outdoor patio chair with thick cushions, an unfinished wood picket fence in the background, beyond the fence an open yard, beyond the open yard trees. Her left leg is thrown across her right leg, her right elbow resting on the chair arm, her head leaning ever so slightly so that it rests upon her right hand...she is smiling...her hair is short...is it growing back from the chemo.

Vickie and I sat in that backyard with her husband Frank some months after this photo was taken; we sat with Frank as Margaret and Frank’s three children played around us. I might have sat in the chair in the photo, the chair Margaret once sat in. Frank invited us to dinner a few months after Margaret’s memorial service, a big service in a little town with people from big cities; from D.C., Baltimore, New York, Paris, Geneva. Margaret had been an international investment banker for a European firm with branches across the globe.

I doubt she had ever heard of our little town when she was growing up. I doubt that she had heard of our town when she was travelling around the world. I imagine the first time she heard of our town was when she was dating Frank. “Where did you grow up?” she might have asked. Or maybe it was, “Where are you from?” Or perhaps Frank wove the name of our town into an early conversation as they were getting to know each other; if he did she would have asked, “Where is that?” Our little town is the kind of place you don’t know about unless you need to know about it. The kind of place that you can drive right through without stopping, or noticing, or even looking around - unless of course you happen to see a bear crossing the road - then you might both stop and look.

I remember when I received the first phone call from a member of the pastor-search committee, among other things Susan said to me, “Our town has bears. The mountains surrounding our town have bears and it is common to see them in and around town - I just thought you should know that.”

The town is so off the beaten path that when Federal troops were burning The Valley it may have been the only town they missed between Staunton and Winchester. It is said that for years after the Civil War that no one really knew whether the town was in Virginia or West Virginia, for it virtually straddles the border.

I doubt that Margaret anticipated spending the last eighteen months of her life in our town, Cat Mountain is hardly where a self-confident sophisticated international banker would plan to retire...or die. Why we didn’t even have a traffic light.

The pastor before me, Johnny Travis, was a prince of a man and a fine pastor; thoughtful and gentle. A year or two before I arrived a young mother in the parish was killed in an auto accident on I-81, leaving a three-year old boy and a two-month old daughter - I used to wonder how Johnny got through it with the family, living with them through the shock and sorrow and grief. I used to wonder how I would have handled that. I don’t know how this sounds, but the truth is that I was glad Johnny was the pastor and not me. Of course that was during my first few weeks at my first church and, as I was to discover, life and death wouldn’t wait for me, wouldn’t ask my permission anymore than death asked Johnny’s permission - being with folks in life and death soon became a way of life for me - a continuum that they didn’t teach us about in seminary. A doctor once told me that they didn’t teach med students about the continuum either.

Some folks spend all their lives in Cat Mountain or in one of the small surrounding towns. Some of the older men and women were born in Cat Mountain and they will die, as others before them, in Cat Mountain. Younger generations were born in Winchester or Harrisonburg and were brought home to Cat Mountain and never left. If you weren’t from Cat Mountain you weren’t likely to move to Cat Mountain...but if you were from Cat Mountain there was a good possibility that you would move away, unless you were going to farm, or raise cattle or sheep, or unless you didn’t mind a long commute, or unless maybe you had a moonshine still operating in one of the hollows.

I guess when Frank went off to George Washington University and then Johns Hopkins that he never thought he’d move back to Cat Mountain - he ran a research center at N.I.H. and he and Margaret were living in Kensington, MD when she received her diagnosis.

Sometimes folks end up where they always expected to be, like the folks who were born, lived and died in Cat Mountain. But then sometimes we end up where we had no idea we’d be, where we couldn’t even imagine. When I visit nursing homes I sometimes wonder if any of the men and women thought they’d be there...often alone, isolated; sometimes incapacitated.

I am reminded of a resident of an apartment community I used to manage in Silver Spring, MD - Mrs. Jackson. I don’t think she expected to live the final years of her life alone, isolated, with family within a thirty-minute drive who didn’t come to see her, didn’t call, didn’t care...to be continued