From the Archives - In Memory of Mary

I found this post in my drafts from early 2014. I post it now, remembering Mary as I also celebrate the life of my Grandma.

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My friend Mary passed away in October 2013 after a nearly year long battle with kidney cancer that had metastasized to her brain before she even knew she had it. It was a difficult year for her: struggles with treatment, reactions to chemo, seizures, loss of abilities.  The funeral was packed.  I guess that's what happens when a person is only 55 and has touched so many lives. 

I met Mary through a friend/coworker when I was also introduced to scrap booking.  I have to note here that I never thought I would be come a scrap booker.  I used to call it "crap booking" and couldn't see the point of chopping up my photos and putting a bunch of junk in my album, of decorating the pages with baubles, stickers and fancy paper.  Somehow, I decided to go and check out an open house scrap booking thing Krista was having at her house.  As suggested, I brought a couple photos with.  I chose some pictures of my cat, Oscar.  Heaven knows I had plenty of those.  I can't help it - orange tabbies are highly photogenic.  Anyway, I started with just a little sample packet which just happened to coordinate nicely with the coloring of the cat.  Next thing I knew, I had the first page of Oscar's album and was making an order for more supplies.  And I went back to Krista's several more times for scrap booking sessions.  Part of the joy of scrap booking, for me, was the camaraderie.  Hanging out in Krista's basement workroom with Mary, Mary Kay, Mama Jere and the other girls, I found common bonds.  These were creative women who made beautiful scrap books.  Some of the pages were elaborate, some of them simple, all telling a story important to the woman creating the page.  Tales of travel, tales of a belly dancing troupe, tales of gardens, motorcycle trips, weddings and more.  I started joining them on retreats, spending a long weekend in a little cabin in the woods and later a retreat center build especially for scrap booking retreats, working on my own books.  I have completed Oscar's little album and several volumes of travel albums.  Mary was there for most of my scrap booking.  I liked the other ladies, but I really connected with Mary. 

Mary knew a lot about a lot.  She had a wicked sense of humor and lots of opinions. She was talented and loved to offer advice.  A designer and professional organizer, her sense of color and style was a terrific help.  I remember struggling to find the right paper to set off some pictures of a fortress I had visited in France.  I had a couple hundred sheets of paper in dozens of different colors and was about to just use black, my default background, when Mary pointed across the table to a color I never would have even looked at. I had thought it a hideous shade of poopy tan. "That one.  That's the one.  Do you have 2 sheets?  Do a double truck (2 pages side by side) and draw lines on it to look like the brick in the photos."  Genius.  It matched perfectly and turned into a terrific brick wall background.  Another time, she found the perfect shade of green (again a color I thought was kind of gross) which set off the foliage of Kauai like it had been color-matched by a computer.  Then she helped make the perfectly-colored bird-of-paradise paper flower to coordinate with the picture.  She offered tons of advice and encouragement on one of my more insane ideas - a paper stained glass window which mimicked the windows in a church E had taken a picture of in Hawaii.  She lent her exacto knife and helped with the shaping of the window, and then kept me going as I place all the little teeny pieces of paper in the "window". Hours later, I had finished one of the coolest, most frustrating things I had ever made for an album. 

These are just some of the scrap booking memories I have of Mary.  She also inspired me to seek out a belly dance class (she and some of the others we scrap booked with knew each other from when they were in a belly dance troupe together).  She offered advice, when I asked, about remodeling my kitchen. She made me laugh, A LOT.  Riding as passenger in my car she would say, "No cars!" and then as I entered the intersection, she'd add "Only vans, buses and trucks!"  She would wave to the mannequin in a car perched a top a tall billboard in Minneapolis - every single time we drove past it.  She would bob her head and sing "Raahr, raahr, raahr" in her best death metal voice when something like Rage Against the Machine played on the iPod in the scrapping room. And then say "I LOVE this music" with a sarcastic roll of the eyes.  Eating fries at McDonald's, Mary would shake the extra salt off each and every fry before she ate it - because of the hypertension, you know.

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Even now as I read this nearly 6 years after Mary's passing, I realize how much I still miss her.  Scrap booking is still fun and I love the group of women that I retreat with now (including my little sister!) but scrapping still makes me think of Mary and wonder what color paper she would advise, or what crazy-ambitious detail she would inspire.  And if ever RATM comes on the radio, I will say "Raahr, raahr, raahr - I LOVE this song!"

Mary is the one who is a friend of the author of Hit by a Farm which I blogged about before. If you want more stories about Mary, check out Sheepish: Two Women, Fifty Sheep and Enough Wool to Save the Planet also by Catherine Friend.

Mary, I am sorry that it took me all this time to get this posted.  Please hug my grandma who recently joined you in the great hereafter.  

Until we all meet again,

Hallie

Comfort foods

This has been a strange week and I have been feeling out-of-sorts since Monday.  Our chief underwriter at work passed away early this week after a battle with lymphoma and the chemotherapy that went with it.  He was only 60 and had just announced a month ago that he would be retiring next spring.  He said that something like cancer makes you look at your life and think about how you want to spend your time.  He had decided that he wanted to spend his time fishing, and that spring would be a good time to get on with that.  I know that people tend to elevate the recently departed to a higher level, choosing to remember them in a fonder light than we perhaps consider them in life, but he actually was a really nice, decent, approachable guy who did a lot of good both in his career and in his life.  The department was given the day off today to attend the memorial service or to remember and honor Chris in another way.  We packed that darn chapel full of underwriters and did our best to support his family.  And we talked to each other - a kind of rare gathering of 100+ of my closest co-workers.

Underwriting is an unusual profession.  Death, or rather "mortality", is in our daily language.  We have enough medical knowledge to know when someone says they have lymphoma, that we ask, "what kind and what stage?" and then we mentally begin assessing the risk.  We do this automatically, even off the clock.  We comfort ourselves with knowledge that our loved ones are getting the appropriate treatment to extend their life expectancy, but we still know the inherent risks with both the disease and the treatments.  We know that, statistically, a percentage of people with the disease are not going to survive 5 years.  Doctors and other medical professionals also know these risks, but they are in the business of giving hope.  People heal better with hope.  Underwriters are in the business of managing the risk.  Waiting until you are ill with a terminal disease to get life insurance is like applying for car insurance as you are heading the car toward a tree, or homeowner's insurance when the fire department is on the way.  When someone tells an underwriter that his doctor tells him he is perfectly healthy, what the underwriter finishes that sentence with is, "for someone who has had ___ disease."  Anyway, what I am saying is that I think about death every day and tend to have something of a gallows humor about it, but this week made me think.  I don't know when my time will be up.  Chris didn't know last November that he was eating his last Thanksgiving dinner or that the teleconference last month was the last time he would discuss our plans for year-end.

What do I want to spend my time doing?  I do love my job but struggle with balancing my work and "real-life" time. Would I still do this job if I didn't "need" to work?  Yes, I think so, but maybe only a couple days a week or on a reduced work-load basis - there are parts of the job that are very rewarding for me.  What else would I do with my time?  I would cook, read, knit, garden, scrapbook, spend more time with family and friends.  The same things I take comfort in now, just perhaps in greater quantity.  For now, until I am miraculously independently wealthy (can't win the lottery since I have almost never played the lottery), I can only strive to take more time for the people and activities that bring me comfort and joy, to live with more purpose and intention.

I am going now to knit some comfort items, plan some comfort food dinners, read a comforting familiar book, and then curl up in my comfortable bed.  I take comfort in knowing I have you, my friends and family, reading this and loving me despite the fact that I am assessing your mortality rate in my head.

Hoping this is not my last post,
Hallie