To Marcy, who taught me grace

Sometimes people come into your life and you don't realize what you've learned from them until after they're gone.

Marcy was one of those people for me. That's her on the right, in the picture above. We visited with her and her husband, Barry, in their old RV on an unseasonably warm night last December and talked of returning in the spring to take a long bike ride and have a cookout.  

I didn't meet Marcy until several years after a stroke and related illnesses permanently altered the vital woman I can only see through Barry's pictures and memories. The Marcy I knew spent most of her time in a wheelchair. Despite her physical limitations, I never saw her without a big smile and a warm hug. She had a joyful, raucous laugh, and she frequently turned it on herself as she struggled with some small thing most of us can do without thinking.

Even as her world grew smaller, she never lost her sense of joy and delight. When the bank foreclosed on their home, and she and Barry moved into an old RV, she talked about how freeing it was to downsize to just the truly necessary. As a city girl living in the country for the first time, she delighted in the sights, sounds and scents of the abundant life around them. 

I can think of no better words to salute Marcy and her life than those of another friend who left this life too soon:

Cirrus

I'd like to leave
an imprint
on the world
lighter than
I'd formerly meant.
Just a scent, 
not the thud
of the thing
steaming on a plate.
Instead of "I told you so!"
let my epitaph be
the glance, the edge,
the mist. The delicately
attenuated swirl
of an innuendo
instead of the thunderhead.
The rain that fell
when I was ambitious
seemed conspiringly rushed
in my way. But the same rain
today tastes of here and now
because of where it's been.
I'd like to be gentle
with small, great things.
They are larger
than what we think
we came here for.
I'd like to be an eye of light
that opens the air
and burns beyond ambition,
like the sun that can't see us
and is beyond our human reach, 
yet is in us trillions of times over.

- Jack Myers from his posthumously published book of poems, "The Memory of Water."