Memorial

Yesterday was the memorial service here on the Point for my fellow quilter Bea Croisdale, who died last month.  It was held at the lovely Trinity Lutheran Church here and her friends and family--more than a hundred people--filled the space.  A nice send off, a nice remembrance.  The Red Hat group were there in full force and full costume which, in itself, would be a pretty spectacular send off.  Joining them were many members from the Wacky Walkers, the local walking group, many in their lime green t-shirts.  And the quilters, both from here on the Point and from Tswaassen's Boundary Bay Quilt Guild, were well represented, not only in numbers but in the fact that the pastor and one of the musicians were also quilters.  Bea was a Red Hat, a walker, and a quilter, but also a happy participant in her life.

It was a good ceremony, mostly of Bea's friends and close family members standing up and talking about her and about their memories of her.  Bea lived almost 80 years and she did a good job of it.  I saw her about a week before she died (of ALS) and she talked about how the curtain was coming down on this journey and she had certainly enjoyed it all, and was so grateful that if someone in her family had to be so ill that it was her and not one of those who had not already had all the time she had been given.

I knew Bea best as a quilter.  But she was also a woman of my generation--about 6 years older than I--a woman whose childhood was spent not in the (relatively) easy United States' experience of World War II, but in Denmark, which was occupied throughout the war by the Germans.  We talked occasionally about what that had been like for her and what coming to Canada had meant to her.  I don't know whether it contributed to Bea's capacity to enjoy the small things of life, but it seems likely that she understood very early in her life how easily things could go wrong, and to remember to appreciate what was right while it was happening.  As Thornton Wilder once wrote, 'Just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.'

When I first met her, about 13 years ago, she was a beginning quilter, but I never knew that until a week before she died,  That was because she was so committed to doing a good job based upon her own high standards for herself.  She had sewn all her life and she brought that skill to both traditional quilting and to what is now called 'art quilting.'  The Point Roberts Quilt Group has distinguished itself by its group work, and Bea was an essential part of that process.  Indeed, we all knew we could always depend upon her to be there when we needed her, to work longer than anyone else, to volunteer to do just a little extra, and to do it right.

We will all miss Bea, and the quilters' particular task will be to fill that space, to share the responsibility for what Bea so cheerfully always took unto herself.  We are indeed bereft of her: of her skills, her attitude, her standards, and her easy laughter, but she has also given us, especially over the last few months of her illness, a lesson in how to take on that far harder task of dying in company.  Go well, Bea.  You have done it right.