My friend, Mary, died last week. I met her in 1968, and we never lost touch. One of the privileges of keeping friends close over a period of years is that you get to see the arc of their life: what they were like when you knew them first; how they dealt with the joys, the slings and the arrows, and finally, how they faced death.
When I met Mary, she was 27 and I was 25. Ted and I were living in an old farm in Blucher: raising chickens, growing vegetables, brewing bad beer, discovering the not inconsiderable pleasures of an outhouse. Mary and Marshall had their beautiful home on University Avenue. Even then, it was filled with beautiful pieces that Mary made by hand. Mary and Marshall gave elegant dinner parties and had New Yorker cartoons in their downstairs bathroom. They were the most sophisticated couple we’d ever known. They even had a child—a nice one. Marshall and Mary were, in every way, grown-ups.
The Gillilands and the Bowens began a series of collaborative lunches with another couple and an occasional guest chef. By this time, the candied violet excesses of the early 70’s had come to dominate cuisine. We were the Gourmet Generation. We began to compete with one another—our dishes grew more elaborate. We outdid one another in our search for rare ingredients, rich and complex sauces and brilliant presentations that never quite looked the way the illustrations in Gourmet promised and made us cranky when we finally sat down to eat. Mary watched all this with her bemused Mary look. Then she volunteered to bring the centerpiece for our next gourmet lunch. The centerpiece Mary brought was a clown’s head that she’d made out of a cabbage, a carrot and some other humble vegetables. We got the point. We scaled back on the Julia Child and started having fun again.
Mary was always fun—even when life was not going well for her. Once she was in the midst of the kind of personal crisis that comes to us all. To help her over the bad patch, Sean made Mary breakfast in bed; his beverage of choice was blueberry Kool-Aid. When it comes to beverages, blueberry Kool-Aid is pretty tough to beat, but when Mary came to my house, I did my best. I poured our bottle of Beau Sejour sherry into our snazzy German decanter and got out our finest wine glasses. Mary’s and my conversation that afternoon was very serious, and we were both very emotional. When she stopped talking and stared fixedly into her glass of sherry, I thought perhaps she’d had an epiphany.
In a way, I guess she had. What Mary discovered in her glass that grey afternoon was a toenail – and not a new one. It was the kind of toenail that might have been aging in a bottle of Beau Sejour for a very long time. Mary fished it out and held it up. “There’s a toenail in my sherry,” she said, then she grinned. “Things have to get better after this.” And amazingly, they did.
Like everyone who knew her, I have thousands of memories of Mary, but there was a phrase she used that I believe captures her. Once at one of our long-ago lunches, Mary’s eyes had been larger than appetite. I offered to take her plate, but she stopped me. “In my family we had an expression, Mary said. “‘Thee took it. Thee eat it.’”
Many things ended up on Mary’s plate that she didn’t choose. She and I had both had breast cancer. No one chooses that, but Mary handled her diagnosis and the endless complications she faced after the initial diagnosis with intelligence and unwavering courage, grace and humour. The last years of Mary’s life were filled with difficulties that most of us would have found insurmountable. Mary didn’t. The emails she sent about Marshall’s last illness were characteristically Mary. She never took refuge in euphemism when truth was called for; she never wallowed in self-pity when she could enquire about our lives. Mary loved life and she lived it well.
In Mary’s obituary Sean and Bernie alluded to that perfect piece of material Mary was always seeking to complete her quilts—the piece that would bring all the disparate colours and shapes into something that would unify them and make each piece more beautiful and more connected than it was alone. At the risk of sounding hopelessly cheesy, I think Mary had that perfect piece in her back pocket all along. It was her.