Thursday, March 09, 2006
Service of Remembrance: what David Platt said
In the garden of our shared lives there is a special, sunny place.
It’s on the warm southern side. There the hybrids and the rare wild flowers bloom.
The hybrids have a long recorded history. The wild flowers’ origins are uncertain and it is not known how they will endure a hard winter or a drought.
But they outshine all others in the garden with their colour and fragrance and glow with a brilliance, like a candle, burning at both ends.
What was the essence of Mary Lee’s spirit? What propelled her forward in life as in Dylan Thomas’, “the force which through the green fuse, drives the bud.”
I sought an incident, phrase or word that would help reveal her inner core.
The history leading to this special word I remembered is quite revealing as to who Mary Lee was.
She started high school with a strong musical background with a Grade 10 in piano. Her favourite subject and probably her best marks were in Latin. This was owing to Mr. Hope being her outstanding teacher. Her reverential respect and admiration for him, the first black teacher hired by the Lakeshore Board of Education, was lifelong. This led to Mary Lee’s deep interest in Caribbean culture and its people, and eventually, repeated trips to, and friends in Trinidad. As well, Latin provided the foundation for her simply outstanding vocabulary and great fluency in French. She was the best read non-English major I’ve ever known.
Forward 30 years to the early 1990s and Mary Lee was the only woman in a Trinidadian steel band. Characteristically, her role was to set the beat. They needed a band name. Mary Lee promoted, but without success, the name SCINTILLA. Scintilla – of course it had to be Latin – means a spark, and leads to “scintillate”: to sparkle, twinkle, to emit sparks and to speak cleverly or wittily.
That was Mary Lee: the spark and magic in any group who showed us style, grace and ease in all she did.
She was the one person who could captivate everyone in this room.
She had effortless brilliance: academically, in speaking, skating and dancing, in her career, and especially in making and keeping friends. She was the light.
It was truly remarkable for someone who complained that so few people called her, that she had so many visitors and such support in her last month. We would all be grateful for one quarter of her visitors at our hospital bedside.
One wonders at the coincidence that her night-time nurse attendant, Cecily, was from Trinidad and in whom Mary Lee found such delight in talking about that island’s people.
One is grateful for such small mercies for her and is also amazed how men only learn tenderness and compassion through the hands of women. That being the many, many women who held her bedside hand, caressed and spoke to her even until her last breath.
In the end, all we want is comfort and warmth. This, you most generously provided her.
Mary Lee will be remembered for the courage she showed us all in the last difficult five years of her life.
The scintilla is gone from our lives. No more is that special light and spark that touched us with her magic and the smile that Peter Henderson described on her blogsite as:
“One of the largest, most expressive smiles I’ve ever seen, a tall, wide, toothy, half-moon, Cheshire-cat smile.”
Let us not lament the days lost but instead remember the days we had with her, especially when her life was good.
In the garden of our shared lives there is a special, sunny place.
It’s on the warm southern side. There the hybrids and the rare wild flowers bloom.
The rare wildflowers outshine all others in the garden with their colour and fragrance and glow with a brilliance, like a candle, burning at both ends.
Please visit that place whenever you think of Mary Lee. And may the memory of Mary Lee Coombs endure with you all until the end of your days.
Arrangements have been made for a memorial tree planting for Mary Lee at Victoria University where she graduated in 1970. It will be a red maple near the entrance to the E.J. Pratt Library in recognition of her great interest in fine literature. It will have a cast brass marker on a 30” steel post and some of Mary Lee’s ashes will be scattered in the tree roots. The cost is estimated to be $2,500.00. Donation cards are available in the entrance lobby and tax receipts will be mailed. If you wish to be notified about the planting ceremony, most likely in May, please give me or Doug your Eaddress.
