Parking Lot is two years old today.
Thanks for all of you who have read and responded to the meanderings posted here for the past two years.
Martha on Lake Simcoe with my aunt Norah
A memorial site has been set up for my cousin Martha Mills, her fiancee Sean and their friend Peter Ambler. There are some photos of the three of them and some links to worthy causes and projects in their names. There is also a guest book for people to add their memories.
I wanted to finish writing about Martha with this photo above, because as I have already written, this is mostly how I remember her, as a little kid at my grandparent’s cottage on Lake Simcoe, north of Toronto.
This picture must have been taken in the early 1980s. The boat is my grandfather’s old 100 horsepower cedar strip launch called Chinook, named for the warm winds that blow down the lee side of the Rocky Mountains in the winter in places just east of Canmore, Alberta, where Martha lived most recently.
I think the last time I saw Marf (as we called her) was actually at Lake Simcoe in 1996 during a family reunion when we sold the place. The cottage (it was actually a huge house) was the centre of my grandparent’s family, and as long as we had that place, we were all close and in contact. Since then, with family spread all over North America in Ontario, Quebec, Minnesota, Alberta, BC and as far away as Australia, we don’t see each other much. My grandparents both died in the 1990s and with them in many ways went the glue that held us together, like many extended families in this part of the world.
Martha’s death reminds me of how much I miss those crazy get togethers at the Lake with my grandfather driving us like slaves to paint the boathouse or cut the grass or rake the leaves. Once in a while, if we were lucky and we had finished most of the chores, and if Grandpa Jack had tinkered enough with Chinook to get her working, we would get a chance to ride out into the lake with him, cutting over the water, sticking our hands in the spray, wind tossing our hair around.
Just like in this picture.
In this picture, Martha has all the happiness and promise of a life to come in that wide mouthed grin. She is covered in bright coloured safety gear – a trend which she never gave up, being an adventurer her whole life – and she has her hand in the water, connected to the elements around her, pulling away a little from mom, starting to become the independent, adventurous woman she eventually became.
I’ve been holding my aunt Norah and uncle Doug and their son Mike and Fred in my thoughts all week. I love them very much and wish them peace and closure and warm memories of this wonderful young woman who graced their lives.
Here are some more articles relating to Martha, including one with a lovely biographical sketch:
Martha’s organs were donated to four sperate individuals, a gift that empitomized the way she lived her life.
I find the following poem overused, but for one who spent so much of her life outdoors, and the last few years in the mountains and on the prairies, it seems appropriate:
Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow,
I am the sunlight on ripened grain ,
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning’s hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there. I did not die.
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow,
I am the sunlight on ripened grain ,
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning’s hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there. I did not die.
Jay Wortman, who has been a client of mine, is a medical doctor and also the Regional Director of the First Nations and Inuit Health Branch here in BC. He recently had a breakthrough by addressing his diabetes by changing his diet
“In evolutionary terms, it’s a blink of an eye. Aboriginal people have been transformed over a hundred years or 200 years, very few numbers of generations, from a completely different way of life to what we experience today, and diet has dramatically changed for that population,” he says. “And that very small period of time, there’s no possible way their physiology could evolve to cope with such a big change in something like diet.”
So Wortman has become an advocate of a return to the traditional, very low carbohydrate diet. His family dines on salad and green vegetables, on cheese and berries and cream, on chicken and fish and meat.
There are folks here in BC who are looking at decolonization right down to the level of bodies. I like the integrated feel of that approach.
My cousin Martha Mills died in a tragic car accident along with her fiancee and his business partner on Monday. Her funeral is today in Canmore, Alberta. If you’re so inclined, spare a prayer for her parents and her brothers, as well as the families of the others.
It’s funny how I never really knew Martha. When she was a baby I moved to the UK and when I returned I was in high school and she was beginning kindergarten. By the time I went away to university and then got on with my life, I saw her only very occasionally. But in 1996, when my father’s family sold my grandparent’s summer cottage, we all gathered there for a reunion. I was amazed to meet this confident young woman who, for all intents and purposes, had appeared out of nowhere. I had only remembered her as a baby, or a small quiet kid, and her transformation was amazing.
She had been living in Canmore for the past few years with her fiancee Sean. By all accounts they were soul mates, the best of friends and true partners. I wish I had known them better.
Sogyal Rinpoche, in the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, counsels that because we are all going to die at some point, we should treat everyone with the compassion that you would normally reserve for a dying person. It’s events like this that really remind us how fragile life can be, and how much more mindful we should be in our daily relationships with each other.