Two Valiant Women

Two valiant women, heroes to me at critical times in my life, were claimed by death within the past two weeks. I sorrow over the news of their passing, knowing the love they held for their families and the footprints they’ve left upon my life and the lives of so many others.

One of those women is Margaret, a Salvation Army colleague. We never served in the same area, nor had we spent much time together. Our acquaintance had been a casual one over the years, except for one long, deep conversation in a coffee shop in North Canton many years ago. Writing in The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis explains it to me. “Friendship is born at that moment when one man [woman] says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . . ‘” Margaret later gave me Lynne Hybel’s book, Nice Girls Don’t Change the World, that helped me understand our commonality. “The opposite of a nice girl is not just a good woman, but a downright dangerous woman. A woman who shows up with everything she is and joins the battle against whatever opposes the redeeming work of God in our lives and in our world.” That was Margaret.

As I think of her, I wonder what it might have been like if one of us had said, “let’s make time for each other.” If I had said, “I’m coming today.” We didn’t, I didn’t, and I am bereaved, deprived of what could have been but isn’t.

I’ve got a similar feeling about my friend Pat. She was the tenth grade geometry teacher who promised to take her students out to dinner at the Lakeview Smorgasbord if they received a perfect score on their New York State Regents Exam, an offer with very little probability that she would have to pay up. I was thrilled when the test results came back and four of her students had obliged her to follow through on her promise. That was one delicious dinner.

As teachers sometimes do, Pat took an extra interest in the young woman “whose eyes mirrored so much of her thoughts and feelings,” as she later described me in a letter. Her ever present desire and demand for excellence and her willingness to believe in me when I struggled to believe in myself are gifts that I’ve carried with me long past my high school years.

Life moved on, and I did as well. As I write these words on the morning of her funeral, I am grateful that for a few short weeks in 1997, we connected once again when I sent her a packet of some of my early writing. The signature handwriting that had first challenged me from the chalkboard at Tonawanda High School filled pages and pages of a legal pad back in ’97, and remains a precious gift to me on this morning in Ohio. We corresponded back and forth then, and talked a time or two, but I don’t think I ever answered her last letter.

I have a sense of regret at what could have been, but I’m wise enough to know that life gets in the way of all that could have been, and that’s how it is sometimes with friendship. Distance, time, work responsibilities, family obligations, and changing circumstances all make it challenging to form and sustain friendships of value. Facebook may help, but we kid ourselves when we think that our friendships will stay the same forever. So instead of focusing on regret, I’m choosing this morning to celebrate the sense of sisterhood I felt with both Margaret and Pat, honoring their lives as I hold a few pages torn from a legal pad and a small book.   

It was Washington Irving who wrote, “Sweet is the memory of distant friends. Like the mellow rays of the departing sun, it falls tenderly, yet sadly, on the heart.” Even as the frigid air blows around us, the sun is shining, and there is comfort in the warmth of memory this morning. Flight of the angels, my friends.