Marguerite

Today a special lady went to a special place. This is my version of her story. I may have some of my facts a little wrong, or I may have made some of it up, but this is right to the best of my ability.

A long long time ago, when my grandma, Velma Ruth Powell, was 8 years old, her mother died just weeks after giving birth to her baby sister, before giving her a name. Velma named the baby Marguerite.

Many years later (61 years) my grandma died, and so did Marguerite's husband Bill. In what seemed to my young eyes a short (immediate) period of time, my grandpa married his late wife's sister and my Great-Aunt Marguerite became my Grandma.

I was about eleven at the time, making my siblings 8, 5 and 3. She was really the only Grandma my sisters ever knew. We lived 2 doors down, so we saw them all the time.

Somehow Marguerite became the matriarch of two families. She was a giving mother and grandmother to her four children and several grandchildren, but also became a devoted wife to my grandpa and picked up with all of us right where Grandma left off. She even made the same chicken and noodles and cherry delight.

For Christmas that first year she bought me my first make-up kit. It was a little wierd having all the people there together, but it was way better than not being there at all.

Once there was a dog that showed up, we later learned he was a Westie, a West Highland Terrier. We started feeding him. What we didn't realized was that next door my Auntie Evelyn and Uncle Charlie, and next to them, Marguerite and Grandpa, were also feeding the same stray dog. Finally we figured out with meals at three different houses, he was never going to leave. They advertised for him, but no one called. The family worked it out so he only got one dog's worth of food per day, and named him Benji. (Of all the things to name a stray dog!)

I remember she was afraid when she was 69 that she would die, because her brother and sister had both died at 69. But that was 20 ish years ago.

My grandpa not only lived longer because she was with him, he really really lived much longer. I remember when my husband and I were first married we all took a road trip to Colorado to see my brother play drums with the touring choir from Azusa Pacific University. Grandpa and Marguerite went right along with us - something like a 19 hour drive. Nothing stopped him, to a large degree because she was right there with him.

I remember visiting them for spring break one year and them driving around trying to find a beach for me to lay out on. In the end, we pulled over along side the road, where there was something like 20 feet of wet dirty sand by the water, and I "laid out". So funny.

Marguerite means pearl, and she was one. I named my youngest daughter after her.

So here is my goodbye to a wonderful lady who added so much to so many lives, a sweet, kind, patient, gentle woman, tenderhearted, longsuffering, a great cook, a great mom, a great wife, a great aunt/grandma.