By Valarie Schwartz
Many social contacts this year have been made while saying goodbye to a beloved community member. At all such gatherings that I’ve attended, the deceased were blessedly ready to go, having lived long, fruitful lives, giving more of themselves to others than most of us ever consider providing outside our families. Though sadness permeated each occasion, the prevailing and lingering feeling was of the inspiration each brought by the life they’d led.
Sunday’s cold rain could hardly have provided gloomier circumstances for celebrating a life, except that we were saying goodbye to the daughter of Swedish immigrants, who had reveled in her roots. That we ventured out with the promise of awakening the next day to snow must have suited her, especially as Bill and Libby Hicks lured us into closing with song and dance, the falling rain outside the windows behind them creating a backdrop.
Though her name was Ruth Alfva Richard, everyone called her “Richie.†From the time I read her obituary (www.carrborocitizen.com/main/sections/obituary), I regretted having not known her; but knowing her kind and humble daughter Sherry Jones, a former neighbor, led me to attend The Chapel Hill home of Sherry and Rodney Jones was filled with people touched by the life Richie had made since moving to Carrboro in the 1970s. Richie was evident throughout the Jones home, from the art on the walls to the food on the table. Sherry pointed out a handwritten saying on the refrigerator that Richie had lived by: “We can’t ALL be stars but we can ALL Twinkle.â€
A slideshow of Richie made by Sherry’s daughter, Katie, ran on two computers stationed where people could watch it and share their stories. One image projected her youthful beauty from the cover of a nursing magazine in 1938; another of her flight-attendant days. Tables were spread with her favorite foods — crab cakes and shrimp, fresh fruit and vegetables, soft and ripe cheeses, ginger snaps and jams.
One after another, family members and friends shared stories of the woman who found and shared adventures throughout her 95 years.
Her daughter Patricia Thompson read a poem she wrote a few days after Richie’s death. “Richie loved life,†Pat concluded. “Her goal was to be useful.â€
Pat’s husband, Charles Thompson, said, “Any time you met Richie was memorable,†as he shared his second meeting with her, at her home in New Hope, Penn., where the house was full “of every variety of antiques,†including an array of antique bowls and pitchers in the hallway. It was his first time in the home of a Northerner and, “I thought it was the way things were done in the North.†He may have gotten a clue that Richie was not the norm when dinner was served and she pulled a “braid of spaghetti†from an elegant dish she called a “thundermug,†which he later learned was a Limoges chamber pot!
Energetic and spunky, she left everyone with memories of her stories.
She was a woman who, upon realizing one night that something strange lurked in her Elm Street driveway, threw a bowling ball into the dark and, though it didn’t strike, scared up and away an owl; not your standard owl, but “an Arctic owl.†This story, which many had heard and loved repeating, leaves me with this Richie lesson: We can’t always know what’s waiting for us, but we can use what we’ve got to find out. It will be worth the effort, if only for the story we are left to tell.
So here’s “skål†to Richie, and thanks for a life well lived and remembered.
Contact Valarie Schwartz at valariekays at mac dot com