21 April 2005
Myrth Brooks York
3 December 1915 – 17 April 2005
My mother had an incomparable zest for life. She has been loved by many. Her warmth and enthusiasm have always been infectiously endearing. As a mother, she was delightfully fun, super-abundantly loving and comfortably easy. Always open, she shared her thoughts and feelings as an intimate friend. She placed little expectations on others but accepted people for the most part as they were. But she also had standards, and as she grew older and increasingly representative of a disappearing generation and fading world, there were certain expectations that she would not compromise. She became an oracle of a by-gone world who was able to teach us things that many of us today have forgotten to appreciate and honour.
Hers was not a life without pain and deep loss. Her childhood was one of uncertainty as the marriage of her parents dissolved. Her own marriage came to be an unhappy one, and she suffered many years first for her children's sake and then through a fear of insecurity. The loss of her second child and son was particularly painful. But through all her ordeals, she exhibited an ultimate tenaciousness of strength that never failed to surprise from beneath an overall gentle demeanour. Her last years have not been at all easy for her, and she always said that she thought old age would have been a dignified and gentle decline. But while her decline has not been easy, she still retained an unwitting dignity that she herself could not see. She has always been a fighter, and she fought a long and hard battle right up to the end. In short, she had an incomparably great appetite for life but was now ready to go. Her peace has been well-earned.
My mother was a truly wonderful person. Of course she had faults, criticisms and complaints as we all do, but these have been more than compensated by her sense of humour, her ability to smile and laugh, her generosity, her ever compassionate nature and her expression of love not only to her family but to so many others as well. Moreover, she had the courage to allow change to engrained social and political conventionalities for an outlook of wider horizons, liberating imagination and sensitive insight. Through blood and emotional adoption, she leaves a son, two daughters, seven grandchildren and three great-grandchildren as well as a void in the lives of us all. We miss her deeply but live now with the example she has left us in appreciating life, struggling against whatever odds and connecting with others in the uncomplicated manner of our deeper humanity. May the soul of Myrth Brooks York continue to be the `laughing waters' for the world to come.
A memorial service is to be held at the Cathedral St. John at 271 North Main Street in Providence, Rhode Island (401-331-4622) on Saturday the 23rd of April. The time will be 11:00.