whitefun220

By ANNE RAVER
Published: September 20, 2007 NY.TIMES
WE filled the church and the house with her favorite fall flowers: sunflowers in many shades of gold, pale yellow, orange, red and burgundy; zinnias in bright yellow, orange, deep red, salmon-pink, white and pale green.

We sang “For the Beauty of the Earth” and read “The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry. Part of the poem reads:

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.


My mother, Kathleen Moore Raver, died at 94 on Aug. 31, so early in the morning that the sky was full of stars. My brother, Jim; my sister, Martha; and I were by her side in the nursing home, where she had spent only a few days, and what we most wanted was for her to depart in peace.

She had been ready to go for quite a while, but her body wouldn’t cooperate. “I’ve lived a good long life,” she kept saying. “My bags are packed.” And when my oldest brother, Carroll, died in April of cancer, some spark in her sturdy self went out.

In typical style, she had planned her own funeral years before, tucking the poem and a few other favorite writings into a packet, complete with a voucher marked “paid” from the local funeral home, and putting it in her safe-deposit box at the bank. She had even given the funeral director a beautiful hand-thrown ceramic pot, a gift from my sister, to be used as an urn for her ashes.

Her own father had been a funeral director, and she was not about to be laid out and buried in a casket. She even wrote her own obituary, just to save us the trouble. And no eulogies, she ordered. “No one wants to hear someone else go on and on,” said Mother, who was brought up by a proper Victorian not to go on about anything.

She had something else in mind. “I want you to celebrate,” she told us. “Dance and sing. Have a Scotch for me, back at the house.”

So that’s what we did, after we buried her ashes, and my brother’s, in the old churchyard, and went into the little church that my great-grandfather helped to build. We tolled the old church bell 94 times — an ancient practice, my sister said, to help the soul get a headstart to wherever it was going — and headed for the farm to feast on some of her favorite foods: chicken salad and biscuits, thin sliced smoked ham and tomatoes fresh from the garden. We set up a little bar under a tall red oak that my friend Ginger and I planted as a sapling 20 years ago.

“Why did you spend money on a red oak that you could have dug from the woods?” Mother’s friend Betty, a landscape architect, had asked with a mocking laugh, when she saw the little tree on the sun-baked grass. “You should have planted a Cladrastis lutea,” she said, using the Latin name for the yellowwood tree.

Betty was always trying to get us to plant more unusual trees, and a yellowwood would have looked fine there. But Mother loved our tree because we had planted it, and more than once she ran out to blast its caterpillar-infested branches with a good hard spray from the hose. If that didn’t work, she went for the Raid.

It was my father who taught me how to garden. Mother would help plant the peas, because she loved to eat them. But she hated to weed. And she found garden books a bore.

But she loved trees, so in a drought she would carry buckets of water to them. And she loved all things that charted the seasons: the first snowdrops by the smokehouse door, the winter jasmine outside the living room window, the intoxicating scent of Viburnum carlesii when it bloomed in early March.

She had a knack for arranging flowers, and something always was in the house, from the sprays of yellow jasmine in December, to delicate branches of dogwood blossoms set among the first tulips, to a single crimson tree peony floating in a bowl of water.

The day before she went to the hospital, she was still pushing her four-wheeled walker down the lane past the barn to see what was blooming, or to admire the light on the rolling fields. The sapphire of a bluebird’s wing would lift her heart. So could the jaunty, upturned tail of our dog, Wolfie, or the cats, who accompanied her on these walks.

She always stopped to catch her breath at Rock’s field of flowers behind the barn where he and I live. There are hundreds of sunflowers, zinnias and cosmos, blooming in a great horseshoe around the squash patch, tomatoes and beets. When she could no longer cut them herself, he would bring her a bucket of those intensely colored late-summer flowers.

Trained as a dietitian, she taught me how to pick okra, young and still tender. How to skin the beets and pickle them while they are still piping hot. How to add a dash of sugar to fresh tomatoes simmering in a pot, to cut the acid and to bring out the flavor for a quick, fresh sauce.

But more than any tip she gave us about food or flowers (put an aspirin in the vase, to keep them fresh) she infused us with her love of the fields and woods, the sound of water over rocks in the stream, the moon in the sky.

As children, we used to follow my mother and father through the woods as they hunted for the first skunk cabbages unfurling by the stream. We climbed the steep banks and hiked up the hills where the mountain laurel and dogwood bloomed.

She was our quiet guiding light. So it will take time, and changing seasons, to see our own way.