January 30th Margaret’s “Grandmommy” and namesake, Margaret Brandon James Collins, died at age 98. She was in her home surrounded by family and passed peacefully. Her waning moments of consciousness were filled with the songs and voices she had loved all her life. Logically, then, this should have been about as good as losing a grandmother gets, but emotionally it remained a pretty tough patch for Margaret.
But before taking off to Virginia Margaret played hostess to two tables of female physicians at the annual Red Dress Luncheon. Everything comes around again, and Margaret’s dress I’m pretty sure was second-hand off the wardrobe rack for Laugh In. She and her tablemates reportedly had huge laughs talking about things no one can remember when a man asks what they were.
When Margaret finally came in the garage door Monday evening Sellers grabbed her around the neck and cried as though he thought she had gone forever. (There were several times I feared the same thing, but I didn’t cry quite as hard as Sellers.) We, of course, were fine without Margaret for four days. I can look after three children on my own with a miserable cold and no help, all alone, solo, one-on-three, no back-up, without any support, solitary, just fine, thank you very much. Did I mention it was just me and the kids for four days?
The following week was a bit emotional for Margaret, with her grief compounded by sleeplessness and a mountain of backlogged work. But with time we all settled out again.
Valentine’s was more fun than we expected. We started the day as is our tradition with a table laden with candy and gifts. I got to have lunch with Abby and Sellers at school and for dinner I made fillet mignon, asparagus, and chocolate cherry cake. Ever since Christmas the big story with the kids has been Webkinz. Valentine’s found Abby with a third online avatar, Sellers with a second frog, and Julian with his first Webkinz (the plural and the singular apparently are the same) a duck he named “Nope.” Margaret and I also got a free kitty of our own, which means we can furnish our online house with the chic modern accessories we cannot afford in the real world. If you have a Webkinz we’ll give you our user name and you can come by for a virtual tour sometime. If only we could pour you a drink…
This Thursday I have a second interview with WWAY TV 3, “Wilmington’s Second Choice For News, And We Only Have Two Choices.” It’s good to live in a community roughly 67 times the size of my high school. Friday Francis will be coming to town to give a lecture on science and faith at our church. We’ve heard he’s a decent speaker, and since the writer’s strike there’s nothing on television, so we thought we’d attend.
Have a great week, drop us a line and let us know how you’re doing. Below is Francis’s eulogy for Grandmommy:
Reflections from the Family
At the funeral of Margaret James Collins
Trinity Episcopal Church
Staunton, Virginia
February 2, 2008
Francis S. Collins
I am honored to be here representing the family of Margaret Brandon James Collins – much loved great-grandmother to 17, grandmother to 14, mother to my three brothers and me, and loving wife and life partner of more than 73 years to my father Fletcher Collins, Jr., who preceded her in death a little less than three years ago. To all of us, she was, is, and always shall be our true matriarch.
And yet we family here, numerous as we are, are only a small proportion of the Tribe that gathers here today to celebrate her life.
Mother loved coincidences. She frequently pointed out that if she had tried to incorporate some of her own life coincidences in a play, critics would have complained that these were utterly unrealistic literary artifices. Yet what could be a more dramatic coincidence than the receipt of a last minute letter of admission to the Yale Graduate School by a young woman with her bags already unpacked at Radcliff, who then went off to New Haven to meet (in her words) “the most arrogant and handsome man in seventeenth century class”? She and that brilliant man then went on to change the world – to literally create life for many of us here today, and inspire the lives of the rest.
Mother was fearless in taking on challenges that few women of her era would attempt. Being one of the first women to obtain a graduate degree in English from Yale, she went on to create beauty and meaning in a rapid succession of life chapters in New Jersey, West Virginia, North Carolina, Long Island, and finally here in the Shenandoah Valley, where for the last 62 years she became the person you would most want to talk with when you were trying to find the right path forward through a thicket of confusing options.
Where can I begin, to tell you of the many talents she possessed, and gave of so freely? Did you know that she was once an athlete, winning prizes in tennis and golf? It’s true. And those who knew her only more recently may not have experienced her astonishing and soul-penetrating singing voice that would set your spine a-tingle. Kit tells the story of a concert she and Daddy gave in North Carolina in the 1930s where the audience, instead of applauding, simply sat in stunned silence, broken only by Allan Lomax’s exclamation: “Great God Almighty!”
For me, her youngest son, Mother was many things – nurturer, encourager, nurse to scrapes and bruises – but especially she was my first and best teacher. I learned from her that discovery of new things was one of the greatest joys that a person can have. Growing up on Pennyroyal Farm with her as my teacher, those discoveries might be of the constellations in the night sky, the amazing properties of the number nine, or of the power of language to capture ideas. All of us four brothers were home-schooled for some part of our elementary and high school education, and this was long before home schooling was cool. As I recall, there were no particular lesson plans or curriculum outlines. We just chased after what was interesting. As just one example, I recall Mother spending several weeks with Fletcher and me teaching us about word derivations – we would study a word, try to figure out its origins (Latin? Greek? Old French?) and then go to the massive Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary to see if we had gotten it right.
And it was the love of language and ideas that propelled mother to write – journals, plays, essays. “I write”, she commented in The Quilt, a marvelous compilation of some of her journal entries, “like saving pieces of string and paper bags because they might come in handy.” And she captured the challenge of writing for one who is also a mother: “There must be the heat. And to be hot one must at least lay a few sticks together or gather so much as a cupful of oil. Whatever else art may be, it is self… But the feminine chore is the Not-Self – that creation at odds with creation, that Other who demands, interferes, torments, nauseates, comforts, exalts. While it may be plausible enough for an artist to starve, it is not plausible at all to let a child go hungry.”
The older children only went slightly hungry once every couple of years, when Mother would sit down to write a play, and for a week or more we would be reduced to lunches prepared by my father, whose main culinary production was chipped beef on toast. But what plays she produced! Plays that were full of memorable characters, joy and tragedy, and always her beloved and intricate language. In her marvelous introduction to a compendium of Theater Wagon plays, Mother wrote, “Of course Broadway can no longer afford language. Producers explain that straight plays don’t pay production costs. Off-Broadway prefers the primal scream or the higher frequencies heard only by dogs. The missing wave lengths are words. If theater is human, we need them.” She knew what Shakespeare knew, that theater is about stories, ideas, and words.
But perhaps the greatest talent that Mother possessed, and which no doubt contributes to this church being so full today, was her ability to create a community and to invite people to join in it. “Where community is real”, she wrote, “there is communion. Good things can happen. People talk to each other. Artists, patrons, audiences get together… There is zest. There is laughter. There is even compassion. The rest is imagination.”
She made those words a reality for hundreds of people over the decades. Being part of Mother’s community meant being inspired to do more than you dreamed that you could. It meant being welcomed right away, but not in a way that you were fussed over – not at all, you were immediately assigned an important task to do! And what better way is there to honor someone than that?
Mother and Daddy’s created community of theater, music, and art was spontaneous, evolving, fluid, but Mother was always looking for ways to enhance the experience. My brother Fletcher recalls being in the back seat on long car trips when Mother would brainstorm about ways to help the current group coalesce into something greater than they might have thought possible – but always subtly, so that you thought you had done it yourself.
And Mother had an incredible ability to enter the lives of all of us in profoundly detailed ways. Even near the end, Brandon points out that Mother seemed able to keep the details of the lives of hundreds of people in her head, each of whom thought that they were particularly special – and they were.
In some way, we all believed that Mother must be immortal. And perhaps she did too. Just a year or so ago, Paul Hildebrand came to visit her, now having moved away from Staunton. Recognizing her increasingly frail state, he said, “Well, Margaret, I don’t know if the next time we see each other will be in this life or the next.” Without missing a beat, she replied, “Oh Paul, do take care of yourself!”
But even the indomitable Margaret Collins could not stave off the advance of years. We family and friends gathered with her over these last weeks, told stories, and sang to her and with her. She was increasingly willing to talk about faith and the end of life, though in her own somewhat ambiguous way. She and I prayed together a lot near the end. When Diane asked her whether she expected to see her beloved Fletch after she died, she responded: “If that option is available, I believe we would be good candidates.” On her last evening, Diane and I anointed her for her journey, sang the Angel Band and Amazing Grace to her, and read to her a paragraph from her own memoir For a Curious Grandchild: “To believe in God”, she wrote, “is not to comfort your soul with an easy immortality, nor to put aside the world of the flesh – but to understand that in God’s eyes life or death is of little consequence, and that the purpose of life is not life – not Art even… How terrified I was when I first suspected God… how I stopped dead in my tracks, when I had begun to follow the path of ‘thou shalt have no other gods before me’ – Art, I thought, Art. And I closed the door and went away awhile, pretending I hadn’t seen. And I went another way, in another direction, running – but soon running toward not away – toward other annunciations, other journeys, other adorations – and how only a few days ago, I find I have come upon the closed door from another direction, and the door is open, and there is nothing to fear.”
Yes, Mother, the door is open, and you have now stepped through. Yes, I imagine the heavenly hosts now gathered around you, your dear Fletch holding you close again (that option having been available after all), and as the choirs of angels hush their chatter, you raise the sleigh bells high and shake them to rouse all of heaven to joy and praise. The program begins; the song is “Will the Circle be Unbroken”. And in heaven, as for the Tribe here on earth, the resounding response is that the circle you have created will live on forever, just as you, dear Mother, live on in our hearts.
And yet we family here, numerous as we are, are only a small proportion of the Tribe that gathers here today to celebrate her life.
Mother loved coincidences. She frequently pointed out that if she had tried to incorporate some of her own life coincidences in a play, critics would have complained that these were utterly unrealistic literary artifices. Yet what could be a more dramatic coincidence than the receipt of a last minute letter of admission to the Yale Graduate School by a young woman with her bags already unpacked at Radcliff, who then went off to New Haven to meet (in her words) “the most arrogant and handsome man in seventeenth century class”? She and that brilliant man then went on to change the world – to literally create life for many of us here today, and inspire the lives of the rest.
Mother was fearless in taking on challenges that few women of her era would attempt. Being one of the first women to obtain a graduate degree in English from Yale, she went on to create beauty and meaning in a rapid succession of life chapters in New Jersey, West Virginia, North Carolina, Long Island, and finally here in the Shenandoah Valley, where for the last 62 years she became the person you would most want to talk with when you were trying to find the right path forward through a thicket of confusing options.
Where can I begin, to tell you of the many talents she possessed, and gave of so freely? Did you know that she was once an athlete, winning prizes in tennis and golf? It’s true. And those who knew her only more recently may not have experienced her astonishing and soul-penetrating singing voice that would set your spine a-tingle. Kit tells the story of a concert she and Daddy gave in North Carolina in the 1930s where the audience, instead of applauding, simply sat in stunned silence, broken only by Allan Lomax’s exclamation: “Great God Almighty!”
For me, her youngest son, Mother was many things – nurturer, encourager, nurse to scrapes and bruises – but especially she was my first and best teacher. I learned from her that discovery of new things was one of the greatest joys that a person can have. Growing up on Pennyroyal Farm with her as my teacher, those discoveries might be of the constellations in the night sky, the amazing properties of the number nine, or of the power of language to capture ideas. All of us four brothers were home-schooled for some part of our elementary and high school education, and this was long before home schooling was cool. As I recall, there were no particular lesson plans or curriculum outlines. We just chased after what was interesting. As just one example, I recall Mother spending several weeks with Fletcher and me teaching us about word derivations – we would study a word, try to figure out its origins (Latin? Greek? Old French?) and then go to the massive Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary to see if we had gotten it right.
And it was the love of language and ideas that propelled mother to write – journals, plays, essays. “I write”, she commented in The Quilt, a marvelous compilation of some of her journal entries, “like saving pieces of string and paper bags because they might come in handy.” And she captured the challenge of writing for one who is also a mother: “There must be the heat. And to be hot one must at least lay a few sticks together or gather so much as a cupful of oil. Whatever else art may be, it is self… But the feminine chore is the Not-Self – that creation at odds with creation, that Other who demands, interferes, torments, nauseates, comforts, exalts. While it may be plausible enough for an artist to starve, it is not plausible at all to let a child go hungry.”
The older children only went slightly hungry once every couple of years, when Mother would sit down to write a play, and for a week or more we would be reduced to lunches prepared by my father, whose main culinary production was chipped beef on toast. But what plays she produced! Plays that were full of memorable characters, joy and tragedy, and always her beloved and intricate language. In her marvelous introduction to a compendium of Theater Wagon plays, Mother wrote, “Of course Broadway can no longer afford language. Producers explain that straight plays don’t pay production costs. Off-Broadway prefers the primal scream or the higher frequencies heard only by dogs. The missing wave lengths are words. If theater is human, we need them.” She knew what Shakespeare knew, that theater is about stories, ideas, and words.
But perhaps the greatest talent that Mother possessed, and which no doubt contributes to this church being so full today, was her ability to create a community and to invite people to join in it. “Where community is real”, she wrote, “there is communion. Good things can happen. People talk to each other. Artists, patrons, audiences get together… There is zest. There is laughter. There is even compassion. The rest is imagination.”
She made those words a reality for hundreds of people over the decades. Being part of Mother’s community meant being inspired to do more than you dreamed that you could. It meant being welcomed right away, but not in a way that you were fussed over – not at all, you were immediately assigned an important task to do! And what better way is there to honor someone than that?
Mother and Daddy’s created community of theater, music, and art was spontaneous, evolving, fluid, but Mother was always looking for ways to enhance the experience. My brother Fletcher recalls being in the back seat on long car trips when Mother would brainstorm about ways to help the current group coalesce into something greater than they might have thought possible – but always subtly, so that you thought you had done it yourself.
And Mother had an incredible ability to enter the lives of all of us in profoundly detailed ways. Even near the end, Brandon points out that Mother seemed able to keep the details of the lives of hundreds of people in her head, each of whom thought that they were particularly special – and they were.
In some way, we all believed that Mother must be immortal. And perhaps she did too. Just a year or so ago, Paul Hildebrand came to visit her, now having moved away from Staunton. Recognizing her increasingly frail state, he said, “Well, Margaret, I don’t know if the next time we see each other will be in this life or the next.” Without missing a beat, she replied, “Oh Paul, do take care of yourself!”
But even the indomitable Margaret Collins could not stave off the advance of years. We family and friends gathered with her over these last weeks, told stories, and sang to her and with her. She was increasingly willing to talk about faith and the end of life, though in her own somewhat ambiguous way. She and I prayed together a lot near the end. When Diane asked her whether she expected to see her beloved Fletch after she died, she responded: “If that option is available, I believe we would be good candidates.” On her last evening, Diane and I anointed her for her journey, sang the Angel Band and Amazing Grace to her, and read to her a paragraph from her own memoir For a Curious Grandchild: “To believe in God”, she wrote, “is not to comfort your soul with an easy immortality, nor to put aside the world of the flesh – but to understand that in God’s eyes life or death is of little consequence, and that the purpose of life is not life – not Art even… How terrified I was when I first suspected God… how I stopped dead in my tracks, when I had begun to follow the path of ‘thou shalt have no other gods before me’ – Art, I thought, Art. And I closed the door and went away awhile, pretending I hadn’t seen. And I went another way, in another direction, running – but soon running toward not away – toward other annunciations, other journeys, other adorations – and how only a few days ago, I find I have come upon the closed door from another direction, and the door is open, and there is nothing to fear.”
Yes, Mother, the door is open, and you have now stepped through. Yes, I imagine the heavenly hosts now gathered around you, your dear Fletch holding you close again (that option having been available after all), and as the choirs of angels hush their chatter, you raise the sleigh bells high and shake them to rouse all of heaven to joy and praise. The program begins; the song is “Will the Circle be Unbroken”. And in heaven, as for the Tribe here on earth, the resounding response is that the circle you have created will live on forever, just as you, dear Mother, live on in our hearts.
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