Molly McBride Feb 1, 1929 – September 22, 2018

Image from Facebook page of Terry Jones

Richard, Michael and I drove to Magrath for Molly’s funeral.

We left at 10 am, on the #2 highway south, but still it felt as though we were weaving our way through country roads and in and out of the coulee’s that pepper what was once only a trail between Central and Southern Alberta.

We talked about the silo’s full of wheat, about the grain elevators, the bales of hay with their green coats, sometimes the hay was yellow, being placed in orderly stacks.

We talked about the wind turbines, generating energy, and noted that while we saw them in the distance at first, there was a time that we drove right under them.

We drove past the St. Mary’s Reservoir and saw the precious water spilling out of it in into the irrigation ditches. Sometimes the yellow field were just stubble, sometimes the wheat had been cut and was laying there in snake-like piles, drying in the heat of the autumn sun. Richard promised Michael that the first person to spot a deer in the fields would get a wonderful surprise. We spotted one right beside a pond in the town of Taber and at that point Richard pulled the car to the side of the road, hopped out, and Richard took a picture of Michael, with the deer in the background. I am beginning with these sights because they were the ones of Molly’s birth and death. Born in Taber. Died in Magrath. And in between her life took her to Calgary, Edmonton, Kamloops, Sherwood Park, High River, Barnwell, and finally to Magrath when she could not longer take care of herself. Even at that point, she could reach out and take care of others. It was just when she stopped remembering to do self-care, like eating, that others steps in to minister to her.

Since she died I have been trying to write about Molly’s life. The paragraphs were harder to do than writing usually is to me. I think what I needed to hear was the collective whole of those who were closest to her, for in many ways she was and is an enigma: a tiny person whose grand plans she executed with the help of others, and without that help, she sometimes went on to single-handedly drive them to completion.

Trying to find an image that would work for for me about Molly's determinedness, Colleen gave it when she described moving Molly from Barnwell to Magrath. Molly sat in a blue chair and told those who had come to move her, “You can’t make me go.”

Molly was right. They couldn’t make her. 

Perhaps they had known that before coming to get her. They had planned to counter her resistance by just picking up the chair and taking it along with her sitting in it. That might be the kernel of why Molly could do so many things. Nobody could make her change her own agenda.

Arta