Mauricette Atwood

Born: April 29, 1931
Passed Away: October 22, 2018

I met Mauricette Atwood when I was about 16.

She was a young French woman who had come to Canada to marry.

I think I first learned to love her because my mother loved her -- this brave young woman whose name we said in three syllables, Maur-i-cette.

I have known her over the years since then, watched her raise her family of three children with her husband Dwayne.

And she has watched me raise mine.

Dwayne predeceased her two years ago and ever since then, she has been waiting to join him.

Her biography was given by her son Denis.

He talked for a long time about her birth, her mother and father separating when she was very young, about how she was given to another woman to raise for many years, and how she and her older brother had to go to Algeria when the Germans were invading France.

We learned about how she joined the church and then followed a missionary here to be married to him a few months later.

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Pictures of Mauricette

In those days, after missionaries were released from the missions, they sometimes toured the places they had been. Dwayne and Dale Davies toured together, and when they went back to Lile, Dwayne and Mauricette decided to get married.  Well, it wasn't really like that.  Mauricette asked him right out if he loved her.  He shyly said yes.  She said, then we should get married.

He went home and together they worked and saved for 3 months to get enough money to bring her here.  She arrived in Lethbridge without really knowing where she was going and without knowing  a word of English.  His large extended family accepted her with open arms and they were married 2 months later.

My synopsis of this wonderful story of two people who loved each other and helped each other for 60 some years can't really be captured here.  Her son, Denis, did her biography with such respect for her.  I hung on every word he spoke -- so beautifully chosen.

Mauricette had planned her funeral.  She wanted Shauna Murdock to play Debussy's "Claire de Lune" which might have captured the tone of the whole funeral.

As well she had Andrea Hudson and Shauna Murdock do a violin-piano duet called "Amazing Grace Medley".

I was sitting by Barbara Cassinette who leaned over to me and asked me the name of the other tune that was in the medley.  I could hum it, but I didn't have any words to go with the melody.  She was madly flipping through the hymn book, which I thought would be a lost cause.  I can never find a hymn I want to that way.  But then she pointed to Hymn #169, "As now we take the sacrament".

Success.

That is one of the hymns that was added after I quit memorizing every hymn in the book, so it was lovely to have Barbara beside me.

Arta