MemoriumPg2.html

So what am I to do now? The answer is simple and difficult: accept the

forgiveness already given. You see, Ms. Lillie never complained about my

visiting too seldom or too often: whenever I was there, it was that moment

that mattered to her, not the past (which is a pretty good definition of

forgiveness). Anyway, now that she is gone, and I can’t go see her again, it

is obvious that whatever happened or didn’t happen is all right -- otherwise,

in the mercy of God, there would be something I could still do about it. Thus,

Lillie Haertig, whether she intended to or not, reminded me that both failure

and forgiveness are real.

This being clear, we are now to ask what in her life gives us cause to praise
God, to rejoice in what she represented. How, in the particularity of this life,
given and taken away, do we say, “Blessed be the name of the Lord?”
Fortunately, for this I have not only my brief acquaintance with her to go on,
but also her memoirs, dictated to her daughter when she was 90. I will mention
three things that stand out, abounding in Lillie’s experience, and essential in
human life.

First, there is “pioneering.” Part of our collective sadness over her passing
is that she represents the last of a remarkable movement in history, in which
women especially played a vital and courageous role. Having been born in the
early part of the last decade of the nineteenth century, covered wagons and
campfires and clearing wilderness and raising houses up out of nothing were
not stories in books, but her own ordinary, adventurous life. But it is not merely
that she was caught in a moment of history; pioneering, for her, was a calling, a commitment: “I was the youngest girl who always tagged along,” she said. She seemed always to believe that the future would be friendly, that the world, with
all its lurking hazards (a rattlesnake bit the schoolmate with whom she was
walking one day), could be trusted. Of course, the test of a genuine pioneer is
whether adventurousness is a passing phase or a permanent characteristic: I
can tell you, on good authority, that Ms. Lillie had dinner at the top of the Space Needle in Seattle, at the age of 87.

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