Chance = Change

Today at 2:00, in Evanston, Illinois, I think (I must check with Paul to be sure), Lucinda Sherwood Daniels will be laid to rest after 99 wonderful years on this earth. I promised Paul I would stop at 3:00 NYC time and chant something from the Metta Sutra, or Nam Myho Renge Kyo for her ...and I will do that.

Of course, not all of her 99 years felt all that wonderful to her, I'm sure, especially as life presented her with its full array of fortunes and misfortunes, births,deaths , plenties and scarcities....givings and takings, she had them all.

When Paul was about 17, his older brother John died in a terrible and contentious car accident, meaning that Mom Daniels lost her eldest child ...besides the fact that no parent should have to outlive a child, the ordeal was made worse by the greed and grasping of the survivors of the accident who blamed it all on the one person who did not survive it, and so the Daniels family life was made grey and miserable long after the actual death of the beloved son...Mom Daniels not only survived all that horror, but went on to raise her two other children with love and care...whereas God gave her many blessings in her life, she was also given a trial of major proportion and she bore up under it with grace and gentleness. She survived it! Which is saying a lot.

She had the love of her husband by her side most of her life, and though George Daniels was a hard and demanding man, he also clearly filled her life with romance and love, and gave her 3 gorgeous children, a beautiful home and all the time she could ever want to pursue her special artistic gifts: needlepoint and housecrafts of all kinds. She was a miraculous needlewoman, crafting things with such care and love that they were genuine gifts from her heart. She had gifted fingers, and they produced piece after piece of extraordinary beauty: finely stitched, gorgeously designed and meticulously created. Some of my favorite objects are things she made for me, and only for me.

The best gift of all of course was her son:Paul as my first husband has proven to be a friend for the rest of my life,and a finer example of a woman's child is found no where. Lucinda Sherwood Daniels is well and strongly alive in the son of hers I married many years ago,and am still friends with today.

But another gift she gave me is my love for needlework.

When Paul and I became engaged,over 30 years ago, she made , from scratch, my first needlepoint kit: canvas with her own floral design, complete set of yarns that she herself picked out and organized, and a key to how to use them, written in her own fine hand....I still have that canvas, complete, today and must make it into a pillow in her honor. She instilled in me a love for the colors, craft and satisfaction of needlepoint, and since then, since that first kit, I have completed over 3 dozen pollows, if not more.No doubt more.
She changed my life in several ways, and that was one of them.

Thanks,Mom.

And she shared with me, by the way she lived, her love of order, patience, solicitude for others, gentility, gentleness, soft-speaking, sweet smiles, as well as an appreciation for the loveliness of her pure white hair...I never knew her otherwise...her soft crown of silver sweet white hair was healthy, always worn in a genteel small bun at the back, with waves of soft white hair framing her face...a perfect style for a gentle woman. Little glasses on her nose, as she sewed...perched there perfectly, like some one's idea of what a sweet little old lady should look like...but a sharp and discerning mind sitting in observation of all around her. She was a sharp cookie, that Mom Daniels, and whereas i know it bewildered her when Paul had to go and pursue his own identity away from our marriage,she never was anything but lovingly generous with me for all the years after we divorced. Yet, after Dad Daniels died, she was the parent who finally got to know the true loving man her son really was, when he finally brought his Steven home to meet her. Now there was a match made in some sort of right-minded Heaven: Steven and Mom D. Gentle souls all around! Once, when recently referring to me, she looked at Paul quizzically and asked: "Evalyn? Weren't you two married once?"....that makes me smile.

Dear Mom Daniels...we will all miss you. But, then again, you do live on. Every time i make a stitch or snip a thread neatly, I will think of you, and that's a promise from my heart. Every time I sit and have coffee with Paul I will thank you silently for the man you gave me as a lifelong friend. Everytime I see white hair,and as my own grows silver (if i ever let it, that is!),i will take pride in it and attempt to carry it with the grace and charm of LUCINDA SHERWOOD DANIELS.