e all let out a whoop when we heard the news that Elsie, Florrie and Bernice, the Good Sisters of the Valley, left on a road trip to Florida last Monday, heading for a house and garden tour of Sarasota.
The three girls haven’t been outside the country since… well since forever, it seems. They did make that one trip to Nashville 10 years ago. Well, almost to Nashville. They got halfway down I-95 when the Port Petunia hospital tracked them down and told them their mother had gone face down over her bingo cards at the Legion and wasn’t expected to last the night. Poor Myrtle. She hadn’t been feeling her best and she had warned the girls darkly that her heart wasn’t good, you know, but if they needed to get away from the drudgery of looking after their old mother, a person could hardly blame them.
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The girls received a succession of bedside bulletins on the trip home: that Myrtle was doing a little better and breathing on her own. When they crossed the border they heard she was sitting up and able to take a few spoonfuls of soup. When they re-entered Persephone Township she was managing to take a few bites out of a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. When they rolled into the hospital parking lot, an attendant told them that Myrtle had gone back to the bingo hall in a cab, grumbling that her daughters ought to be doing the driving.
Myrtle enjoyed poor health for 94 years. They say she never quite got over that bout of Spanish Flu in 1919. She reminded the girls every day what a terrible time she had in childbirth with each of them and they obediently came to her side whenever she needed someone to minister to her needs, which were formidable.
The girls grew up patient, thrifty and they worked like rented mules. They made good marriages, raised decent kids and each one became indispensable to a cause: Elsie for the Anglican Church, Florrie for the Fair Board and Bernice for the Hospital Auxiliary. But Myrtle’s voice hung over their lives like a distress call from a sinking ocean liner. If you made the mistake of asking Myrtle how she was in the grocery store, it was a blunder you never made twice. She would take you by the arm, fix you with a pirate’s glare and give you a video-graphic description of her latest colonoscopy in a voice that competed successfully with whatever shrieking soprano was holding forth at that moment on the store sound system.
But then the unthinkable happened. Myrtle dropped dead last month in the middle of a conversation with her doctor, right there in the office. There were no pithy last words, no summing up in a touching bedside vigil. After playing more death scenes than Sir Laurence Olivier, she was snatched away from us off-camera, backstage, with no audience but a bored medical student listening to her with one ear and playing solitaire on his laptop. To a community resigned to the probability that Myrtle would plod on for decades to come like a Galapagos tortoise, her death came as a thunderbolt.
I did a double take going by the casket at the funeral home. Myrtle’s cellphone was clasped in her right hand, held gently to her breast. The funeral director leaned over to me and whispered that it had been a special request by the girls.
“So she can call them from heaven,” he added solemnly.
My wife looked at me for a long moment and said, “And call… and call… and call.”
The last decision the girls had to make before they left for Florida was to choose an inscription for Myrtle’s headstone. They had the dates but they were struggling to find an appropriate epitaph. Their mother had not been a particularly religious person and they leafed through page after page of Hallmark sentiments, without finding anything that captured Myrtle’s unique personality.
My neighbour Vern Bunton suggested they just write, “I told you I was sick” and leave it at that.
