Mary Catherine MacNair Midyette

Catherine’s Rich Life

Good question. The idea is to remember of Catherine’s life and love through family photos and videos. Catherine lived a loving active life and that’s how she wanted to be remembered. Glancing through this selection of amateurish but loving snapshots, we can all enjoy what fun she was, what love she offered and how lucky we were and are to have shared her. The hope is to keep alive an awareness of the lives she touched, the love and generosity she shared with us, and the vibrant “let’s go” spirit she lived. From teaching swimming lessons in the cement pond and trail rides around the lake as a teenager to her friendship, hospitality and unrestrained exuberance as an adult, Catherine showed us a spark and a way forward without baggage or affectation. While Catherine lived, she lived! And we lived more fully because we knew her.

If you are reading this, then you knew Catherine. You knew her love of an active life, you knew her smile, you knew her love of her family and friends. You also feel the pain of her loss. For her family this loss is unlike anything we have ever experienced. Each have tried, in our own way, to face and deal with her death, the grief and finality of what that means. For the family this is new territory: the loss of a sister, a mother, a wife. Words are necessary but don’t begin to cover such a circumstance and the emotions and the change involved.

For those of us of Catherine’s generation we face the new reality that her death will not be the last one among us. Many of us were blessedly naïve about such close contact with our and our loved one’s mortality. We are being educated to something new and something that will be a regular part of our future. We will learn of this, one way or another. And will join Bob Seegar as he sings “I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.”

Catherine had the time from her cancer diagnosis in late January of 2010 until she died on April 3, 2011 to think and talk about these things. She decided that there was little good to come from her disease but that she would make what good of it she could. One point of focus was to learn and share how loving people die. She was quick to see the uneasy interactions with her family and close friends after they knew she was sick. She commented early in the process that her incurable illness was a sad fact of life but a fact of life nevertheless. She decided that she and everyone else needed to get on with living as long as they and she lived so she made a plan to involve friends and family in the process of her passing, to show them it was a part of her life, and theirs.

As long as she could, she welcomed us into her life, cared for us and showed us that love, happiness and dignity were not casualties of her awful disease. She said she was going to leave us on good terms and on her own terms. She was literally going to learn and perhaps show us how to die as well as teach us how to love and act around someone who was dying. And this is what she did. She and her friends and family had emotional times of great intensity but Catherine never lost the strength and focus to, as she put it, “live as long as I am living.” Her lead oncologist told me several months before her death that if we listened and watched very carefully, “she will teach you something important.” For many of us, she did.