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Pauline
Life Doesn’t Listen
My friend Pauline Collier died Saturday. She was not an hour into her 77th birthday when she saw Jesus face-to-face. I guess she decided that she would give her three daughters a bit of time on her last birthday on earth before she left to be reunited with her husband who had died nearly five months before, a fact she never knew.
I remember the first time I met Pauline. She had come to the door to deliver cookies that all first-time visitors to church received. One of the boys must have let her in. All I remember is rushing out of the bathroom just in time to see our exuberant Labrador bounding toward her and jumping on her in greeting. Here stood this lady who screamed class, and my dog was using her as a prop as he tried to greet her with a less-than-holy kiss. Meanwhile, here I was, head wrapped in a towel after a fresh shampoo, pulling my stubborn dog off of her as she stood demurely with a box of cookies in her hand. To me, her gracious smile and graceful exit meant that she was covering well for the fact that she was going to the leaders to tell them they did NOT want that family in the congregation!
The opposite occurred.
When we decided to host a small group, she and her husband Ron were first to sign up. When I led evening women’s Bible studies, she was there to support in spite of leading her own morning study. We were invited to their home on several occasions just to fellowship. And the week we suffered two tragedies within 60 hours, she was the first I called. She did what I needed while praying and suffering alongside us.
And we were not alone. If anyone needed support, Pauline was there. She was an encourager, a teammate, a friend, a mentor. What you needed, she was. She and her family took many of their church family under their wings. Pauline would make sure, though, to bring ministers and their families in as their own. She had been a preacher’s kid. She knew how important connections were to those who were likely to be either put on a pedestal because of their positions or shunned as people who would move on sooner or later, so getting attached was risky. She also knew that their lives were under a microscope. She and Ron were sure to build them up every chance they could take. She was there for flood victims in 1997. She was there to help with Wednesday night meals. She was there. Period. There was nothing she would not do when the need arose.
When her mind started fading from the effects of Alzheimer’s to the point that they had to move from their beloved home where they had finally settled for several years (she would often explain to people they had moved 17 times, I think it was, by the time they settled into their beautiful place in Falmouth), her family honored us by asking us to sit with her while they looked at a place that was more manageable for Ron since he was doing all he could to care for her and for the house, a task he had rarely had to worry about. Her amazing hosting skills were being stolen from her, but her hospitality had not waned. She told me stories of her life—stories I had heard often and loved to hear—and every few minutes, she would interrupt her stories with one question: Where’s Ron? She was having trouble connecting the dots of her present, but he was one devotion would not let her forget.
As I said, Pauline died on her birthday. I had prayed for this for one particular reason. Jewish tradition says that dying on one’s birthday is a particular blessing reserved for the righteous. “The righteous person lives his life achieving his fullest potential and completes his mission on earth in the most perfect way possible,” according to Chabad.org. “This perfection is expressed in the fact that his (or her) mission ends on the very same day that it was begun.” While I am a Christian, I know no one who fulfilled this more than Pauline Collier.
Well done, my friend. Till we meet again.