The Commemoration
Introduction
We are gathered here on this day to mark the death and commemorate the life of Anna Wood Murray.
We welcome you here to join us. Anna’s friendships and larger family covered many countries and two continents. Wherever you are on this sad day, welcome.
This is an unusual occasion and we are deeply pained to be missing two of Anna’s sons Andrew and Ferg and their partners and their children; Barbara, Phoebe and Bennet, and Jo and Peg, and Evie, my daughter. All are locked down in their respective countries: America, Italy and the Netherlands.
It was always our intention to have a small family crematorium service and then a larger memorial event to celebrate Anna’s life. We will still have this celebration. We don’t know exactly when but it’s safe to say that we want it to be a very special day and to have as many of her friends there as possible. This will also be an occasion for more personal reflections and memories of Anna’s life.
For the last three years Anna had lived at Rush Court Nursing Home, near Wallingford in Oxfordshire. The advance of Alzheimer’s and her increasing physical frailty made this decision inevitable and one that she accepted with remarkable good grace. She had a deep store of both stoicism and optimism and these served her well as staff and shield in the last difficult but strangely benign years of her life.
We would like here to publicly express our gratitude and admiration to the staff at Rush Court who showed Anna immense tenderness, professionalism and love over her three years there: the carers, nurses, physiotherapists, cooks, cleaners, helpers, volunteers, grounds and maintenance staff, admin personnel and mangers.
Anna had many visits over the years from her children, grandchildren, nephews and many friends. Every visitor was always greeted with “What a lovely surprise!”, her love and enthusiasm never failing. Even at the end when unable to speak, she found a way to show us her love with a raised arm and a warm and contented smile.
We were told in January of this year that Anna was entering the final stage of her life. All of us, but particularly Andy and Ferg who made long and complicated efforts to be by her side, were able to visit her during this important time.
In the last week of her life we were lucky enough to make one final visit and to have Ferg and Andy in the room with us by video. On Wednesday 8th of April her long and rich life came to a peaceful and painless end on a beautiful spring afternoon.
We have thought carefully about the readings and the music that represent the different parts of Anna’s life, both her
native New England beginnings and her adopted homes.
First reading: The Road Not Taken: Robert Frost
Anna lived a long and rich life that spanned two continents and ninety years. Family and community were central to her life’s work. She had a framed sampler on her wall, both in Hill Top Road and above her nursing home bed, that stated simply, ‘Let me live in the house by the side of the road and be a friend to man’.
She lived her life in that spirit with a determined optimism and a need to more than merely sit by that road. In many ways she wanted to, and did refashion and extend the road itself. Both with man and woman, friends and colleagues, her dear and long departed husband Robert, and the five chooks and seven kiddywinks, her beloved children and grandchildren.
We will now stand to sing Eternal Father Strong to Save, a hymn that Anna specifically requested and that was also sung at Robert’s funeral.
Hymn: Eternal Father Strong to Save
There is so much to celebrate and remember in Anna’s life that it cries out for something more joyful than our gathering here. Alzheimer’s is a cruel illness and robbed Anna of much but she was spared its wilder shores. And she bore it with great fortitude and dignity to the end. She was a trier and a striver and fought for life and light with a determination that won her friends and admiration wherever her life took her and wherever she took her life.
Granny loved poetry. On her bookshelves, she had a well-thumbed anthology by Seamus Heaney, from which this comes.
Scaffolding: Seamus Heaney
North Wales was always an incredibly important part of Anna’s and our lives, both as a holiday and a spiritual sanctuary. A cornerstone of this were the lifelong friendships forged with John, Elwen, Ian and Delyth Cae Adda, our closest neighbours in the parish of Trawsfynydd in what was then Merionethshire. Delyth was instrumental in tracking down our next piece of music, a recording made in 1987, which involved retrieving a cassette tape from a friend’s attic in Trawsfyndd. It is sung by Meibion Prysor, the local male voice choir, and features the voices of many dear friends, including Gareth Bryn Goleu, John, Glynn and Gareth Fadfilltir and Brian Hughes from the Esso garage in Traws. It laments the death and celebrates the home of one of Anna’s Welsh heroes, the poet and Trawsfynydd shepherd Hedd Wyn, who tragically died in 1917 on the first day of the Battle of Passchendaele. His farm lay between two others that we as a family visited and stayed in during our early trips to Wales, Bryn Goleu and Bodyfuddau. Hedd Wynn, a bardic name meaning Blessed Peace, was posthumously awarded the 1917 National Eisteddfod chair
Music: Englynion Coffa Hedd Wyn: Meibion Prysor
Anna lived to the full the cyclicality of life; the turning of the seasons and the call and changing colours of the garden she loved so much. She could weed a flowerbed like no other; hour after hour in some determined contemplation of the mysteries and generative power of dock and dandelion, cooch and nettle, those enemies of the flowers she loved.
Shakespeare’s works always resonated with Anna, particularly the sonnets.
Third reading by Grace: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day: William Shakespeare
Although Anna lived in England in Linton and Oxford most of her adult life, she maintained a strong relationship with America and her and Robert’s larger families there. In later years travel to the States became increasingly difficult and perilous, although Anna in her oldster buccaneering way often seemed to relish that peril, but seeing and being with the Wood and Broeksmit families and her grandchildren there remained hugely important to her.
The next piece of music, Don’t Fence Me In by Cole Porter and sung by Ella Fitzgerald, is a track that came with Anna to the nursing home on a playlist created by her children. A highlight of Alison’s visits was to take Anna out into the beautiful grounds to sing this song from Granny’s teenage years. It stayed fresh in her memory to the end. Please join in.
Music: Don’t Fence Me In: Cole Porter/Ella Fitzgerald
Someone said in my beginning is my end. And maybe in that end there is also a beginning; the ever turning wheel that somehow sets us back where we started, amazed and entranced with the wonder of the world.
Some of our fondest memories with Anna were of outings to explore and marvel at the countryside, the joy of nature and the physicality of the world. This poem is a perfect reflection of her ability to be amazed and entranced. And despite the changes to her body and brain as she aged, her beautiful essence was, as Hopkins says, beyond change and, strangest of all, shone ever brighter in her final years.
Fourth reading: Pied Beauty: Gerald Manley Hopkins
Anna was of course Anna or Annie (or even Ann in her childhood) and Aunt and Granny and Granny Anna to her larger family, friends and colleagues. But to us, her five children, she was also and primarily Mum, the mother who bore and cared for and raised us. Indeed for 65 years of her 89 year allotted span she was a mother and we in turn are eternally her children, her daughter and sons. It’s a strange thing how that relationship takes such different forms, how it is so very individual and unique and how it waxes and wanes over time, sometimes so near and intense, and at other times more distant and calm (or at least giving the appearance of calm) and through it all woven the full range of emotions us humans can feel. But to each of us in turn and together in her unique way she was Mum. We will miss her terribly.
The final piece of music, Mache dich, mein Herze, rein (which translates as Make thyself pure, my heart) is taken from Bach’s St Matthew Passion and is apt for several reasons. Mark, Alison’s friend, is playing the oboe on it and it was recorded at King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, one of Anna’s favourite music venues particularly over the long years the family lived in the Cambridgeshire village of Linton. Mark also gave a concert at Rush Court, introducing it by saying they had come to play for everyone, but in for one very special lady in particular. And can you imagine how Anna’s face lit up at those words?
And so we come to the end, to the final parting where we take leave of Anna and she takes leave of us. We commend her body to those spirits she held dear, whether in the silence of a Quaker meeting or in the rage of a storm over that corner of mountainy Wales that she held so dear with Robert.
Life brought her many treasures and she gave them back one hundredfold. In her leaving let us be thankful for that life and its riches. Go softly and with our love everlasting.
Music: Bach St Matthew Passion Mache dich, mein Herze, rein