In Remembrance - Margaret Elizabeth Stout - My beautiful Auntie Peggy

Today, on the day when it is believed that the veil is thinnest between the netherworld and ours, I like to like to light a candle, share a sacred meal with a loved one, and pay attention to the indications around me that my loved one has deigned to come join me.

I speak of my Auntie Ellen often, she is the Coast Salish Elder who guided me through my years in university. She would say, whenever a fly was apparent in the classroom, that a loving relative was attending. She believed that flies could be used by our ancestors as a means of travelling to our reality, to check up on us, and to keep tabs that we were okay. Her rationalizing was that fly incarnations were brief and that flies had the ability to move through space rapidly, in order to get through tiny spaces to facilitate their getting to where they needed to go in a short amount of time so they can fulfill their visit's goal.

All this month, at work and at home, I have had a single fly come say hi. Not obnoxious, as Auntie Peggy would never be rude, just obvious that it was there. Just staying out of reach, because sadly, I've quickly sent Auntie Peggy to her demise without thinking a lot over the years since her death in 2004.

Auntie Peggy. The one woman who loved me through all my hellish years with my mother. Who would take me for the weekend, bravely, and return me on Sunday night lying through her teeth that 'Chrissy was SUCH a good girl." I gave her conniptions, she'd say to me when my mother wasn't around.

This was the woman who was always there with nonjudging unconditional love all through my years as a troubled teen and twenty something, going through life on a hellbent for hell streak, she was still there for me whenever I was in a pickle or had been abandoned again.

Auntie Peggy, who worked her whole adult life at Spear and Jackson's since the war years, making saw tooth blades and teeth, in coveralls when nice girls wore skirts, she was a feminist from way back. She never took a sick day in her life, taking the bus up Kingsway to Burnaby every day, Monday thru Friday, at 6 in the morning in all kinds of weather and when she retired, they'd rescinded pensioning people so she wound up with nothing for her years of work but a tiny gold stickpin a quarter the size of a penny.

In 1988, when we returned from Alaska, my son Dan and I were able to stay with her for a whole month as we got on our feet. What could I have done without her?

Auntie Peggy was 5 foot nothing to my almost 6 feet but she would walk me the 5 blocks along East 13th in Vancouver to the bus stop to keep me safe, even though at 80+ she was walking back by herself, a target and a soft touch for the local thugs.

Her passing was a hard one for me to take. She is my stepdad's sister and that stepdad had no fond feelings for me after I left home and abandoned him with my mother and sister. So when Auntie Peggy's end was near, and she was transferred from the hospital (where I saw her last, briefly) to a facility for hospice for her final days, he wouldn't return calls, wouldn't let me know where she was, and then, months later after hearing from my sister that she had passed, that man didn't allow her or myself to acquire anything of hers. We have no idea what happened to her apartment's contents or all the treasures that she had in there like the complete records (78's and 33's) of the Beatles and so much more. I have a few treasures of hers that she gave me those last visits in 2002 and 03 when we both suspected what was coming, a ring, lots of old photos of her from her younger days. They will come out today to be a part of a very private altar I will assemble in her honour.

Every year at this time, Auntie Peggy comes to the forefront of my world and I spend a day with her. These slippers I am knitting (and that she taught my friend Genya to make too, who is making them by the bucketload this yule), are a tribute to her.

Happy Halloween, Auntie Peggy, now that you understand me so much more.

Danny, the squirmin' German and his Auntie Peggy