“How are you?” “Satisfied”, she said.

About 34 years ago I was hugged by a woman I met when the train stopped and let the two of us passengers hop off. No station, but an official train stop. It was up island and I was travelling with someone who was very special in my life. The kind of special that makes your heart flutter and you realize you are smiling just at the thought of him. The hug was something. She held me tightly for a long time there on the tracks as the train moved away in the distance. All these years later, I still remember the strength of it, the confidence of this beautiful woman. We had never met before, but obviously she had the instinct that this would be the first of many meetings. She was right. I became her daughter-in-law and the mother of two of her three granddaughters.

We walked up the hill from where the train dropped us. The house they had just bought had a river running through the basement. Yes, a river. It was the first of many renovations that this house needed. It had been used by a potter. I’ve seen many pottery studios, but this one was something else. There were splatter marks and clay bits all over the cupboards in the kitchen, the dark walls, the ceiling…it was for these two entrepreneurs “a before”. In their long careers together, they had also been real estate agents…so they knew the possibilities and potential in location and good bones.

If this was a set in a play on stage, one would notice this contrast — in the middle of all of this mess was a rectangular table with four chairs around it under the window. The sunlight illuminated the white linen table cloth with napkins which had been perfectly ironed, a small vase of roadside flowers, a beautiful tea pot with proper cups and plates and knives for the butter that would accompany the scones that had just come out of the oven. The table scape was in sharp contrast to the rest of the surroundings. Given the circumstances, the effort made was not lost on me. In preparation for our visit was a trip to a storage locker to rummage through boxes for all the things: the kitchen tools, the linens, the iron, the ironing board.

Once they made this house a home, they decided to travel and when they came back it wasn’t to Ladysmith.

After much exploration they landed in a 300 person town on the site of an old mine, so there could be no houses next to the glacially fed lake. It was here in Riondel that Bruce and Wendy Scott lived out the last chapters of their lives.

It is this place that we brought their granddaughters to visit every summer. We would swim in the lake, and celebrate an August birthday under the hazelnut trees in the front garden with hot dogs and angel food cake.

As community volunteers, both Wendy and Bruce shared their gifts of organizing, of hard work, of their technical skills. Bruce brought highspeed internet to their town. Wendy ran the local library, sang at the church on Sundays, organized the weekly visiting minister to come to that side of the lake to deliver a sermon if only to 9 people in attendance. She planted a memorial garden. She wrote a column in the local paper. It was called Pebbles. It was about this and that. Somehow you could always see yourself being touched by something in the story- the gift of good storytelling that can reveal truths in the everyday making them universal.

Eventually she saw that when people passed no one was capturing the stories of their lives for the local paper— so for years she would meet with the family and friends of those who had lived in this place, for many years or just for their last chapter. She would write with such insight. Capturing the essence of the person – for others to remember and in doing so document the local history. She worked for a time with Kathy, her neighbour, running the medical office for the one doctor who was in their community at that time. She was involved in helping to make things happen. I would always marvel at how very busy people were in such a small town. I admire the leadership and sense of service this takes to contribute to a vibrant community. It is important.

In July, I attended her memorial service. It was at a church camp ( the biggest room in town) just down the road along Kootenay Lake. All of the ladies I had seen so many times before were volunteering once more- this time running the kitchen, having brought their own baking, serving the tea to their fellow citizens and figuring out that weird community kitchen dishwasher. They are the doers. Wendy was a doer. She was a person who was interested and interesting.

Over the years, we would sit up late at night under the star-filled August sky and talk. The air having cooled a bit from its 37’C earlier in the day (there was no air conditioning). For hours through more and more pots of tea….we would talk. Being an avid reader and listener to CBC radio as we both were—the topics we covered were wide reaching.

In Wendy’s last days with her three children, her sister, and her cats, she was asked “How are you?” and her reply: “Satisfied”.

The last time I spoke to her she told me not to cry. I got to say goodbye and tell her what she meant to me. How I was grateful that she had given my girls valuable experiences. For example, on their walk back from the general store, they saw a squirrel lying dead on the ground. Granny somehow scooped it up and they took it to the memorial garden and buried it. What a grandmother moment. I re-told that story and what an impression it had made on two little city girls. My tears were really of gratitude that I had her as my mother-in-law and my girls’ granny.

Satisfied. It was the last time she spoke. Her last word on earth. What a perfect, considered and wise answer. No fear. Acceptance. Gratitude. Peace.

I have thought of this so often since. How to, or perhaps, how to continue, to live a life where at the end, if we are lucky, we can answer that we are satisfied.

I wish that for you- that you live a long and full life and at the very end- you can sum it up the way Wendy May Scott so aptly did: satisfied.