Our mother was a woman of ideas. More than large philosophies, however, she embraced the more immediate raw materials. She was the planner; the doer rather than the seeker after ideals. As a weaver, a baker of bread, she made things from other things. She spent less time discussing politics or society than discussing personal relationships. She spent less time cleaning up after an idea than getting it started or making something of it. That seems to be the way in which she went about dying as well. She took what there was and made something of it; this time, though, the conclusion of her project was there, waiting for her.

Our mother was always most comfortable when in command of a situation. She dealt more easily with a schedule of events of her own choosing than with that of someone else. Suddenly, unable to influence the world around her physically as she might have wished, confined to verbal involvement, vicarious experience, she became frustrated with us. We didn’t cook rice as she did; I tore lettuce instead of cutting it; I scraped the carrots for soup instead of peeling them; I sometimes left the skins on when I boiled potatoes. These seem now to be incredibly unimportant things—but at that time she could not comfortably mix together the ingredients of a batch of bread. What was there to make from what she had?

There truly was glory in moments when Betsy would smile and ask us to step closer; we had brought the freshness of outdoors in with us on our coats, in our hair. There was glory in coming in from an early snow, laughing, hands bright red with cold, to give her the first pressing of cider from a tin cup.

On July 30, 1983, when the youngest of her five children was 23 years old, Elizabeth Good Merrill died. Surrounding her with love were her husband and two daughters. She was at home, in her own bed, as she had wanted to be, and she passed without the pain of which she had been so afraid. As she began slipping away, our father came crying to us in helplessness and loneliness at watching the passing and not being able to do anything. We touched her, and one another, again the egg, encased; as one being we held the moment quietly until it passed.