Insight: We rise by lifting others

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

Even though we all share space on this planet, I’ve found that truly knowing what others carry around inside them is never easy.

That fact was evident for me this past weekend when I accompanied my wife Nancy to a funeral service in St. Albans, Vermont for our sister-in-law Millie Boyd. She had been married for 34 years to Nancy’s oldest brother Will, and they lived in St. Albans.

Over the years we saw Millie when we visited them on trips to Vermont, and she came across to me as a talented artist who was warm and welcoming to us. She wanted to know about us and our lives, and we were never there long enough to carry on long conversations with her about her own life.

On the drive over to Vermont, I asked Nancy how Will and Millie met and I had forgotten that they had met while struggling through issues with alcohol. Nancy told me that both Will and Millie had devoted their lives after overcoming alcohol problems to helping others, serving as sponsors, listening to people struggling as they had, and serving as their mentors.

Until we had arrived at the funeral home though, I was not aware of the full extent of Millie’s life. She was a mother of three daughters, a loving grandmother who taught her grandchildren gardening, and had completed nursing school.

During her eulogy, I heard that in 1988, she fulfilled a lifelong dream and earned a degree from Trinity College in Burlington, Vermont. The speaker said Millie was proud that she and her three daughters all attended college full-time at the same time and graduated by birth order.

I did not know that Millie enjoyed singing classical acapella music with Gigi Scriggins' Morning Glory Singers, and later, the Side Effects barbershop quartet. She had great fun performing for Cardiac Capers, a hospital benefit show, and at other venues in Vermont. I learned that Millie was also involved with The Aphasia Choir of Vermont, a community group founded by her daughter Karen McFeeters Leary, a former speech-language pathologist who is a gifted singer and songwriter. The choir is for stroke and traumatic brain injury survivors with speech difficulties so they can communicate fluently through music.

Millie also was an avid reader and in later years, she discovered a passion for watercolor painting. She belonged to numerous artists' groups, especially enjoying painting and learning with the "Tuesday morning gals." She exhibited her work in Franklin and Chittenden Counties in Vermont.

In fact, I had forgotten that on one of our trips to Vermont to see Nancy’s family, she had given us a painting completed by Nancy’s mother, who was a professional artist. The painting had been hanging on a wall in Will and Millie’s home. It shows Nancy at about the age of 14 and her mother at the lake and now is one of the centerpiece paintings in our living room in Maine.

That led me to remember that Will and Millie were frequent visitors to the nursing home in St. Albans where Nancy’s mother was cared for until her death in 2005.

But the most humbling thing that happened to me during Millie’s funeral came during the “Community Remembrance” portion of her service. 

One by one, people from all walks of life stepped forward to say how Millie had been someone who truly cared about them and had been instrumental in helping them forego dependence upon alcohol and change their lives for the better.

Each one talked about how tough and strict Millie and Will were as their sponsors and yet they felt that the couple always treated them with respect and dignity and most of all with kindness.

I was moved when a man discussed how he had “burned his life to the ground” because of alcohol and walked away from his children when they needed him. He said he saw no point in going on, but it was Millie who had convinced him that he could overcome his problems and start again.

Another speaker discussed how many lives Millie had touched and through her faith in humanity and using her own example as inspiration, had transformed hundreds of lives through her willingness to volunteer on behalf of others struggling with sobriety.

A woman who worked as the only female on a construction crew talked about how kind Millie had been to her and that she continually told her to smile.

Many other speakers mentioned that smiling was the cornerstone that Millie used to calm people’s fears of talking with her and how she felt no matter how hard a day someone might have had that a simple smile showed kindness to them.

Driving home that evening, I told Nancy that it was very humbling to hear all of those speakers talk about what Millie had done for them, how her persistence had led them to turn their lives around, and why they felt they needed to be there to express their love for her.

I carried one big question away from that entire experience that day. When my time comes, as it does for everyone, what do I expect my friends and family to say about me? <