Today, the blog contains reflections of him that I wrote for his memorial service.
And the encore for this is short and sweet, friends. No matter how long it is, life is too short. Be the loyal person, the one who stays in touch when you say you will. Sometimes it's a nuisance. It's a hassle to buy stamps, send cards, and make phone calls - especially in our era of incessant texting. There is nothing inherently wrong with texting. But life. Life is lived in the words and the connections. Be the connection.
Your encore for the day? Tell the people you love that you love them.
Robert Harold MacPherson:
I am Leslie
MacPherson, daughter of Wallace MacPherson who was one of Robert’s younger
brothers. I didn’t see much of my uncles
growing up. I knew I had two uncles, one older than my Dad and one younger,
both Universalist ministers, one active in parish work and the other, who had
moved onto a new career. Because of geographical distances, we only saw each
other occasionally. In my mid-twenties, I decided that I wanted to change that
and get to know them for myself. At the time, I was considering a career in
ministry and since my lineage was as a MacPherson – literally: son of a parson
– it meant that it was in my blood. I decided that I wanted to know these men
as family.
And so, I
did. I took trips to Richmond where my uncle – Rev. Dave – served a church and
to Asheville to get to know Uncle Robert better. The funny thing is that Uncle
Robert didn’t want me to call him Robert. For all his formality, and the Boston
accent that never quite left him, when we corresponded, he wanted me to call
him Uncle Bobo. Which yes, I really did.
Each of you
has your perspective on who he was. Here’s what I can tell you; He loved the
Red Sox and was passionate about politics. He stayed on top of what was
happening locally, nationally and back here in New England. He was as eager to
ask me what I thought about national elections as he was to hear what the
mayors in his hometown of Somerville, MA were doing. Side note: He was thrilled
when I sent him an article last March about the current mayor who had declared
Somerville a sanctuary city and when the Attorney General announced he would be
taking away funding from these cities, the mayor announced: “Come and get me.”
I LOVED
sharing that article with him.
During one
trip to Asheville, I asked him why he had left the ministry and gone into
speech pathology. I’m there were multiple reasons, but what he said was that he
still considered himself a minister. He’d left the parish but not the work. He
defined ministry broadly.
It was a bit
of a miracle for my family that he’d gone into that field. In 1993, my mother
was diagnosed with throat cancer. She lost her voicebox to surgery and my
family was thrown into a world of unknowns. I can’t even begin to express how
grateful we all were when Uncle Robert mailed two state-of-the-art
electro-larynx devices to my parents. HE was the calm presence who understood
it all and could patiently explain to my mother and father how to use them to
produce sound. He was their angel.
This past
year, I have had my own trials. Without going into details, I will simply say
that Uncle Robert has been one of my lifelines. At 92, he stayed connected to
me, emailing me and calling me every week for months. We would talk about the Red Sox and
Elizabeth Warren, the state of the world, and what my kids were up to. He kept
me upbeat, because that’s who he was. Yes, he was so smart, but he was also
relentlessly positive. In a world besieged by heartbreak, Uncle Robert ended
every conversation with “Let’s look at the bright side, shall we? What else is
there?”
And indeed,
what else IS there?
I will hold
these words in memory, and I will be grateful for the time with him that I was
given.
Peace.