Saturday mornings, my husband and I usually go to a great neighborhood diner where we load up on blueberry pancakes, eggs, coffee and the newspapers.  We bring a pile—things we have earmarked during the week, in magazines, random invitations, personal news items about family or friends and stuff we want to remember to put on our calendars together.  We look forward to Saturdays as if we were just about to leave for vacation. We have our little ritual of sorting the sections out of the paper that we usually like to read and throw the rest in the trash before heading out the door.

So, it is rare that I ever look at the Obituaries. They usually land at the back of the same section, which is reporting  all the overnight random acts of violence, car wrecks, drug wars and any other TUMS  inducing events that can happen in the big city, so we actually scan for THE METRO section to put it in the “reject” pile.

But this Saturday, there it was—THE METRO section.  Somehow, it slipped in.  Instead of pushing it aside, on a whim, I opened it up, starting at the back (o.k., I confess to doing that with books too.)   After 2008, when so many of our friends or family members died suddenly, I had a creepy feeling that we might have missed someone.  That turned out to be true.  Only this one was about the life/death of someone I have never met.

To have it jump out at me was stunning, all by itself.  It was about the life of  Maude Moore Buckley.  She was married forever (56 years) to Mortimer.  They traveled the world and had a bunch of kids and grandkids.  It sounded like a life well-lived and loved.

But here’s the thing about Maude—-until just shortly before her death,  she never, ever stopped serving others.  Right there in her obituary it said that her motto was to “think of a way to accomplish something worthwhile for someone else every single day”.

Maude had her ways.  She took something she loved to do and served others with it.  Her love of crocheting and knitting became her gift.    Guess what she decided to do with this love of hers, coupled with her determination to serve others—-in some tangible way—every day?  She knitted booties and caps for newborns and supplied hospitals all over Dallas with her treasures of  “welcome-to-the-world”.  For thousands of families, when the tiniest, brand newest people arrived here on Earth, from the top of their heads to their twinkiest toes, they were swaddled and cuddled and touched by Maude’s loving hands, as those caps and booties were slipped on for the first time.  Can you imagine?

Think of the many family memory/treasure boxes that will be filled for lifetimes to come with her handiwork—the lives she comforted and touched, literally—and think some more, about where these lives might go—out into the world, where they will be educated, get married and have their own families who might start their precious little ones in those same booties made by Maude.  She also made slippers for hospital patients.  And she made dolls and blankets for the children who were patients at Children’s Medical Center in Dallas. “She spent countless hours”, to be exact.

Each of us can find a way to put the loves in our lives into motion—-into gifts that solve a problem, create a comfort, or soothe a soul, or lift some heart on their journey.  Maude’s life is an inspiration to all of us.  I definitely don’t believe any mere coincidence caused me to see her story that Saturday morning.  Divine forces were at work……or at play.

Maude needed to live on, just a little longer.  For her, 110 years just weren’t quite enough.