I knew when I decided to leave the country for three months that I would miss something-and I did. Just after I left for Portugal, a friend – and a very good friend to Millersville University and the Millersville community passed away.
Marsha Frerichs lived with her husband, Rich – a long time Millersville faculty member and colleague of mine in the Educational Foundations Department, in a beautiful home overlooking the Crossgates Golf Course where her Penn Manor Golf Team practiced and played. Her death was expected in one sense.
Marsha had been living with end stage breast cancer for more years than I care to count. But in another- sense, her death was utterly unexpected. Someone with a soul that large cannot die.
Marsha Frerichs had been living courageously and fully in the face of her cancer. She had packed more grace, dignity and love into those years than many of us pack into a lifetime.
I could talk about Marsha’s coaching and teaching golf, or about her shepherding MU, hosting Elderhostel participants around in the summer, or about her unfailing support of MU athletic teams, especially women’s basketball, her breeding and raising her beloved Golden Retrievers.
She loved learning to journal for physical and spiritual health after her diagnosis and the incredible poems she composed, her spot-on mothering of two lovely and loving adult daughters – Kim and Melissa, her unflagging support of her life partner Rich, or about her ability to make me and so many of us think I was her closest friend, but I don’t have to.
Anybody reading this who knew Marsha is already crying. They are also smiling and thinking about the time . . .
I spoke with Rich over long, long distance the other day and he told me about Marsha’s funeral. He said they were planning a simple reception at the church after the service, that he had been worried about the number of people and providing enough food.
The minister, Randy Martin, suggested that he just make an announcement that family and close friends were invited to the reception; that way people wouldn’t stay unless they felt Marsha would have wanted them there.
Rich told me he started laughing and said to Reverend Martin, “Oh c’mon now, you know Marsha, everybody she ever met thinks they were one of her close friends.”
Rich is right. That was true of Marsha when I met her in 1985 and it was true when I visited her at Hospice the day I left for Portugal.
This woman just five days from death made me feel like the center of her attention in a miracle of barely-verbal communication.
I knew the first time I met Marsha that she had a big heart. What I learned in the last years of her life was how big her soul was.
The smaller her body became — she lost weight slowly but steadily because of her cancer and her treatment – the bigger her spirit grew. She began to journal as a healing practice and to compose poetry. Then she started sharing the practice of journaling with others facing and fighting cancer.
She continued to coach golf, focused as always on the development of young golfers into responsible young men and women.
She spent time on and with her many friends, listening generously and commenting lightly and lovingly. Marsha was fully present to the life she was offered.
By the time she died, she could convey love, support and peace with a look, a chuckle, a hug. You knew in your head that she was slowly dying but everything about her spoke of life.
My colleague John Ward and several hundred others attended Marsha’s funeral. He emailed me: “You probably heard about Marsha’s funeral – it was really a wonderful tribute. [President] Francine [McNairy], among others, gave beautiful eulogies. Made me really want to live life. Not because life is unpredictable and short, but because Marsha was so inspiring in how she lived hers.”
The poet Mary Oliver has been keeping me company on my adventure to Portugal, helping me to stay grounded as I encounter the strange in another culture and the new in me.
Oliver writes almost exclusively about nature, but her poems are almost always about loving life and living well.
In “The Summer Day,” Oliver puts it this way: Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
I am in Portugal because I heeded Oliver’s call and Marsha’s example. May Marsha rest in peace. You and I have living to do.
Dr. Barb Stengel has been a member of the educational foundation since 1985. She writes “Uncommon Sense” for The Snapper.
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