Margaret

"Your lost friends are not dead, but gone before, advanced a stage or two upon that road which you must travel in the steps they trod." - Unknown

She was the boss who showed me how to be a boss.  She was a relentless friend, a go between, a champion and a cheerleader.   Yesterday I learned that my old friend Margaret Robertson passed away.  We were more than thirty years apart in age.  I remember when she turned sixty.  She redefined aging in my young eyes.  It was the year she traveled to Africa to go mountain climbing.  She loved the notion of turning sixty feeling it gave her the freedom to say what she wanted and do what she wanted and most of all, to stop doing what she didn't want to do.  She took an early retirement and retreated to her West Hill home where she could enjoy nature.

Much of what I learned from Margaret came in handy many years later.  She adored her sons and daughter and gave them the freedom to express themselves and live their lives.  She didn't have a melt down when she got home one afternoon to see marijuana drying on her roof.  She just asked them to take it down.  When they became teenagers she put condoms in their Christmas stockings.  She accepted the friends they brought home and accepted them.  She was much the same with me.   When Margaret tried to protect me from workplace politics, a nasty executive at the hospital where we worked accused her of behaving more like my mother than like my boss.  She responded that she should be so lucky as to be my mother.  I bought her a Mother's Day gift that year. 

For a number of years after we worked together I would go to visit her at her home.  I remember when I took Jacob to see her.  She was wonderful with him.  I also remember a night she planned a lovely lamb dinner for us.  She had just rescued a sheep dog who apparently smelled the defrosting leg of lamb, took it off the counter and ate it before Margaret could get it in the oven.  I don't remember what we ate that night but I do remember how hard we laughed.  

Somehow Margaret convinced me that the sixties are the best time of life.  That thought has sustained me often in these past few weeks as I am about to embark on the last year of my fifties.  As things too often go, years have passed since I've seen her.  I have infrequently heard news of her from a mutual friend.  She had become a doting grandmother before she made the descent into dementia.  Margaret Robertson was a great lady, a great boss and a great friend.  My life was better for having known her.