Remembering Peggy
March can be an unpredictable month. One morning it’s 70 degrees and sunny; three days later the snow falls in clumps.
Last week, in the earliest dark hours of March 1, my husband and I packed up the last moving box, loaded our car and drove across town. We had sold the house in New Jersey where we had raised our kids for 22 years and now we were stopping by the house where I grew up, to stack boxes in my mother’s garage and spend the night before we drove to the city. I slept in my childhood bedroom (once wallpapered in frenetic green and white flowers, now muted brown) in my old trundle bed. My husband slept down the hall in my brother’s room. The next evening, I went to an informal shiva for a longtime student, a writer in my Tuesday night workshop who had unexpectedly passed away.
This woman was a wonder—the adopted daughter of a man who had made a fortune selling pornography. Peggy—tall, intelligent, beautiful—was already a published author (Psychosocial Interventions in End-of-Life Care: The Hope for a “Good Death”)and was writing a memoir called The Pornographer’s Daughter. Peggy had worked as a caterer, jewelry designer, bereavement counselor, and horticultural therapist and was now writing about life with her father, first as the oldest child growing up in his Cleveland household and later, as his dutiful adult daughter, visiting him while he served time in prison in California.
At the memorial service, five of us who lived locally crowded into one pew and listened to eulogies delivered by Peggy’s sons, first husband, granddaughter and daughter-in-law. Afterward, we gathered around Peggy’s current husband. He smiled at us sadly. “She was typing and then she went to make dinner and collapsed,” he said. He thought it might have been a heart attack or an embolism.
A couple of days later, on the night that we would normally have resumed class, one of the women in the workshop invited us to gather in her downtown apartment. Other than the memorial service, we had not met in person since March 2020. One writer brought delicious homemade sesame cookies. Others shared wine, Manchego cheese and salumi. One woman, who had been taking the class for two years via Zoom, came down from Boston to meet us for the first time. Two others Zoomed in from Florida and Long Island. It was extraordinary how close we all felt, despite the distance and the years that had separated us. We lifted our glasses and spoke of Peggy—her humor, her stamina, her resolve. She was one of the most committed writers I have ever worked with. She revised and revised and revised and was on the cusp of having a portion of her memoir published. “She put her shoulder to the wheel and she wrote,” said one class member.
Coincidentally, on the night of our first class, we were scheduled to discuss Jennifer Senior’s essay, It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart and Lauren Groff’s short story, Annunciation, stories about women (and men) and friendship, women under siege, and various experiences of motherhood. I suspect Peggy would have had a lot to say about both pieces. I will miss hearing what she had to say and reading what she was writing about her life.
