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By JEANNE MALMGREN
© St. Petersburg Times, published October 29, 2000
In the golden autumn of Pennsylvania, an 11-month-old boy named Shane flings handfuls of leaves in the air and laughs as the wind takes them flying. His mother, Julia Ford, watches.
Could this be Shane's grandmother, somehow, her spirit dancing in the wind, that plays with him? Is Marilyn reaching from somewhere far away to touch her loved ones?
Early this year, Marilyn Myers of St. Petersburg shared her dying process with Times readers. She was 50, in the terminal stages of ovarian cancer. She was determined to embrace the experience with openness and joy, and to let others know what she was learning about life as she moved closer to death.
In frank conversations recorded at her bedside, she described what it felt like to confront physical pain and the fear of dying. She mused on what she believed would happen after death, and she left instructions for her family and friends on how she wanted her last hours to be.
A week after Marilyn's death in early March, she was laid to rest in a grassy meadow on the Tennessee farm where she spent summers, in a grave dug by her sons, Charris and Boomer Ford.
Nearly eight months later, they are grieving the loss of their mother, to whom they were extraordinarily close. To mark her birthday in September, they mailed a spiral-bound booklet of poems and pictures to some of her friends.
Marilyn designed the booklet before she died, as "a farewell "I love you,' " Charris and Boomer wrote in a letter that accompanied the booklet. They also collected her favorite music on a double CD, as she requested.
Boomer, 29, lives in Berwyn, Penn., with his wife, Julia, and Shane, Marilyn's first grandchild. He works for FPL Energy, an affiliate of Florida Power and Light, developing natural gas power stations in the Northeast. Julia is writing her dissertation for a Ph.D. in education and has opened a community literacy center.
They feed Shane only natural, organic foods and take him to a physician who practices herbal medicine and homeopathy. They know this would please Marilyn, who was a holistic health educator, massage therapist and fanatic about healthy diets.
Before she died, Marilyn told her sons to seek her spirit in nature if they needed to feel connected with her. Boomer now takes comfort in long walks on a trail near his house, accompanied by Shane and the family dog, Kaiser. The change of seasons from summer to fall has brought up deep sadness, he says.
Charris, 30, misses his mother intensely, but says, "I am half amazed with how peaceful I feel about her passing. I thank her for life every day, sometimes out loud but mostly by living with passion, generosity and gratitude."
He and his wife, Dulcie, live as caretakers on a 1,000-acre ranch near Telluride, Colo., and this summer did custom stone work for homes in the Hamptons. Dulcie is a filmmaker and is writing a screenplay.
Charris' latest project is a prototype vehicle that will run on bio-diesel fuel he calls "grassolean." Designed for environmental education, the vehicle will tow a trailer with its own portable fuel processing plant to turn waste vegetable oil into fuel.
"We'll go across country with this rig and fuel up by sucking out spent fryer oil from McDonald's and Burger King," he says. "The exhaust smells like french fries!"
Many European countries already offer inexpensive bio-diesel fuel at the pump along with gas and diesel, according to Charris. He has started a business with the goal of building a demonstration "grassolean station" in Telluride and is looking for investors.
Just before Marilyn's death, a donor came forward with a $5-million gift to endow the Marilyn B. Myers Foundation for Creative Healing, to be established at her farm in Tennessee. That is still in the planning stages, Charris says. He and Boomer agreed to take a year or so to grieve before they plunge into that project. For now, they want to concentrate on remembering their mother.
"We can't get her on the phone anymore, or see her in person," Charris says. "But Marilyn's love is as alive as ever."