A Eulogy—The Silence a Mother Leaves; or, Heather, that Heathy Flower by Mark Tredinnick

For Heather Tredinnick

1.

SHE LEAVES a silence decades deep, a mother, when she goes.

A mother who sang and played and taught and cared and did not stay silent when a thing needed to be said.

Heather Marks, Heather Tredinnick, my mother, your friend or aunt or sister, your wife, your conductor, your teacher, your neighbour—my mother was such a woman: a singer, a pianist, a chorister, a teacher (of music and grammar and all the good old things they used to teach), a scholar of church music, a lover of sacred sound, a stickler for the disciplines of grace, for the proprieties as she saw them (and very largely she saw them pretty true), a woman you were pleased to please, a woman it did not pay to disappoint.

And the silence she leaves is profound and long, and today we gather to dwell in the beauty of the space she made for us all in the world, and to begin to fill the silence she leaves— with what she loved and how we loved her: a little hope in all things…