This memorial was created in honor of Margaret Helen Stockhill of Raymond, California. Margaret was born on December 24, 1944 in New York and passed on March 15, 2019. She is survived by her husband, Ross, and her daughter, Sarah. In her younger years, Margaret was a boat builder, a backpacker and loved hiking with her dog, Thud. In her older years, she loved dark beer, good grammar and the New Yorker. Throughout her life she had a passion for knowledge and a strong sense of social justice.
Margaret was loved by many and will be dearly missed by all of her friends and family.
Tributes
Leave a tributeP.S. I baked some carrot cake, but mine didn't taste as good as the cake she made!
I was reminded of Margaret a few days ago when I finished reading an article describing newly discovered coronavirus information on Pub Med. What dawned on me was that I had Margaret (in addition to many other people) to thank for the existence of the wonderful resource called Pub Med, the National Library of Medicine's online database of medical publications.
Margaret's part came about when she worked as a librarian at a pharmaceutical company, and she was that library's representative to the Nation Library of Medicine's initiation of a computer network linking medical libraries. Margaret made a number of trips to Virginia to participate in this project, which, at that time, was only a network linking medical libraries so they could share publications.
After the Internet came into being, this library network expanded into the Pub Med that I find so valuable now, and I had a big smile when I remembered that my friend played an initial role in creating this great resource.
The ides of march have come and gone now twice since you’ve been gone. The past two years have been a whirlwind of uncertainty, fear, and change. None of which I think you would miss.
I so miss our simpler times together, sharing holiday eggnog lattes and chatting about now seemingly mundane events.
I think of you often, but have yet to share a visit with you in my dreams. Maybe one day soon.
I hope your Rossi is well. I know you’re worrying about him and are looking out for him as best you can. I know you worry about Sarah too.
Life was so much more fun when you were here. Now it seems so much more tedious and complicated. One less thing to look forward to.
Rest assured, you’re not missing much these days, but I think you know that.
I think of you often, but try not to focus on your death day, but rather your birthday. I wonder what it must have been like to have a birthday on Christmas Eve. Special, yet not.
You’re in a better place, but not missed any less by me as time passes. Wish we could chat like we used to. Missing you!
Love you
Carla
It’s been a year today since you passed away- an amount of time that seems simultaneously a deceptive compression and expansion of time. I can’t quite put into words all the things that have changed, nor would I want to bore you with a tedious inventory of all my life’s victories and failures. Nor do I dare to tell you what has happened in the world (I can assure you, you simply would not want to know).
But something has changed, at least it feels like it has for me. It’s almost like a piece of my spirit was ruptured, letting a little more of the outside in. My bereaving compass points shifted every so slightly to orient me better in my own backyard, and to stop me constantly coveting the greener grass next door. You have reminded me how much wonder and life there is right here in front of me, in the top quarter-inch of topsoil.
None of us are islands, and the hard-beat societal delusion that we are is a waste of precious time. Better to spend that time in utter astonishment of our interconnection- even when this interconnection makes us realize how vulnerable all of us really are.
There is poem by Czeslaw Milosz called “Ars Poetica” that I think you would have loved, so I wanted to share a piece of it here:
“The purpose of poetry is to remind us
How difficult it is to remain just one person
For our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
And invisible guests come in and out at will.”
All my love,
Sarah
I've sometimes said that she and I had to stay friends because we both knew too much, but that statement wasn't really true. It was true that we did many crazy and fun things in those past years but never anything that couldn't be published, and it was NO effort—only a lot of joy--to stay friends with her.
Some of the fun things we did was to attend—along with a group of friends—many concerts at Winterland, Kezar Stadium, the Oakland Coliseum, and the Cow Palace. Poor Margaret always ended up driving because she was the only one of the group who had a full-size car. I often think of all the times I snoozed leaning against a backseat window while the red Volvo rolled home down 280 or 101. Thank goodness, other friends were decent enough to stay awake and talk to our generous driver!
One time, Margaret and I nearly got into a riot as we were purchasing tickets for a Who concert—the Who's Quadrophenia Tour. Several of our friends who were intense Who fans could not get off work at the time the tickets went on sale (10:00 am on a weekday) at the (now closed) Emporium Department Store in the Stanford Shopping Center so she and I bought as many tickets as the store allowed per person. The Emporium ran out of tickets shortly after we had purchased ours—with a lot of people still waiting in line, and some of the people who didn't get tickets started to get angry. She and I ran for our car and got out of there fast! After all that excitement Margaret decided she didn't really want to attend and gave her ticket to another friend. The concert she made one friend very happy to attend was the one where the Who's drummer, Keith Moon, passed out and an audience member came on stage and drummed for the rest of the concert.
I've seen the statement “friends are the family we choose for ourselves”, and that statement definitely applies to Margaret as a friend. I've celebrated and enjoyed many holidays with her, and I got to enjoy her daughter, Sarah, as a baby and as a child and as an adult. At most of the traumas in my life, Margaret appeared at my door bearing chicken soup or chocolate.
Margaret's absence leaves a colossal empty place in my surroundings. She was a person I could laugh with and cry with, celebrate with and complain with.
My life has been 100% better because I got to have Margaret as a friend.
Sitting on her porch, overlooking the sloped and darkened hills of the Sierras, she said that this owl spoke to her, and jarred by the experience, stepped inside to tell my father about the mysterious encounter.
For anyone that knows my mother, you know how bizarrely disjointed this story is. My mom never sat well with mystery. She had composed a collection of certainties in her life, and she fiercely maintained them- certainties about the changes that needed to happen in our world to preserve the environment, certainties about a justice for those that had been squashed under the boot of inequality…but uncertainly like this was not in her collection.
The last book she read was book I recommended to her called “impossible owls” by Brian Phillips. It’s a collection of essays ranging on topics physically and emotionally all over the human map- from covering the Alaskan Iditarod, sumo wrestling culture in Japan, man-eating tigers in India to the prevalence of UFO stories along the old route 66, the book is truly a collection of oddities. Owls appear in almost every essay, acting as the gatekeepers between the known and the unknown world. Owls seem to appear just as the world seems unknowable in its vastness and complexity- around unexplained phenomenon and in that twilight hour when any metamorphosis seems possible. They appear as strange but comforting creatures-giving a sense of peace nestled deep in that uncertainty.
My mom’s encounter with this owl has been a strangely shaped puzzle piece of her death- it’s the piece with dark and tangled colors and unmatched edges that doesn’t seem to have a home in the rest of the ordered whole.
I have been unable to write much about my mom- because everything was simultaneously tender and untouchable. I wanted death to somehow be couched in a greater narrative- I wanted to weave a story of “why” around her death, to cocoon and comfort my pain. I think I just wanted my pain to know that it was here for a reason.
Death sits uneasily at the edges of our stories, beckoning us to try and categorize it and to give it a place at the table. But instead, maybe it should just flit by on the outskirts, mysterious and unknowable, like an owl coming in and out of our sight for only a moment before it disappears into the dusk- a way of reminding us that our time on this strange rock is brief and sacred and full of impossible owls.
We had a tradition of sharing a Starbucks Eggnog Latte every Holiday season. When we were not able to physically share our Eggnog lattes together anymore, we'd email or call and check to see if we'd had our annual Eggnog lattes yet. We also shared a love of dark beers. Margaret loved Deschutes Black Butte Porter and would tell me about the latest stouts she'd found at Trader Joe's.
I so enjoyed talking to her and reading her latest emails. Margaret was so witty and smart. We'd talk about all sorts of things, events, world happenings, people we wondered about from work, Ross's latest hikes, on and on. I miss getting emails from her and hearing about what's new in Coarse Gold, how the weather is, what Sarah's been up to, all the things that seem so mundane and yet so important.
I miss Margaret so much and find it so hard to believe that she is gone. Margaret was a very special person, a one-of-a-kind friend I will never forget and never stop missing.
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P.S. I baked some carrot cake, but mine didn't taste as good as the cake she made!