EPRILE o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-07-14 published
Doris MARSHALL
By Jamie SWIFT,
Paul
EPRILE, Monday,
July 14, 2003 - Page A18
Jamie and Paul are Friends of Doris
Homemaker, teacher, writer, visionary. Born January 4, 1911,
in Killarney, Manitoba Died January 15, in Toronto, of old age,
aged 92.
When we first got to know Doris
MARSHALL in the mid 1970s, we
encountered everyone's grandmother. She served her famous biscuits
and lemon tarts accompanied by tea in delicate porcelain cups.
Perhaps it would be homemade oat-cakes and cheese with sherry.
A minister's widow, she seemed to fit the little-old-lady stereotype
right down to the tissue tucked under her well-ironed cuff.
But that wasn't all she kept up her sleeve. Doris had a passion
for social justice. Anything showing old people in isolation
or robbed of dignity made her shudder. Once the tea was poured,
she would extract an item she had carefully clipped: it could
be any news item hinting that old people are somehow a problem
to be solved.
While preparing her 1987 book on aging, Doris maintained a unique
filing system involving paper clips, hundreds of clippings, and
handwritten notes inscribed on the clippings themselves, to save
paper. Doris knew how to stretch what she had. She was the oldest
of eight children from a Manitoba farm family. Because her mother
preferred outdoor work, Doris began to cook for a family of 10
plus guests -- as a young teenager. Her work as a live-in
housekeeper financed her studies at Winnipeg's United College,
where she met George
MARSHALL.
Before marrying, she spent four
years in Norway House, working at a residential school.
She realized that teaching sewing and music to aboriginal children
left them ill-equipped for life in either white or native society.
After a stint in The Pas as the "minister's wife," she settled
in Winnipeg with her husband and three daughters: Brenda, Judith,
and Mary. While doing community work, she helped organize Winnipeg's
first Indian Friendship Centre.
Doris became a single mother with George's death in 1959. Her
new parish job at Westminster United Church led to work with
the neighbourhood old ones -- she abhorred the term "seniors."
This be came her passion. She soon found herself at the United
Church's Toronto head office, working in the field of aging.
Doris never saw herself as a gerontology specialist. One of the
lessons she drew from her Norway House experience was the way
in which native culture valued and cared for elders in the community.
These lessons were reinforced in her travels to China, Ghana
and Mozambique.
"We must discover new family and neighbourhood relationships,"
she would later write. "Helping one another and fighting together
for just and fair treatment for all would be the rallying point
for a different kind of extended family."
Doris found a new extended family in and around the Development
Education Centre, where a community of younger people shared
her vision. She proceeded to organize a group of elders. Then
she wrote a book, Silver Threads: Critical Reflections on Growing
Old.
She used her life as a prism through which the problems of aging
are reflected. Her 1988 national promotion tour, under taken
at age 78, took the book into a second edition. The tour included
a visit to grand_son Jama's Grade 2 class as his "show-and-tell."
He was the only one with a grandmother who was also an author.
Doris lived independently in her tidy Annex apartment, with its
lace doilies and family keepsakes, until 1999. Her capacities
diminished, her family knew that she did not want to enter long-term
care. But she was, as usual, gracious in accepting what she could
not change.
She once said that she agreed with physicist Ursula
FRANKLIN's
vision of the ideal society. It's like a potluck supper -- everyone
brings something and everyone gets something. Doris brought the
best she had. And she shared it all around.
E... Names EP... Names EPR... Names Welcome Home
EPRILE - All Categories in OGSPI