This article has been updated to include pictures from the memorial service that were omitted during first publication.
One of the first things people notice about Twisp are the death notices on the door of the post office. I remember feeling moved the first time I saw them. On the other side of the Cascades, I couldn’t get paper tickets for a show anymore but here, people still use communication tools that began with the advent of cheap paper.
I was also moved because in an era of regulations, politics, and egos, the Twisp Post Office allows people to tape notices to their door. That’s something to be grateful for.
I always read the death notices. When someone walks up behind me, I let them pass and continue reading. I examine the photo, go through my memory database, imagine what they might have been like in life.
“Every time I come here I’m glad it’s not my face on the door,” said an elderly man a few years ago to the chuckles of people in line at the post office.
I was an observer in all this. I hadn’t lived here long enough to know any of the deceased, but deep down, I wondered how long it would take before I knew someone on that door.
It happened in my third year. The name struck me. Marti Darling.
Marti?
It shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but it did because Marti was one of the most vivacious people I knew. If our days were numbered by the energy of our spirits, Marti would live forever.
By the time I met her, Marti carried an oxygen tank, but you wouldn’t have known it by her involvement in the community. I met her on the set of Wizard of Oz two years ago. I volunteered to help paint the set, but in the end, Marti painted almost all of the scenes. I remember marveling at her Professor Marvel sign. It was in the play for only one scene and from my seat, obscured by bushes, but I thought her eye for color and knack for hand drawn fonts was ingenious.
I often found her in the MVCC gymnasium working by herself without fanfare, in the very same building she went to high school fifty years go. Sometimes she would take the oxygen tubes out of her nose, but she couldn’t be without them for long. I assumed she was a smoker but never asked her about it. She had a big smile, laughed often, and was so productive that the oxygen tank was a side note. It didn’t slow her down except for a mild pause to reinsert the tubes.
Besides helping with stage productions, Marti was one of the original painters of the murals at the four way stop in Winthrop. She was also the lead painter in restoring them fifty years later. I pulled my car over last summer to say hello. She was working alone in the hot sun to restore the Pratt’s Healing Ointment mural, oxygen tank by her side. I told her how amazed I was by her restoration. She smiled broadly, and her mind turned to her next project, the mural of the Cascades across the street. She told me some of the challenges in restoring it. At the memorial, Nilsine Harris, the organizer of the restoration project, told me that mural did her in. Harris, who apprenticed under Marti, had to complete it.
I drove past Marti last summer working on the Cascades mural, alone under the beating sun. I didn’t stop that time. I didn’t know that would be her last summer.
The last time I saw Marti was a chance encounter outside Mill Hill Custom Meats in Twisp last August. She was in an electric wheel chair but vivacious as ever. She told me how good their ground beef was and asked me how I was doing. I told her about a new paper I had started. She took an interest in it and I gave her my card. We hugged warmly. She became a subscriber of MVE. A few months later, I got an email that Marti’s credit card was rejected. Oh, I thought, I guess she didn’t like the paper.
I didn’t know she had passed away until I saw the notice on the post office door the following spring.
Marti didn’t die of smoking related causes. She was diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. Pulmonary fibrosis is a scarring of the alveoli in the lungs that hampers the transfer of oxygen to the body.
Idiopathic means doctors don’t know what caused it.
Marti’s tank got bigger and toward the end of her life, no amount of oxygen was sufficient, her friends said. Her alveoli just couldn’t absorb it. She died where many people in this community take their last breath- their home.
At the memorial service, I saw a picture of Marti competing in barrel races. Seeing her on a horse brought up a side of her I didn’t know. She also participated in dog agility competitions. Friends said she loved her husky, a tough dog to train for an agility competition, but she welcomed the challenge. She continued to train until the very end, “running” with her dog in an electric wheelchair.
An article in MVN publicized her bicycle trip from Disneyland to Disneyworld to raise money for MVCC.
Another picture showed her in a rather risqué outfit for either a theater or dance performance, her other hobbies.
That Marti surprised me.
Pulmonary fibrosis didn’t fit Marti’s personality. She was too alive to be hampered by a lack of oxygen.
You’re free now, Marti.
