MARGARET HEATH WADSWORTH 1920-2008

Meg Wadsworth died in Stonington, Connecticut, October 15, 2008. Born in Winchester, Massachusetts, in 1920, of the late Donald and Theresa Heath, she graduated from Wheaton College. After completing a Master of Arts degree in architecture at Harvard University, she worked in Boston for Carl Koch, who was among the early architects of contemporary low-cost housing. She married fellow Harvard architect Christopher Wadsworth and traveled to Baghdad in 1951, where he taught on a Fulbright scholarship. On their return, they lived in Cincinnati and attended the Friends Meeting there, then in Brooklyn and joined that meeting. Chris taught at Pratt Institute, and Meg studied ceramics, receiving a Master of Fine Arts degree from Pratt. She was an accomplished artist whose works in various media, especially paint, clay, and photography, were loved and respected because they revealed her own love and respect for creation, whether she found it in her own yard or in the distant corners of the earth. Meg and Chris raised three children, Connemara, Stephen, and Mayada. Meg had been deeply moved in her final years by the loss of her son and the birth of her first great-grandchild. 

When Meg's husband Christopher retired from Pratt, the Wadsworths moved to Old Saybrook and became active members of New London Meeting. It was there that Meg met Bettie Chu and her husband Charles, art professor at Connecticut College, whose Chinese brush paintings appear on some of Meg's larger ceramic pieces. Meg's home was always a busy studio full of projects. The Wadsworths loved spending time in Italy, and, even after Chris's death, Meg continued to spend several months each year in Venice, learning language, art, and culture, playing in a recorder group and joining a Quaker worship group. 

Meg had celebrated her 88th birthday, but in many ways managed to remain young to the end, in that she never lost the "gift to be simple, the gift to be free, the gift to come down where we ought to be." In her last days, she said she imagined sliding down a long snowy hill, and many will remember her in her vintage red VW bug, off on a spontaneous adventure--to a Narragansett pow-wow, a Waldorf school open house, an art show, a concert, a farmers' market, even a women's pajama party at the Voluntown Peace Farm (VPT). Because she believed in the good work it was doing with nonviolent conflict-resolution training for inner-city Hartford kids, Community Supported Agriculture, and a variety of Peace and Justice conferences, Meg hosted a VPT fund-raising coffee at her house. She believed in the good works of the Peace Trust and acted on that belief in the most practical way--helping to find financial support. Likewise her long friendship with a Narragansett family and her visit to the Waldorf school resulted in a gratifying marriage of the two, thanks to Meg's matchmaking efforts.

Throughout her life Meg studied spirituality and strove to foster peace and justice in the world, leading her to a variety of pursuits, among them belonging to an Ashram in New Jersey in her youth. Meg understood--and lived--the connection between Faith and Practice. The years she and Chris lived in Iraq translated into a special interest and activism in the Peace movement leading up to and since the U.S. invasion, but Meg had also traveled to the Middle East, visiting the Ramallah Friends School for Palestinian children in Israel and becoming especially supportive of the Palestinian-Israeli cooperative village Neve Shalom. To complete her travels, she would return to Stonington and get to work. She loved participating in the Raging Grannies of Greater Westerly, dressing up to look like the great-grandmother she actually was, so that she could sing about her outrage at the war and other government misdirections. On the 4th of July, 2002, even before the war began, Meg and fellow Friends marched in the Stonington village parade wearing red, white, and blue shawls and bonnets and carrying a "Peace Is Patriotic" banner at a time when the notion had not yet caught on. 

Meg, however, was never a one to enter into protest or support without mindful consideration, and she will always be a model for many Westerly/Stonington F/friends of the Quaker process of discernment. Her many journals and books and notes, some in Italian and some in English, all dogged her and delighted her right to the end-and no doubt will continue to dog and delight her family for some time to come. In the past eight years, she felt a certain responsibility to take news of the American Peace and Justice movement to Venice with her, and then to bring Italian peace news back to Stonington when she returned. 

Many who spoke at her memorial service think of Meg in the context of her home, the handmade bowls on simple open shelving, the photographs and paintings and ceramic architectural renderings of Venice street scenes. We remember Meg there measuring her life choices--what to buy, what to drive, what to cook, what to read, what to do--measuring them against Friends' Testimonies of Peace, Integrity, Equality, and Simplicity. It may not have been always a conscious yardstick, and her choices may not always have met the test, but, in contemplating Meg's life, we have come to see her F/friendship as a remarkable gift. The lower-case "f" in the adventures with friends here and abroad, the capital "F" in the Friends testimonies she lived and modeled.   

Fulfilling spiritual life can never come through imitation; it must shine through our particular gifts and capacities as a man or woman on this earth.       Jack Kornfield