Muriel Duckworth, 1908-2009

More bad, sad news from home - Muriel Duckworth, one of the world's great souls, has died.

My parents were involved in the Ban the Bomb movement in Halifax in the Fifties and Sixties and knew Muriel and her husband Jack well. Mum and Muriel were members of the Voice of Women. In the many years since, Muriel has never stopped working for peace. She was one of the most genuine, open, generous, compassionate human beings imaginable.

I was lucky enough to be invited to one of her hundredth birthday parties last summer. There were three - one in Magog, where she had gone every summer for decades; one outside of Ottawa, near much of her family, and the last one in Halifax on the actual day. Though she was fairly frail and sat much of the day in a walker, she was absolutely articulate, 100% mentally alert, full of life.

The shot above is with a grandson, and below, with her daughter Eleanor, not surprisingly another extremely smart, independent and active woman who teaches at Harvard and decided, in her early seventies, to take up modern dance.

It is fitting that Muriel died in Magog, where she was so happy and spent so much time.

The world needs hundreds, thousands, millions of Muriels. It's our tragedy that there was only one.