Marion Kerans, author of A Legacy of Love delivered this speech about Muriel Duckworth at a book launch in Ottawa on December 3, 2010. It’s a great speech that encapsulates Kerans’ thoughts on Muriel Duckworth and her motivations for writing two books about her.
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We Canadians tend to be modest. We are not given to crowing much but tonight let me tell you I want to crow! I have two good reasons. First of all I want to crow about Muriel Duckworth, a truly great Canadian whom I see in the same league as Ghandi and Nelson Mandella. Canada should be very proud of her. Whatever experience any of us had of her was inevitably memorable and inspiring – whether it was having a quiet conversation with her, attending a huge meeting chaired by her, hearing her give a rousing speech or working alongside her to organize a peace coalition of fifty–six peace groups of men and women, in Nova Scotia.
I met Muriel in 1974 after moving to Halifax. Knowing her caused me to join Voice of Women, a national women’s peace organization begun in 1960. Muriel was a founding member of Voice of Women that was catapulted into existence when Canadian women responded to an immediate crisis, the threat of nuclear war. An American spy plane was downed over the Soviet Union and Kruschev threatened war. People were paralyzed with fear. Lotta Dempsey, a columnist for the Toronto Star, challenged, “Where are the women? “ They responded and within its first year 6000 Canadian women joined Voice of Women.
These pioneers went on with a rich peace agenda. In 1967 Muriel was made President. During the Vietnam War she came to public attention when she accompanied four women from North Vietnam across the country on a speaking tour.
It was after she was struck with a serious illness, Guillaume-Barre syndrome, in 1982 that I determined to write the story of her work in the women’s peace movement. A year later, as I began the research, I was curious to learn what influences had shaped and sustained her as a peace activist for over sixty years. I also wanted to uncover something of her effect on others.
I personally learned so much from her. I wanted the public to recognize this remarkable woman who thought of herself as an ordinary woman. She would never take the time out to write her own autobiography but after much pestering she consented to my writing about her life even though I was not a professional writer.
As I worked on her biography, Muriel Duckworth, A Very Active Pacifist, published by Fernwood in 1996 I found that she was not only a renowned person in the peace movement in Canada but that she was well known throughout the country as a gifted adult educator, a pioneer Canadian Feminist, a radical pacifist, a great community developer and a social change activist. Many, many people want to claim Muriel Duckworth as the best friend they will ever have. Muriel has been both regionally and nationally acclaimed having received ten honorary doctorates from Universities from coast to coast as well as the Person’s Award (1980), the Order of Canada (1983) and The Lester B. Pearson Peace Medal (1991).
Enough about the biography. Now I want to crow about the forty persons who wrote pieces for this precious memoir of Muriel Duckworth, A Legacy of Love. They have made a precious contribution.
Soon after Muriel died I realized that my biography of her was incomplete. There was much to be said about the years that remained to her. I contacted Errol Sharpe of Fernwood Publishing to see if he might be interested in doing an addition to the biography. He was. And as the project expanded he even proposed a second little volume. I contacted some of the persons who did see Muriel regularly to ask if they would tell me stories about Muriel and their experience of her in her later years. As soon as the responses started to come in I knew I had to put them together into a collection of memoirs. They not only showed clearly the heroic quality of Muriel’s life but their collective portrait is one of her incredible love for us, for all those with whom she came in contact. I read her message to us as ”peace will be won by people loving one another.” That’s how “A Legacy of Love” was born. With this wonderful team of 40, we got the collection done in less than a year!
Muriel cultivated relationships and made lasting friendships with people in every walk of life. It is these lasting friendships that saw her through her aging years. Reading the pieces I collected I was struck by the number of friends who often acted as her drivers, her cooks, her messengers, her shoppers. People wanted to do something for Muriel just to be in her presence and to return some of the love she showered on us.
No one could combine fun and purpose in life more than Muriel. Just read about her participation in the Raging Grannies, the women’s retreats at her cottage, the Sunday night get-togethers at her apartment and the plethora of memories her family have of her. And we reciprocated with the memorable celebration of her 100th birthday.
Finally there is another reason – precious to me - why I wanted Muriel’s biography to include her closing years. It has to do with the connections I have made between living into old age and dying prematurely. In the past five years of my life I have been privileged to collect and to edit the writings of our son Patrick Kellerman who died in 2004, at age45, after living with multiple sclerosis for twenty years. Although almost totally disabled Patrick produced a journal, short stories, children’s stories, memoirs, essays and poetry. He did these mostly in the last five years of his life. While Patrick’s writings are not yet published in book form they are available on a website. Through working on his collection and biography I have become particularly sensitive to the precious years, the end of life years, the time of completing our own creation. Muriel’s last thirteen years sum up the wisdom of a life fully lived just as Patrick’s last five years were life full to the brim. They are amazing models for me just as I am sure readers of “A Legacy of Love” will be inspired to live and love life fully, to live life full to the brim.
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