Mar 08, 2009
A Memorial for Mary
While family members were busy planning services for Mary Sagerson last March, friend Abby Jane Davis set out to create another kind of memorial. She formed a Walk MS team.
Bringing sign-up information to the funeral, Abby suspected that those close to Mary would welcome another opportunity to celebrate her life, but she had no idea the response would be so overwhelming.
With the Walk just weeks away, they had little time to plan or collect pledges. But 25 people, including Mary’s massage therapist, joined “Mary’s Marauders” and managed to raise an astounding $14,230. Their goal had been $10,000.
“When I saw $1,000 pledges come rolling in, I was blown away,” says Abby. “After the funeral, a lot of people wanted to do something in her memory, and the Walk gave them that chance. It was comforting for them… It also became a fundraising competition between the nieces and nephews.”
Abby, a third-grade teacher at Woodside Elementary School near Mill Creek, considered Mary a mentor of sorts. She got to know her and the rest of Sagerson family as a girl growing up in the tiny town of Grapeview on the Olympic peninsula.
“Mary was strong-willed, independent and very capable,” Abby says. “She helped me put together my scholarship portfolio when I was in high school.”
When Mary wasn’t helping her husband, Ron, build the family fruit leather business, Stretch Island Fruit, she liked to write and published a book on the town’s early history. An expert typist, she earned money in her younger years typing college papers and court reporting.
Her MS eventually stopped her “flying fingers” and took her mobility as well, but she resisted the disease as long as she possibly could. She had her car adapted so she could continue to drive and invested in speech recognition software so she could continue to write.
She died at age 64 of pneumonia, a likely complication of the disease that showed up in her 30s.
Mary, Ron and others had participated in past Walk fundraisers, but never as a team.
“The team was really Abby’s idea,” says Ron, co-captain of Mary’s Marauders. “I was definitely surprised and pleased by the response. Doing last year’s event was great for me. There were a lot of people there, which was nice support. And the day was nice, too.”
Mary’s Marauders will be out there again this spring. With more time to plan, Abby is thinking up pre-Walk gatherings and may even get her students to make decorations for the team tent. “We have a lot to live up to,” she says.