BLAZE

Her Honour The Lieutenant Governor of Alberta
The Honourable Dr. Lois E. Hole, CM, AOE

or Lois...

I just finished making the Thank-you ad for the family to be published in the Journal and the Calgary Herald. It started out with a long-ish list of people who donated their time or services and add a longer list of people who went above and beyond to make the last few months something to be remembered.

In the end though, the ad holds nothing but the thanks of the family. There truly were too many people to thank, too many people who didn't want thanks, too many people that we didn't even know needed thanks. There were too many people touched by this event and by Lois' legacy. I think teh simple thank-you suffices.

I still get shivers when I do something involving Lois, I still discover new dimensions to how she touched my life, I still regret being unable to express the inexpressable and I really wish I had of asked her over for tea like I planned when we first bought the house.

Because you see, we all learn from our experiences, often without realization that learning has taken place. I learned along time ago from Lois' daughter-in-law that wealth is relative and the 3 bucks in my pocket is way more precious to another that it ever should be to me. I learned when I spent my first week working out of Lois' office that wealth and power aren't really synonymous with ambition, jealousy and unending moral compromise. I learned from working at Hole's that strength & confidence is actually one of the keys to charity. In the past month I have learned so much about myself, about the perceptions of truth that we all hold as a society and about the importance of strenght and the insidious eroding power of fear.

I learned a lot.

Kate, Lois' granddaughter, wrote a poem for her memorial which clarified some of what was racing around my mind.



...
I am not afraid to cry.
I will be strong of character
Strong of conviction
Strong of ethics and morals and values
And I will be strong in my beliefs.
...

We need to be strong and to be true and from this great things can come. To live up to Lois' legacy, we need not do great things, we need only to think, to learn, to listen and to do...


"and I said to myself, what a wonderful world..."