Pat Russell has provided a number of pictures which I have posted, click on her picture.

Trish Petway provided a couple of pictures and promises more, click on her picture.

Here are some shots from our day at the beach!

We are sad to note the passing of Mimi McGrath

This is from Maureen Bevans:

HI Everyone:

Mimi --“Mrs. Mcgrath”—was beloved by many of us. She was my second mother since 
elementary school, when Marcia and I became best friends for life. I was a 
fixture in Mimi’s house in Beitou and in her Volkswagon Bug, chugging out to 
Camp Macauley, and lived with Mimi and Marcia in Spain, where she endured our 
teenage disco phase, then later our “quit smoking mom” college phase, and our 
most recent “I can’t believe WE are Mimi’s age NOW” phase. She taught me to 
drive a stick shift, to make tuna casserole with potato chips on top, and to 
read Shakespeare out loud for fun. She knew my parents, my siblings, my husband 
and my children and was loved by all. 

I went down to Palm Springs last month to help Marcia with the difficult 
decisions of what to do to make Mimi’s life comfortable to the end. I had the 
privilege of spending five days with Mimi. Her physical condition was 
deteriorating, but her wit was still alive and she was at peace with death in a 
way that few people are. For her daily physical exercise, Marcia and I would 
wheel her outside for a cigarette and she’d ask us Mimi-esque questions like: 
“If you could have one day back in Taiwan, what would you do? In Spain?” We 
laughed with her about many things. At one point she said to Marcia: “I’m ready 
to go. You told me dying was going to be easy. How come it’s taking so long?” 
Marcia told her: “Mom, I don’t know, I haven’t died yet and I never told you 
that. That was YOUR idea!” A psychiatrist came to see Mimi and told us that he 
was going to have her up and out of that bed in no time. We laughed when he 
left; Mimi had always LIVED from her bed—she graded papers in bed, ate breakfast 
and dinner in bed, wrote her letters, paid her bills, did her crosswords, 
watched her shows, and talked to us for hours from her bed. We wrote the shrink 
off and took Mimi out for another cigarette. 

We decided to move Mimi to Phoenix that week. She was at peace with the idea. I 
promised I’d visit her in a few weeks. I went to Phoenix on April 11 for 
Marcia’s 50th and had the chance to see Mimi in her new place. She was content 
and happy to see me and a few other old friends of Marcia’s in from out of town 
for Marcia’s birthday. I said goodbye to Mimi knowing I would not see her again. 
She was ready for death and said constantly that she had been blessed with a 
wonderful life, with a beautiful family, with Joe and Kem and their wonderful 
spouses and children, and more friends that anyone could hope for. She left this 
world a very happy and satisfied woman. She said she wanted to die in her bed, 
without having to give up her cigarettes. She did. She said it would be OK if we 
miss her. We always will.

Maureen Bevans Ebersole