Browse the obituary of residing in the province of Nova Scotia for funeral details
THE DREAMING LIFE of CHARLOTTE MCGILL
An Appreciation – by Samuel C. Huntington
Well, as a man of over fifty years, who’s spent most of my adult life living in a
collection of major cities where there’s always less time and more to do,
sometimes I feel like I’ve been there and done it all. I’ve taken on the cynical
point of view that life is hard and that most of my time and effort must be devoted
to my own welfare and basic survival because there’s always someplace to be
and something else to do. Life has kind of changed for me recently. It started
back in August of last year when I received an urgent call from my mother and
stepfather one Sunday morning to let me know that my father had been admitted
to the local hospital and that my stepmother had passed away. I wasn’t sure
what to do or what to say but it quickly became clear that as the only living heir
that my time and attention were going to be needed and that I would need to act
now in order to answer the call. I knew that no matter how far away that I
might’ve been, that these were my people and that I had to be responsible for
them. So, I left my home in Cincinnati, OH with basically whatever my hands
could carry, or whatever I could pack to the ceiling into a Ford Focus and set off
on a journey that covered many days and that covered over 2000 road miles as
we traveled enroute to Lunenburg County, NS with my cat sitting next to me in
the front seat. It was during this long trip that I began to remember that I really
hadn’t been there and done that, but that there was still a whole lot that I had left
to learn and to do.
I had never had to pick up a death certificate and I had never had to act on
behalf of a dead person. I’d never had to try to pick up the pieces of somebody
else’s life. Although, when I finally received the keys and entered their home I
learned that I was going to need to try.
My step mother Charlotte McGill passed away at the age of 70. She had been
married to my father, Christopher Huntington, 85, for nearly four decades. She
married my father back when I was eleven years old, somewhere out in the wilds
of Nova Scotia, so she had been a part of my life for most of my life and I’m not
sure how well I ever really knew her.
She was never the evil or dreaded stepmother. She always seemed pretty
accepting and we usually got along pretty well. Although eventually I learned
that she wasn’t always wild about having a child around she never voiced her
frustrations to me directly. Of course, she had other things to worry about
because she was the woman that had to try to corral my father, a man that eased
his way into the new day by mixing a bloody Mary at Noon and blaring jazz from
inside the living room stereo at 10 a.m. on any given day. A man who was
always on his way to somewhere if he could only remember exactly where it was
that he had left his keys. So, this is about her but also about him because their
lives were so intertwined. The thing we shared was a connection to a man who
for better or worse was always on the edge of something so when he’d slam the
screen door shut and walk toward the driveway to climb into his old Chevy
Suburban you never really knew just what the day might hold.
One important piece of information. My father and stepmother met on
Match.com about sixteen years before it ever became a service. He wrote up a
personal ad and published it in the local newspaper. My stepmother had been
one of over thirty separate respondents, who started somewhere in the top six
and found a way to make it to the top of his list. I’m not sure exactly what the ad
said, I’d pay good money to know, but I do know that the final line of it read, “and
no joggers please.”
They were an unusual couple for all of the reasons, he had already been
through one marriage and had a couple of young kids, had enjoyed a few
separate careers, and had had the audacity to decide to build a new life in
Canada as an U.S. citizen even though he hadn’t been wanted for anything. He
was also a man who for a career direction was hoping to become a successful
landscape painter. She had been attempting to establish a career as a
professional secretary so their lives intersected in the middle of a strange looking
totem pole.
I think my father realized that he needed to be married. He wasn’t equipped to
make it on his own. My father was smart and savvy enough to realize that he
couldn’t make it on his own. My stepmother, for better or worse, seemed to
realize that she was never going to meet a man like my father while working in
the secretary pool. One of her closest friends, a sensible woman who hewed
closer to the norm, said upon learning the news, “So, you’ve finally decided to
throw your life away?”
The wedding ceremony was earnest and sweet and the reception that followed
carried on for three straight days. Friends and neighbors seemed to come from
out of the woodwork. They came from all places and showed up at all times. I
read all of the various license plates, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Ontario,
Quebec, Maine, and New York state. My father’s brother who he seldom ever
even mentioned drove with his wife and children all the way from Rochester, NY
to be there for the big occasion.
They were married directly in front of the entrance to the house on Hamms Hill in
Blockhouse, Nova Scotia and I served as my father’s best man. He wore a light
spring jacket, his dark hair was brushed back, and he was cleanly shaven. My
stepmother wore a pure white cotton lace dress with long shiny earrings and was
beaming from ear to ear.
Life up on the hill really came alive during that weekend. The air smelled
fragrant, and music was everywhere. So many people passed through the house
that the place seemed larger than it actually was in reality.
There were some life sized wood carvings that were out in the front yard and
they just seemed like a few more party guests. The branches of the old sloping
crab apple tree were hanging closer to the ground and full of bitter green apples.
We kids enjoyed a few games of tag that usually ended in a full on collision and
did our best not to get hit in the head with an oncoming crab apple. There were
so many cans of additional soda that we would shake it up and explode it into the
air like some type of volcanic explosion.
Of course, growing up is hard to do and there were many long and aimless days
up there on the hill. Sometimes it felt like I had to wait all day for the sun to begin
to sink down so I could coax my dad into coming outside to play a little baseball.
Sometimes it would just be a game of catch but sometimes, if I were lucky
enough, he’d allow me to organize a game with the other kids up on the hill. I’d
tear off on my bike pedaling as fast as I could to gather up the other kids with the
urgency of the local town cryer. “Hurry up, hurry up, we’re going to play a game
of baseball.” The yard was large enough to carve out an infield and anything that
went past second base was likely to be a home run.
We were all together in the summertime. That was kind of the extent of it. We
would all be together just passing time up on the hill until the summer would
begin to wind down and it would be time to head back to school and a return to
the real world. I also learned that life was not always as simple as it seemed to
appear. There was always a sense of tension that my father could snap at almost
any moment and for any reason. He just always seemed to be carrying more
than he knew how to hold. There was a feeling that you always had to be careful
what you said and what you did because it could all wind up in a bunch of yelling
and screaming about something that somebody had done wrong.
Eventually, we traveled out to Saint Johns, NB to meet my new grandparents
Don and Joyce McGill, and they were lovely people. Don was a dormant
character who spent his days staring out the front window from his living room
recliner while smoking cigarettes and sipping small glasses of Canadian whiskey.
He had sad blue eyes that just seemed to burn with a sense of sadness that he
had fallen victim to a mean and cruel world. He couldn’t seem to tell you what it
was but somehow you knew that he had been there. I also liked him because he
knew how to make an authentic meat spaghetti sauce that he finished with
cheddar cheese. Joyce was also reserved in a different sort of way, but she was
always very calm and she knew how to play the piano and sometimes played the
piano at her church. Sometimes, I would come across old church hymnals.
My step mother was my father’s wife and she was also his protector. As time
went by they became two separate minds that seemed to operate as one. My
father could be unfair and he could be quite selfish and sometimes he could be
just plain wrong but if there was an argument about fairness it was one that I
could never win, so whenever I could I just tried to keep it to myself.
There was no shortage of challenges and adventures. There was always
something that was going on. Some pressing event that was right around the
corner and in my world that thing was usually some type of a family auction. It felt
like our lives revolved around them. We made a few family trips out to Saint
John to visit with Charlotte’s family and it was usually after they’d survived yet
another auction. It was a strange dynamic. My step mother survived the auction
business while my father seemed to thrive in the pure adventure of it. It seemed
that the closer we’d get to the big day, the more the stress would ratchet up, and
you could almost feel the tension in the air. Everything would be building up until
the morning of the sale, when my father would make his way up to the center of
the stage and greet the crowd. He seemed to come alive at just about the time
that he began to speak with the crowd.
My step mother didn’t feel that way. The pent up stress just never really seemed
to have anywhere to go. It was like you could almost tell that she had to remind
herself to breathe, let alone to remind herself to try and smile.
Many years later, I visited with them for a couple of weeks in August in the
twilight of their auction business careers and it was obvious that they were both
looking forward to the end. They sent me off to the local post office to send out a
mass mailing and when I came back I asked what I should do with the malign list
and then Charlotte smiled and told me to throw it into the trash. Of course, by
then they’d been holding auctions for the past thirty years. Unfortunately,
whether by choice or by necessity, retirement proved to be a loose term. They
never could reach a place where they could fully let go. The auctions might have
finally ceased but the necessity for them never really ended because they never
really retired. They just began to travel in a different direction. What had begun
with a few exploratory trips into France to explore the local art market and to
collect a few paintings quickly morphed into an annual pilgrimage that would
span a couple of months of combing through every region of France looking for
paintings. So, whether they should’ve or not, they launched themselves into a
new business that very few of their local contemporaries could even pretend to
understand but they were the type of people that marched to the beat of their
own drum. They were simply following their curiosity to wherever it might take
them. They amassed a staggering collection while also developing a brand new
collection of friends. Somehow, they were always able to return home again in
one piece.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure that my step mother and father were ever really able
to settle into the lives that they had built for themselves. They owned several
charming and early homes but they could never seem to find a way to put their
stuff away. Everything always seemed to get stuffed into piles. That’s a hard way
to spend a life when everything that you possess is lying around somewhere. It
also has to be tough on a marriage. They both suffered their highs and lows. I
was always afraid they were simply trying to survive their lives as much as they
were trying to live them. The only way that they could really get through the day
was the oncoming anticipation of the cocktail hour. It was the only release from a
sense of torment that was always there.
My step mother sacrificed a lot when she decided to marry my father, and as
time went by it took a toll on her health. She was never really able to distinguish
herself and her own ambitions from that of my father. She never made the
necessary investment of time, in order to figure out who she really was in life. So,
she tried on a number of costumes that never really fit. She started a vintage
clothing business, the remnants of which are still hanging around today, that
never set sail, mostly because she had no natural instincts for business.
Ironically, later in their careers, she had designs on yet another clothing
business which might’ve been successful if she’d only had the ability and
organizational skills to get it off the ground. Ultimately, she had to sit back and
watch as one of her longtime friends opened the doors on a very similar type of
business. She never said it explicitly but overtime I came to understand that she
had viewed herself as a writer, the adventurous part of herself viewed herself as
a writer that wanted to tell stories, but the practical part of herself couldn’t really
clear the space to finally sit down. She wrote a short story about a young woman
in a small town that was always getting into trouble because she was always
forgetting her responsibilities as she followed her natural curiosity and not
executing on her responsibilities and eventually that became the story of her life
in general.
My step mother survived a couple of major depressive episodes but they
certainly exacted a toll on her health. She had to endure a depressive episode
that was severe enough to drive her into the hospital where she remained for
several months. She had to carry the shadow of that experience with her for the
rest of her life. I’ve also discerned that in the last several years of her life that
she had to take on the role of the caretaker for my father who had been
exhibiting signs of advanced dementia, while she was also struggling to take care
of herself. She found herself attempting to steer a ship when she had always
been a guide.
Several years ago, a water pipe burst inside one of their homes and it caused
enough damage that the main ceiling had to be hollowed out of the living room in
the house and all of the wallpaper had to be stripped off the walls. There were
numerous things that needed to be moved out of the house and brought to safety
and there was a whole stack of bills that needed to be paid. That could be a lot
of responsibility for anyone and unfortunately, the house never got repaired.
They also had to go through the painful reality that the world that they had known
and had been a part of had changed around them. In the aftermath of the Great
Recession the antiques business went through a profound change that affected
anyone who had been affiliated with it because the value of things that had once
been so desirable had suddenly become almost unsalable. They had to face the
reality that many of the things that they had purchased as a long term investment
would never be able to fulfill that role, so they had to remain on the shelf.
They had to watch as many of their cherished friends and colleagues left the
businesses and/or sold their collections. They also had to stand by and watch
while the movement that they had started and so often was the center of
collapsed around them. This just isn’t the type of thing that most people can or
will come back from at any age and yet, they found a way to soldier on. This is
what is most impressive because ultimately what they achieved had never been
for adulation or for money but was instead done for love.
Chris Huntington and Charlotte McGill lived in a world where they believed that
history mattered and that old family memories and heirlooms were worth
preserving and local legacies of people and families were worth recognizing and
preserving. They lived in a world where the average middle class family might
aspire to own their own collection of country antiques, as part of a tradition that
had been handed down throughout the ages and where that desire could also be
possible to achieve. They understood that an old grain painted dining room table
with a set of original press backed chairs were the necessary objects that helped
make a place feel like a home. They understood that having these things
around you made your life richer.
Despite all of their business savvy, they weren’t really prepared for a world where
old family heirlooms were really just commodities which could be appraised on
the Antiques Road Show. They weren’t prepared for a world where a thriving
antiques dealer had to treat his business like the equivalent of an investment
brokerage house where you are only buying for value. They were also sensible
enough to realize that the uniqueness of country antiques were not the same
thing as the clean and polished style of the Victorian era. They weren’t prepared
for a time when the desire to own a collection of antiques could only be achieved
by the privileged and the wealthy.
This was the conundrum they faced while also living the life that they shared.
They both maintained their independence right up to the very end. They were a
team, partners in life, that were bonded together by their own unique vision of
the world where living always came first. They were both extremely charitable in
their work, living behind a gift of over 100 original works of art to The Art Gallery
of Nova Scotia along with numerous additional gifts to The Beaverbrook Art
Gallery at The University of New Brunswick, and the Desbrisay Museum. Chris
was always willing to share his time and knowledge with anybody that was
working to further that cause, and that’s why they continued to make a new and
younger set of friends as they advanced in age.
My step mother left this world knowing that she made an impact on the local
culture and that she had been able to live a life that was filled with richness. She
had gotten to find her own brand of trouble in her own time and her own terms.
She also left this life knowing that she had made the difference in the life of one
man who had loved her dearly. She also left this world with stories to tell and
perhaps the time and space to share in some of the things that she found.
Thursday August 17th 2023
Death notice for the town of: Lunenburg, Province: Nova Scotia
death notice Charlotte Allison McGill Thursday August 17th 2023
obituaries notice Charlotte Allison McGill Thursday August 17th 2023
We offer our deepest sympathies to the family and friends of Charlotte Allison McGill Thursday August 17th 2023 and hope that their memory may be a source of comfort during this difficult time. Your thoughts and kind words are greatly appreciated.
