SOUL FOOD:

Cynthia Frances Doe was a friend to me. She poured herself out with abandon and never kept account.

She wasn’t one to call in favors after she bestowed them. I don’t believe she ever thought of the kindnesses she did as favors, regardless of personal cost.

Her middle name was Frances, I discovered, but only when I saw it on the prayer card printed for her burial.

Cynthia would have been delighted to know she shared the name with my maternal grandmother.

She knew how much I loved the woman I grew up calling “Sissie,” how the love she had bestowed on me as a child had shaped my heart and soul.

As I looked at the name on the prayer card, I imagined telling Cynthia that her middle name was the same as my grandmother’s first.

I could as good as hear her reply, “Oh, I am so blessed by that.”

Cynthia felt blessed by so, so many things. And she was quicker than thunder after lightning to let you know.

On mornings when she was up and out before the sun or at daybreak if she got home as the sun was coming up, the neon sunrise blessed her.

The warm Southern California sun against her lightly freckled skin, the cool Pacific breeze fingering her long hair, the sound of waves lashing the pier or tumbling on the sand, to Cynthia, all were blessings God bestowed on her.

She was blessed by this city.

She was blessed by her longtime parish home, St. Bonaventure.

She was blessed by her home nearby.

She was blessed by her beloved husband and children, and blessed by every friend.

She would clutch to her heart like a priceless treasure a word of encouragement, a hug or a warmly clasped hand. Each and every one, she would tell you, blessed her.

In the mouths of some, such words sound hollow. They vex like notes out of tune. But from Cindy, they were earnest praise from her lips to the ears of God and all his angels.

It was not that God blessed her more than others. Cynthia rarely failed to count as blessings things taken for granted or sometimes shunned by many of us.

Like all of us, Cynthia had her sorrows. Her utmost sorrow during our friendship was the loss of a son.

During his illness I watched her change, but not for the worse as I had first feared. Many times I’ve seen a death — especially the death of a daughter or a son — turn someone bitter toward God.

Cynthia suffered. I could see its reflection behind the sparkle that never went out of her eyes.

She prayed without ceasing for her son’s healing. She asked others to pray with her.

It was not that she never questioned God. She didn’t understand why her son should have to die so young.

She was straight with everyone, including God, about that. But, as with everything, in the end Cynthia took her questions and her doubts and relinquished them to God.

She joined hands with Job and said, “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

After all, she would tell some time later, this world was not for any of us our permanent home. God created us to live with him in his Father’s house forever; dying gives us passage there.

She found solace in knowing that God himself knew what it was like to have a son suffer and die. If others encouraged her to accuse God, like Job, Cynthia never did.

I met Cynthia through the Greater Huntington Beach Interfaith Council, one of many organizations and causes to which she devoted herself.

She ached for a day when religion was equated with love and with peace more than with hatred and violence.

She loved Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, especially the words, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.”

Cynthia was a Roman Catholic. As the New Testament asks of Christians, she was always prepared “to give an answer to everyone who [asked her] to give the reason for the hope that [she had].”

And she never forgot the advice that follows this instruction, to “do this with gentleness and respect.” She loved her neighbor, as Jesus taught, and never asked, as one lawyer is said to have asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?”

Cynthia loved people, flaws and all, and, far more than most of us, she lived for God and for others. As the Rev. Bruce Patterson said at her funeral Mass, she was uniquely without guile.

At some point Cynthia asked me if she could join me for a worship service at my church.

From that time on, she would attend Easter and Christmas services whenever they didn’t conflict with her own at St. Bonaventure.

Our Eastern Orthodox services are highly liturgical with traditional chants, rituals, clerical vestments, incense, candles and icons. They reminded Cynthia very much of Roman Catholic worship before the changes brought by Vatican II.

The first service she chose to attend with me was a midnight Easter, or Pascha, Divine Liturgy, a worship service that for the un-indoctrinated can be painfully hours long.

I asked Cindy if she’d like to take separate cars “just in case.” She said, emphatically, “No.”

Halfway through the liturgy she slid out of her high-heeled shoes (we stand throughout our worship) but her clear passion never waned.

Cynthia worshiped with a gusto more often acquainted with enjoying an excellent meal, a shopping spree or a football game.

If I close my eyes, I can still her singing the Pascha refrain, “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death and on those in the tombs bestowing life!” I can see her face beaming in the candlelight.

Cynthia Frances Doe was born Dec. 6, 1947. She suffered a massive stroke Sept. 23, 2007. On Jan. 9, she took her last breath this side of heaven.

Her last request about the void her death left was (from the poem “Free”) to “fill it with remembered joy.”

MICHÈLE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at [email protected].