Living a life that mattered

Linda McRea didn’t always follow a straight and narrow path as she wandered through her life. Rather she zigged and zagged a bit, taking interesting side trips, reaching one goal only to set her sights on another down the road apiece.

She went to school to be a nurse but then became a newspaper columnist and features editor for a Lewiston paper, a career that combined her love of the written word with history and world events.

In the early 1990s, when she was 41 years old, she slung a backpack on and headed to the University of Maine, where she graduated summa cum laude with degrees in English and history.

During that time she began a part-time career on the copy desk at the Bangor Daily News. We at the BDN were fortunate that she chose to settle in and stay with us a while.

But there were still side trips to take. In 1994 with one daughter who had graduated and another in high school, Linda thought it would be a good idea for her and her daughters to study Spanish together for the spring semester … in Guadalajara, Mexico.

After convincing a reluctant school system that she would personally see to her daughter’s academics while she was gone, the threesome took off for what turned out to be an adventure of a lifetime, and Linda’s wanderlust compelled her to dream of other travels.

A few years and a lot of late nights on the copy desk later, Linda joined the Peace Corps and taught English at a boarding school in Namibia in southern Africa.

“She thrived there,” her husband, Tim Allen, said Friday. “They would go lots of time without electricity or indoor plumbing. It was so barren where she was that you had to hitchhike to get anywhere.” He smiled. “She just loved it. That was what living was about to her.”

“I want to be alive while I live,” she would tell her husband.

Linda married Allen, a BDN assignment editor, in 1999.

Shortly after that the blessings in her life began to grow. First was granddaughter Isabel, who is now 8. Then came nine others, Mariah, Josafina, Charlotte, McRea, Seth, India and Eleanora, Ezra and Sylvia.

Linda spent her days growing gardens and adding on to the home she and Tim shared on Lincoln Street in Bangor and making steady improvements at the family’s homestead on Vinalhaven. She wrote long letters to her grandbabies.

She was happy, although one more trip was calling to her to hit the road.

“She thought she’d really like to go back into the Peace Corps when she was in her early 60s,” Tim said quietly. “When I think about whether Linda had any regrets, I don’t think so, but I do know that she had that plan in the back of her head.”

A little over a month ago Linda saw a doctor about nagging stomach pains and learned she had pancreatic cancer.

She did not go back to the copy desk. Her time was limited. So Linda did what Linda did best. She wrote a letter to her beloved colleagues.

“So bad news is never fun and often better left unheard. But we are all in the business of news and let’s face it, most of it’s bad. Therefore, I will expect a cynical, hardened, joke-cracking response to this particular bad news.

“It appears that I have pancreatic cancer, that is, the cancer of all cancers. No need to get your dictionaries, looks like the life I’ve been blessed with will end sooner, rather than later. And before you get maudlin: I’m okay with that.

“Death has danced through my life for as long as I can remember, most of them, really big deaths. Those are the untimely ones, the ones you’re not prepared for, and so they catch you in the gut (where we all know the soul really resides), and kick you in the head (where we all spend all our time pretending death is orderly and reasonable and will occur at a time and a place of our choosing).”

She went on to say that she would not be returning to work because there’s “too much to do that matters more.”

She asked for no visitors but plenty of cards except for “one of those editorial department sympathy memos.”

Linda died Wednesday morning. On Friday, the house was filled with her kids and grandkids and the phone rang steadily. Snapshots of Linda’s life lay scattered across tables as family members quietly made decisions.

In her letter to her colleagues, Linda said she thought she was better prepared than most for her death.

“I’m okay with it. It’s just life, after all,” she said.

And a life well lived it was.