Edgar

Edgar
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

Just after I posted my last entry, I had a phone call from New Zealand to tell me that our friend Edgar, with whom we had been staying, had died peacefully, surrounded by his family. Although he was ill throughout the period of our stay with him, it was his prime concern that we should have a good holiday, and my blog reflects the excellence of our stay there. As his health declined, he seemed even more determined that this should not impinge on our activities, and so it was not until our return from the trip to Rob Roy glacier that he went to hospital for the last time.

Edgar Pacey was a priest in the Scottish Episcopal Church, serving in the dioceses of Glasgow and Galloway and Argyll and The Isles. He was a man of immense learning and down to earth realism. For many years he was a full-time teacher in Glasgow schools, and talked often of his time in Penilee. His last work in Scotland was to hold together the congregation of his own Holy Trinity Church in Dunoon during a long vacancy. When he emigrated to New Zealand to be with his family, his church family missed him sorely.

He came home from hospital last Friday. On Saturday evening his family held a party. A wonderful party where the teenage grandchildren laughed and joked and everyone had a dram – including Edgar. When we left, it was with the sense of a man serene and confident in the love that surrounded him and the God to whom he was going. It was an exemplary and inspiring end. He died fifteen hours after we arrived home.

I count myself fortunate beyond words that he was my friend. May he rest in peace and rise in glory.