A Hallmark Square Dance Moment… tissues optional
In square dance land there are a number of beautiful things that happen. I count myself blessed with the friends I’ve made and I’m thankful for so many rich memories.
Here’s another one. (The tissues are optional.) If you want to read the original, here’s the link:
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/03/20/shes_square_with_life/
Thanks go to Guy Steele for pointing this link out to me.
The article is © Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.
She’s square with life
By: Steven Rosenberg
Hospice brings partners for resident’s last dance
NORTH READING – Marilyn Coyne survived the Depression with little food and no heat in her parents’ flat in Portland, Maine. She married and sent four kids to college. She saw her husband and one of their children die. And, in November, after three years of fighting breast cancer, she was told by a doctor that she had months to live.
In hospice care and losing weight in recent weeks as the cancer crept through her body, she confided to a hospice volunteer that she had a last wish, something that recalled summer nights of her childhood and joy with her husband. She wanted a final square dance.
Yesterday, her wish came true. Coyne donned a floral skirt, a crimson petticoat, and a red peasant shirt, and walked to the center of a nursing room social hall, where nine professional square-dancers, dressed in cowboy shirts and calico, waited for her.
It had been a decade since she last clasped hands with a partner, but as music played, the elfin Coyne deftly followed the dance caller’s instructions of allemande left, promenade, and do-si-do. After five minutes of swinging her partner, and singing along with “She’ll Be Com ing ‘Round the Mountain,” Coyne let her thin, 82-year-old frame fall into a padded wooden chair and took a deep breath.
“That,” she sighed, “was wonderful.”
It may have been bittersweet, this scene, but it befitted the decades that led to it. For much of her life, Coyne had sought refuge on the square-dance floor. She learned the art as a child growing up on Portland’s mostly-Irish Munjoy Hill, where she received the nickname Minty. The name stuck for life (she never liked Marilyn, she says) and still hints of a youth long past.
“I’m Minty McNeill Coyne, the girl who could steal any heart, anywhere, any time,” she says.
As a teenager, she met Patrick Coyne. The two went to separate Catholic high schools in the city, but they became fast friends, brought together by poverty and hardship and, ultimately, by square-dancing. After their first square dance together, they realized there was more than friendship between them. “I just liked him from the very start. We were good friends and got along very well,” she said. They married in 1947.
In Portland, Patrick worked as a foreman for the city water district, and Minty took a clerk job at a credit union. The couple had four children. Minty says she lived a “simple life,” working, taking care of her children, and putting her passion into baking apple pies and attending weekend square dances. There, she found escape among people who, like her, reveled in music, dance, and small talk.
“I’d feel free when I danced, and it’s nice if you have a husband who likes it. I have some friends and their husbands would never do anything like that,” she said.
All of her children would graduate from college, fulfilling her dream for them. “I never could go. I wanted them to go so bad,” said Minty, who is 4 feet, 10 inches tall, has sharp blue eyes, and short silver hair.
One son became a doctor, a daughter became a lawyer, another son went into real estate, and a third son, Danny, was an assistant secretary of state in Maine. At a family picnic in 1991, when Danny Coyne was 40, Minty watched as her son collapsed during a basketball game and died.
“I screamed ‘Danny’s dead, Danny’s dead’ over and over, and cried and cried,” she said, adding that there is no such thing as closure when one loses a child.
Tired of Maine’s frigid winters, the couple moved to Gulfport, Fla., in 1995, determined to square-dance as much as they could. She sewed all of her dresses and shirts. She bought her petticoats and shoes.
Ten years into their retirement, Patrick died, and Minty moved north to be closer to her daughter, Carol. She settled into an assisted-living facility in Tewksbury and soon after, felt pain around her breast. After tests, she was told she had breast cancer and had a breast removed.
The cancer never went away.
After Coyne mentioned her desire for one last square dance, Camryn Walsh, of Care Alternatives Hospice, decided to bring the dance to Minty. Walsh arranged to bring the Riverside Squares, a Danvers square-dancing group, to Minty’s floor at the Meadow View Care and Rehabilitation Center in North Reading.
“What we really try to provide is comfort and dignity when patients and families are faced with incurable disease,” said Walsh.
For an hour yesterday, the music played and dancers danced while a small crowd of nursing home residents, and Minty’s nurses and social workers, hooted and hollered in appreciation. Then the dancers packed up and were gone, and Minty sat in the dining room, talking about everything from the economy and technology to nature. She’s waiting for a really warm day so she can take a walk outside. “I don’t like sitting around,” she said.
She does not fear death or dwell on the idea of not being around much longer. “I know I’m going to die one day but it doesn’t bother me. I don’t think about dying,” she said. “I believe in afterlife. I assume there’s a heaven. . . . I’ll let you know if I get there.”
Steven Rosenberg can be reached at srosenberg@globe.com. 
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