Of course, we knew that Peggy's time on this earth was nearing its end. Still, nothing can adequately prepare one for the loss of a wife or a mother, a sister or a cousin or a friend. Especially when it comes at six o'clock the morning before her daughter's wedding.

I have to admit that I was naively optimistic that Peggy would live long enough and be well enough to attend her daughter's wedding. But her body was not as strong as her spirit. And so her body took its leave and freed Peggy's spirit to be with us last Saturday afternoon in that old church she loved so well, surrounded by the graves of her ancestors and relatives and friends.

Peggy, in fact, pretty much knew everybody buried there. She could have written the book on the Saint James graveyard, if John Homer Pearce, Jr. hadn't. On the back of the title page of the second printing, there's a note on Mr. Pearce's death signed by Margaret Patterson Smith Keigler, February, 1999. She begins, "the Society regrets the death of its long time member…" Now it's our turn to say the same thing of her.

On Tuesday, Peggy was laid to rest with her father's family over at Chestnut Grove. The Smiths were good Presbyterians, after all; it was the Pattersons who belonged to Saint James. If you'll pardon the denominational rivalry implicit in my comments, I must say I think we got the better deal: Chestnut Grove may now have her body, but My Lady's Manor always had her soul.

But it is the whole Peggy Keigler, body, soul, and spirit, that we have gathered here this morning to remember. And in my brief acquaintance with Peggy, three things in particular stood out to me: her fighting spirit, her soulful sense of humor, and her sense of history, which truly formed a great body of knowledge in an encyclopedic brain-a fact that made her final illness all the sadder for it.

The first time I visited her at Gilchrist, Peggy got on somehow to talking about how life was about taking risks. That if you didn't take risks, life wasn't worth living, and that if you took a risk and it didn't work out, well, that was O.K., you just needed to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and take the next risk that came along. She was in a pretty philosophical mood that afternoon. I remember George commenting to the nurse that at the rate we were going, it would be a while before we got to communion.

Now, I know that some painkillers can make one a bit more voluble, a bit more talkative, but I don't think it was just the meds talking. I think she was onto something there. I saw in Peggy Keigler a real fighter, someone who didn't give up just because the odds were stacked against her.

What kept her fighting, as far as I could see, was that combined with an outlook on life that enabled her to take whatever life threw her way, she had a wicked sense of humor. Leslie's husband, Tom, and I were chuckling about that in the sacristy just before the wedding on Saturday.

It also seemed to me that her sense of humor was informed by her deep sense of history. Leo Tolstoy, in War and Peace, wrote that the tide of history isn't turned by great men like Napoleon, but by his foot soldiers, who decide in the moment before the battle whether to fight or to run. One cowardly soldier can cause a chain reaction, he wrote, that could sap the morale of an entire army and hand victory to the enemy. So too, the history of My Lady's Manor wasn't shaped by Lord Calvert or King George or George Washington, but by tenant farmers and parish vestrymen, who put their lives into the soil until their bodies were put into the ground.

It is the simple faithfulness of the saints that the Book of Revelation celebrates in the reading we just heard:

After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands…Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, 'Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?' I said to him, 'Sir, you are the one that knows.' Then he said to me, 'These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.

While the "great ordeal" John the Divine wrote about was a reference to the persecution of Christians by the Roman Empire, since its writing, that throng of saints has been augmented by many who have gone through ordeals of a different type, among whom Peggy most certainly can be counted. And because Peggy may be counted with that number, the following may also be said of Peggy, that "'They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.'"

Of course, while the seer can promise that God will wipe away all of their tears, he wrote nothing of our own. Those of us left behind must take comfort only vicariously, as it were, in the fact that Peggy's comfort is now assured. And until we join her and the rest of the saints in light, we can only do what all the generations that have passed before us have done: be faithful in body, soul, and spirit, until our bodies are in the ground, our souls are in heaven, and our spirits are with those we've left behind.