Obituary of Margie Ann Webber

b. 1 February 1937 — d. 6 August 2022 (Hebrew/Biblical dates: b. 18th Day of the 11th Month of *5936 — d. 7th Day of the 5th Month of *6022)

On Saturday 6 August, just before sundown, Margie-Ann Webber (née Hines) passed into her rest from this world in the company of all those she loved.

Margie was predeceased by her husband of 67 years, Ed, in 2019; her son, William, in 1960; her son, Bradley, in 1991; her father, William, in 1987 and mother, Mary Alice (Molly), in 2003; her brother, Ron, in 1999; and her sister, Judy, in 2015.

Mourning her loss are her daughters, Patti (Placido) Iammarino and Sandra (Harry) Walker; her sister, Sandra (Richard) Detenbeck, and family; grandchildren Michael Iammarino, Kallie (Russell) Watts, Chase (Jen) Corfield, Molly (Elijah) Brooks, Harry Jr. Walker and Gage Walker; great-grandchildren Samuel, Hadassah, Aliyah, Eliott, Graham, Sadie, and Israel; the remaining families of her sister, Judy, and brother, Ron; and the members of extended family covering many cousins and their descendants. 

Margie wished to be cremated, with her ashes to be placed for burial along with her husband’s at the plot where her son, Brad, was laid to rest in 1991.

Arriving unexpectedly during a visit by her mother to Lockport, New York, Margie was, in fact, born an American, but Molly returned shortly after with newborn daughter, Margie Ann, to begin her life in Chippawa (Niagara Falls), Ontario, a place that remained her residence until only three years ago.

In her teen years, Margie worked at the Starlight Drive-In on Sodom Road at the concession stand where she eventually met her future husband, Ed, one of the parking attendants. They married not long after, and built their home on Roosevelt Avenue, where they raised their three children. In the late 1980s, they moved within Chippawa to Tramore Crescent and established many new and treasured friendships at their empty-nester home.  In 2019, upon Ed’s passing, she sold the Tramore home and moved to the “big city”—Niagara Falls—and into the home of her daughter and son-in-law for a short time, then took up her new residence at Stamford Estates.

For the last 3 ½ years, although Margie struggled with her recovery from a few falls, she remained gracious, determined, gentle and kind to whoever was fortunate enough to meet her. Showing even greater tenacity and grace, she remained a source of positivity and perseverance to her family and friends after discovering that she had been pharmaceutically poisoned by some of her physicians. Despite her commitment to a clean diet and new physical activity, the effects of the drug toxicity proved to be a difficult fight, and ultimately left her with severe, around-the-clock pain. In her final weeks, she pushed through her pain and asked to be out of Stamford Estates as much as possible, spending whole days in the company of her daughters, with nearly daily rings from grandchildren who couldn't be near, who reminded her that she had within herself everything she needed to push on one more day.

Sadly, last weekend, in the final hours of the weekly Shabbat, just before sundown, Margie no longer had one more day. While we are all better off for having had her in our life, the profoundness of the loss of a woman of Margie’s loving and enveloping nature leaves everyone who knew her pleading with our Creator, “If only one more day.”

Margie was a seemingly flawless conduit of the patience and generosity of our Messiah, and was remarkable as a woman of great poise, grace, and unflappable calm temperament. In the most frightening or angry of situations, she was unmoved by those things and, instead, was soft in tone, resilient in spirit, and comforting in message. Where her husband was the cymbals and drums and horns that let everyone know the band was in town, she was the violin that softly ended the show. In fact, the couple were a funny opposition of personalities that formed both an unforgettable force and a harbour of unconditional love to the many outsiders whom they took in
as if they were family.

The pain of our loss of Margie will be most felt in the absence of Friday night euchre games, strawberry jam time in June, singing telegrams over the phone every birthday, and the hundreds
of apple pies and butter tarts which she pumped out like an undercover bakery every autumn.  It is comforting to her family that her loss happened in the height of summer, because the first holiday which they will have to spend without her will be Yom Teruah, the Day of Shouts—that glorious day in the not-too-distant future when her Messiah will call her, along with all of His children, to His Throne with the shout of a great shofar (the trumpet made from the horn of a ram). When the family blow the shofar this autumn to open the celebration of the Fall Biblical Feasts, the first sound heard by the family will also be the next sound Margie hears as the doors of eternity open to her.