Marv Roelofs and Apple Sauce

Making applesauce sort of represents living life to the fullest. I think prayer is sometimes about asking God to let us do what we can and enjoy ourselves. Picking apples and making applesauce has made me do that.

—Marv Roelofs

 

I called Marv soon after he received the diagnosis of Stage IV Small Cell Lung Cancer this past January. I don’t recall if I have ever called him in all the 40 plus years his wife, Lois, and I have been friends. Now in the past few months, I had called him twice.

 

After his diagnosis there was a sense of urgency. The doctors had told him the cancer was very aggressive so when Marv declined treatment, I figured I better talk to him right away. How long would he be around? I needed to tell him how I appreciated his encouragement and support of my friendship with Lois.

 

Lois and I met in Chicago. Two nurses with two young children each: a boy and a girl, and both ready to break out of the stay-at-home-mom mode. Together, in the late 70s and early 80s, we completed undergraduate and graduate nursing degrees. In 1992 I moved from Chicago.

 

We didn’t need to get permission from our husbands to spend time away from home or to spend money on plane tickets when we rendezvoused over the years. But it was Marv’s encouragement and support of our long-distance friendship and warm reception and hospitality during my visits that I wanted to acknowledge. Since Lois didn’t cook, or wash dishes for that matter, it was Marv who made the dinners, baked the banana bread, and served Lois and I as we continued deep into our conversation—as women are inclined to do.

 

That phone call melted into tears for both of us. Maybe the rawness of Marv’s diagnosis and the awareness of impending death were too close to the surface. I was glad I had called to say thank you.

 

After that first phone call and when Marv didn’t die in a matter of days or weeks as the doctors had suggested, I called him a second time. It was about six months after the first phone call. He had written a book of his life and made fifty-five copies to pass along to family and friends. I read it almost all in one evening. I knew some of Marv’s stories already, but his life on the farm and the details of his self-started business was new to me. I was especially taken with the way he wrote—as if we were sitting in his living room in Sioux Falls, or back in Chicago, just sharing his recollections.

 

That second phone call was more uplifting. We laughed more. Cried less. I told him how much I liked the book, especially the story about him making applesauce.

The first Fall after Marv and Lois moved from Chicago to Sioux Falls, he noticed that many people didn’t pick the apples from their trees. The apples just fell and rotted on the ground. He knocked on doors asking to harvest the apples, not for profit, but to donate them to the homeless and churches, and to make applesauce.

 

It was right around apple picking season that I visited Lois and Marv in Sioux Falls. With a refrigerator and freezer stuffed with applesauce in zip-lock bags, Marv sent Lois and me into the neighborhood to give away the first samplings of his culinary concoction to neighbors that Marv and Lois had barely met. The friendly neighbors graciously accepted our offering.

 

Marv was a successful business person, a loving husband, dad, and grandfather. Like all of us he was also a complicated human. But it was Marv, the person who picked the apples and made applesauce, whose memory is the warmest in my heart.

 

Marv died at 4:10 a.m. on July 25.

 

Lois’ Blog “Write along with me” chronicles their journey with a terminal illness.