Bernie Haley, a firecracker of a woman, devoted volunteer at Mariposa has died. I met her once and talked on the phone with her a few times as well as several e-mails. She was a funny lady. Mariposa has lost their best fan. The same week she rec'd the cancer diagnosis she lost all of her belongings in a fire in Orillia...
Picture at the link...
http://www.orilliapacket.com/2013/09...ce-of-mariposa
“You might need to massage those words a bit,” Bernice Haley told me last week.
No biggie. I’ve had to massage her words in the past. Her heart was always in the right place, but her sometimes colourful language wouldn’t fly in a community newspaper.
When I visited Bernie, as friends called her (along with “Grannie B” and other fond names), last week, we were supposed to chat about an article to thank the community, which responded with thousands of dollars after she lost nearly everything in a house fire in April.
“We’re going to have to reschedule,” she said when I arrived. “I’m not having a good day.”
More than an hour later, I left her apartment with a wealth of information — stories she’s accumulated and stored in her seemingly unlimited musical memory.
I was to visit her again this week to take care of the thank-you article. But it wasn’t to be.
Bernie died Monday. She was 67.
Most people will know her as the face of the Mariposa Folk Festival, where she volunteered since at least the 1990s.
“When we didn’t have any paid office staff, she volunteered the whole time,” said Chris Lusty, former president of the festival. “She loved Mariposa.”
In fact, the only time I remember seeing Bernie without a Mariposa shirt on is last week, when she was in a hospital-style gown, labouring through conversation, determined to not let her terminal cancer get in the way of our conversation and her stories.
Fittingly, she was able to catch her breath most easily while singing me a few lines from some of her favourite songs, including Rita MacNeil’s Moonlight and Clover.
Although she’s gone now, Bernie might still be able to make it to the folk festivals she never got to attend. She hoped her ashes would make the rounds at festivals across the country.
Quirky, right? Well, so was Bernie.
“How often do you get an old bag in the car and she doesn’t say a word when you’re travelling around?” she said of her desired after-life adventure. “I get out, I enjoy the festival, I get a sticker and I move on to the next.”
That wicked, often self-deprecating humour was on display the first time I saw Bernie, and the last.
She also wasn’t afraid to express how she felt things should be done.
Lusty recalled his first time meeting Bernie.
“This woman came charging across the street, cigarette burning. I had no idea who she was.”
He soon found out.
“She told me everything that needed to change at Mariposa,” Lusty, who became and remained one of Bernie’s closest friends, said with a laugh.
Considering her quiet contribution to art and culture in Orillia, it was only appropriate to give back when Bernie needed the community.
The house fire happened the same week she received her diagnosis of terminal cancer.
“You wake up and go to your duties and, at three in the afternoon, you have nothing but the shirt on your back,” she said.
But, as Lusty recalled, “one of the things she bemoaned was that all of her CDs were burned.”
Typical Bernie.
The response from the community was impressive. Enough money was raised to “sustain her for the rest of her life,” Lusty said.
“She was incredibly grateful.”
That’s essentially what Bernie was trying to tell me last week, but all of those memories of Mariposa kept getting in the way — the time she had Taj Mahal on one arm and Emmylou Harris on the other; the time Arlo Guthrie shared some of his own stories with her; and the time she got her due, when Lusty brought her onto the main stage and introduced her to the audience, which gave her a standing ovation.
“It brought a tear to my eye,” Lusty said.
While she refused treatment for her cancer, Bernie was a fighter until her last day.
“With the side-effects, you don’t really have a good quality of life,” she said of her reason to not undergo further treatment.
“You’re dying. And if you’re dying, you don’t want to feel worse than Joe’s dog.”
“I’m just going to go quietly into the good night.”
Cremation has taken place and a celebration of life is in the works.
Nathan Taylor is an editor at The Packet & Times. He can be contacted at
nathan.taylor@sunmedia.ca and followed on Twitter @nathan_taylor82.
A sad day for Mariposa and Candian folk music
