Pat Merrill died peacefully in the early hours of Sunday, Sept. 22 this year. She had managed to spend time with all of her children and most of her grandchildren in the previous two weeks so she passed surrounded by loving family. Pat had been doing battle with a neuroendocrine tumor on her pancreas since her diagnosis in the summer of 2018. She was the beneficiary of some of the remarkable new treatments being developed in the war against cancer and was able to live almost symptom free until her last round of chemotherapy began late in 2023.
The youngest child of a career Army officer, Pat was born in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and grew up in London, England, Grafenwoehr, Germany, Florence, Alabama and Indianapolis, Indiana, finally settling in West Lafayette, Indiana, where she attended high school and Purdue University where she majored in Theater. She made another trip to Europe after college with a girl friend starting in Milan where she picked up a Lambretta scooter at the factory. They then drove it over the Italian Alps and across the continent finishing in London.
Back in the United States, she lived briefly in South Lake Tahoe before arriving in California, ultimately Palo Alto where she found work on the technical staff of The Stanford Daily. It was here that she met the man who would be her husband for fifty-three years. Pat Merrill and Craige McKnight were married in Palo Alto on June 12, 1971. Shortly thereafter they moved to Rio Dell in Humboldt County, where they started having children in 1972. In 1976 they bought an old farmhouse on Painter Street from which they launched their four children into the world. It was one of those houses they started working on immediately and finally sold to their eldest, Jessica in 2003, still unfinished. In 1985 Pat completed an AA degree in Computer Aided Drafting at College of the Redwoods and launched her new career drawing land development maps and plans for civil engineering firms.
Not one to seek the spotlight, she exercised her considerable authority dressed in black and standing in the shadows as a theater stage manager. Pat’s post-college theatrical renascence began in 1995 backstage at Ferndale Rep as an assistant stage manager and dresser for a production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Almost the entire family was involved in that show including her father-in-law, down from Vancouver, Washington. Over the years, she stage managed productions for Ferndale Repertory Theatre, North Coast Repertory Theater and World Premier Theater (Plays In Progress). Pat was a founding member of the Redwood Curtain Theatre Consortium and she served as their long-time stage manager, managing all of the shows in the first two seasons.
The coincidence of no children in the house, a job offer for Craige and a concurrent layoff for Pat, landed the pair in Sacramento in the late fall of 2002. She resumed her drafting career until the crash of the real estate market in 2008 when the cutbacks in land development effectively eliminated the drafter function, and engineers had to adjust to doing their own drawing. Pat filled her unexpected early retirement with service to the Sacramento Perrenial Plant Club where she served as treasurer, while tending to her own yard and garden.
She was preceded in death by her parents and an older brother, Fred Merrill. She is survived by sisters Anne (Merrill) Jordan of Castle Rock, Colorado, and Kate (Merrill) Groesbeck of Orlando, Florida; her husband Craige of Sacramento, California; four children, Jessica McKnight of Arcata, California, Audrey (McKnight) Dieker of Kneeland, California, Claire McKnight of Sacramento, California and Sam McKnight of Berkeley, California; and seven grandchildren, Hyrum Dieker of Salt Lake City ,Utah, Robby Dieker, currently serving a mission in Finland, Caroline, Lucy, Annika, Max and Henry Dieker of Kneeland, California.
A memorial celebration of Pat’s long and rich life is planned for Saturday, February 1st, at 2:00pm at the Eureka Woman’s Club in Eureka, California.
This article appears in Flash Fiction 2024.