This is an illustrative example. Marguerite Chen is a fictional person and every photograph on this page is AI-generated — written and made to show how a LastingFarewells memorial reads.  Back to LastingFarewells
MC

Marguerite Chen

1935 — 2026

“Again, but slower.”

Made by her students, with her family’s blessing
Their story
Born
January 22, 1935 · San Francisco, CA
Passed
March 14, 2026 · Columbia, MO
She was
A piano teacher for 41 years

Marguerite Chen was born in San Francisco in 1935 and arrived in Missouri in 1961 with a husband, a teaching certificate, and an upright piano that cost more to move than it was worth. She kept the piano for sixty-five years. The husband, she would say with perfect timing, was also fine.

She had wanted to be a concert pianist. She was, by the account of everyone who heard her, good enough to have tried and not quite good enough to have succeeded, and she made her peace with that in her late twenties in a way that most people never manage about anything. She said once that the disappointment lasted about two years and the usefulness lasted forty-one.

She taught in the front room on Bourn Avenue from 1965 until 2006. The rate went up four times in forty-one years, and never for a family that couldn’t manage it. She kept a ledger with every student’s name in it, entered by hand, and at the end she had four hundred and thirty-one names. Her family found the ledger in April. There are notes beside some of them.

She had a metronome on the piano that she almost never switched on. She taught time by tapping the top of the case with two fingers, and by saying the same four words, thousands of times, for four decades. Again, but slower. Her students report hearing this sentence, in her voice, in situations having nothing to do with music — during labor, during a divorce, in the last mile of a marathon, in a parking lot before a job interview.

She never told a child they were talented. She told them they had practiced, which was the only part they controlled, and the only part she was interested in.

She was widowed in 1998 and did not remarry, on the grounds that she had already been married and had found it to be a great deal of scheduling. She took up birding at seventy-one and was ferociously competitive about it in a way that surprised no one.

She is survived by her son, Peter Chen, of Chicago; her daughter, Alice Chen Novak, of Columbia; four grandchildren; and, in a manner she would have accepted as legitimate, four hundred and thirty-one students.

The door was never closed

Lessons ran thirty minutes and never once ended on time. If a student was in the middle of something, the next family waited in the hall, and the family in the hall had waited for someone else the week before, and everyone understood the arrangement. Nobody in forty-one years complained about it. Several have said since that the waiting in that hallway is the part they remember.

Service

Where we will gather

Memorial recital

First Presbyterian Church
Columbia, Missouri
Sunday, March 29, 2026 · 3:00 in the afternoon

How it went

Nineteen former students played, ranging in age from eleven to sixty-eight. Four of them made mistakes. The family has been told she would have considered this the correct outcome and would have said so out loud.

Ways to honor Marguerite

Ways to honor her

A lesson fund

Her family has asked that gifts go toward lessons for children whose families can’t pay for them — the thing she quietly did herself for forty-one years.

Fund a lesson

Sit down and play

Whatever you still have in your hands from her front room. Badly is acceptable. Badly was always acceptable.

Go play something

Tell her

If she taught you, add your name to the wall below. Her family is trying to find all four hundred and thirty-one.

Add your name
Memory wall

What people remember

Every memory is read by the family before it appears here.

I quit at fourteen and she let me, without a fight, which at the time I took as indifference. She told me at eighty-eight that it was the hardest thing she ever did as a parent and that she’d gone upstairs afterward and cried. Forty years she sat on that so I wouldn’t feel guilty.

Alice Chen Novak · Daughter

I am a surgeon. I count in my head the way she taught me to count, and I have done so through every operation of my career. I have never told anyone that until now.

Dr. Anand Rao · Student, 1979–1986

’Again, but slower.’ I said it to myself out loud in the car on the way to my father’s funeral and I got through the day on it.

Bethany Kirkwood · Student, 1994–2001

She practiced at 5am her whole life so as not to disturb anyone. I grew up hearing scales through the floor and thought every house was like that.

Peter Chen · Son

My mom couldn’t pay some months. Mrs. Chen said the rate was whatever was in the envelope. There were months the envelope was empty and she never said a word about it, not once, not ever.

Tomás Rivera · Student, 2001–2006

Sixty-one years across the street. Piano every morning at five. When it stopped in March I woke up anyway, at five, to silence. Still do.

Joan Petersen · Neighbor

I was her second-worst student and she told me so, affectionately, at my wedding, in front of my in-laws. Best toast anybody gave.

Grace Whitaker · Student, 1968–1975

She left instructions about the recital and the ledger and the piano, and none at all about this page, which did not exist when she was making her arrangements. Her students made it. Her family is keeping it. She would have found the whole thing excessive and then read every entry.

— Peter, Alice, and four hundred and thirty-one students
This memorial will remain here, tended by the family, for as long as Marguerite is remembered.
LastingFarewells — where their story stays