Margaret "Peggy" Sullivan

Margaret Rose Sullivan — Peggy to everyone who loved her — was the kind of woman who made a house feel like a home the moment she walked into it. She was warm without being soft, firm without being hard, and possessed of a laugh that could fill a room and make every person in it feel like the funniest they had ever been. She was a schoolteacher for thirty-one years, a mother for sixty, and a grandmother for the last twenty-seven. She did all three with the same unhurried attention — the sense that whoever was in front of her had, for the moment, her complete regard.

Peggy taught third grade at Jefferson Elementary for thirty-one years. She had a gift — her colleagues always said — for the children who didn't quite fit: the quiet ones, the restless ones, the ones who needed someone to see something in them before they could see it in themselves. She kept every card her students ever sent her. There were hundreds. She never threw a single one away.

Peggy grew up the eldest of five in a small house on Maple Street in Richmond, Virginia, which meant she spent her childhood being responsible for things before she was old enough to understand why. She married Thomas Sullivan in 1971, after three years of what she called 'taking my time and him taking his chances.' They had three children: Claire, Daniel, and Rosie. The house they raised them in on Elm Court was the same house Peggy would live in for the rest of her life — the one with the yellow door that the whole neighborhood knew, and the kitchen that smelled, depending on the season, of cinnamon or rosemary or something just out of the oven.

Peggy was an avid gardener. The backyard on Elm Court was her canvas: roses along the south fence, hydrangeas by the porch, and a small kitchen garden that she tended with the same precision she brought to lesson planning. She read voraciously — mostly novels, mostly ones her book club hadn't chosen, because she always seemed to be slightly ahead. She baked. She volunteered at St. Agnes every Thursday for twenty years. She wrote letters, actual letters on actual paper, to anyone who had moved away and needed to know they hadn't been forgotten.

What people say about Peggy, first and always, is that she listened. Not the kind of listening that is really just waiting for your turn — the kind that takes notes, that remembers, that comes back three months later with 'you know, I've been thinking about what you said.' Her daughter Claire has said that being heard by her mother was the closest she ever came to feeling unconditionally known. She had opinions — strong ones — but she offered them gently, and she was genuinely capable of changing her mind.

Peggy was diagnosed with cancer in the spring of 2023. She faced it — as she had faced everything — with a kind of pragmatic grace that made the people around her, who were struggling considerably more, feel slightly embarrassed about their struggling. She kept her garden going through that last summer. She finished the novel she was reading. She made her famous apple cake for Daniel's birthday in October, claiming it was for him though everyone knew she had been wanting the excuse. She died in February 2024, in the house on Elm Court, with Thomas beside her and Claire holding her hand. The yellow door is still there.