DOCTORS said Marjorie Gray had a bad heart. But Ainsworth Williams, a friend of hers for many years, disagreed.

“Marjorie had a great heart,” he told the congregation at a thanksgiving service for her life last Saturday. “She only had to hear your pain and she would feel your pain.”

Williams was giving one of the many glowing tributes paid to Gray, a Jamaica Observer receptionist who died on May 28. She was 42.

According to Williams, when he was first told some years ago that doctors had diagnosed Gray with a bad heart, his response was that she must have had two hearts. “Because the Marjorie that I know has a good heart, a great heart,” he said to nods of approval from the congregation at the New Testament Church of God on Waltham Park Road in Kingston.

Williams said that the day after Gray passed, she spoke to him through the words of a song he heard on his car radio while he was driving. He had the song, with the refrain ‘I cried my last tear yesterday’, played as part of his tribute.

He also played another song, in which the singer advises, ‘The battle is not yours, it’s the Lord’s’, offering those words as comfort to Gray’s family.

“I ask the family to lean on God,” said Williams. “Marjorie is in a better place right now. We love her, but Jesus loves her best.”

Other moving tributes were paid by Gray’s three children – Monique, Jodi-Ann and Andre – who said their mother taught them “to be strong in the face of adversity”. They also promised to live their lives in order to make her proud of them and offered a touching farewell to her. “We love you, Mommy. See you on resurrection day,” said Andre.

A group from St Andrew High, the school attended by both Monique and Jodi-Ann, delivered a tear-jerking rendition of Celine’s Dion’s Because You Loved Me, while Gray’s sister, Michelle, remembered her sibling as a sharing, giving person who had a good life.

“It was just two years ago that we lost our mother, and Marjorie and I were discussing what kind of remembrance we could have for her,” Michelle Gray said.

“Our mother always told us not to question God,” she said. “So we’re not here today to question why, but to celebrate Marjorie’s life, as well as that of our mom, Ella Maud Gray.”

Michelle said that up to the time that Marjorie died, she was not sick. In fact, she was happy. “She wouldn’t want us to be sad today,” she said.

In his message, the Rev Donald Roberts used Ancient Israeli King David’s 23rd Psalm as an example of the fulfilment of hope that can be provided by God.

He also urged the congregation to live their lives for God and their fellowman. “Life must not be a circle with you at the centre of it,” said Rev Roberts. “Use your life for the service of God and humanity.”

He also advised the Gray family to find comfort in the fact that “all is in the hands of God” and that Marjorie was now in God’s hands.