At the edge of Lyman, Margaret Oldroyd’s house has long stood watch over the small southeastern Utah town — the first place that travelers see and the one that signals to residents that they’re home.

She was the town’s “quiet guardian,” a woman who watched over neighbors without fanfare but whose presence felt constant and steady, her family members said at her funeral on Friday, weeks after the 86-year-old woman was killed in her Lyman home.

“This is a huge loss for for all of us,” Oldroyd’s sister, Brenda Parsons, said at the funeral, which was livestreamed. “To Margaret, community was everything, family was everything. Anyone she touched became family. It was just a gift that she had.”

Her daughter, Sue Ann Westwood, read a poem written in Oldroyd’s honor by Julie Peterson Young, who described her as the town’s “quiet strength” as she willingly watched over the town.

“Someone must stand at the gate. And she answered,” Young’s poem says. “Not loudly. Not for recognition. Not for glory. But because love is stronger than fear. Take me, God. I’ll be the one. The one at the front of the road.”

“The one who meets the darkness first,” it continued. “The one who stands firm so children may laugh tomorrow, so church bells may ring again, so the small town’s heart keeps beating.”

Westwood said that for years after Oldroyd’s husband, Vernon Oldroyd, died in 2006, her six children — including Westwood — tried to persuade her to move in with one of them, but she refused.

“We worried about her being alone, and she wouldn’t,” Westwood said. “She says, ‘This is my house. I’m fine, and the community is here for me. I’ll be fine.’”

And for many years, Oldroyd was deeply involved in her community, the kind of person who knew nearly everyone in Wayne County and could tell you about each family, according to her obituary.

She was a longtime worker at Royal’s Market, the grocery store in Loa, and was often seen at Sunday services at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ meetinghouse in Lyman. Her funeral service was held at the LDS stake center in Loa.

Deborah Whitehead recalled her mother as a deeply faithful woman who would pray for hours before going to bed.

She said that faith became especially clear years earlier, when Oldroyd was in an emergency room for an ulcer and, unexpectedly, met Thomas S. Monson, then not yet church president, who gave her a blessing.

From that moment on, Whitehead said, “she wasn’t ever going to die.”

While Oldroyd’s death came as a shock, her younger brother, Morris Parsons, said he believes she may have sensed her death was approaching. Parsons said his sister called several family members the week before she was killed and spoke in a “different” tone than usual.

During her last phone call with Oldroyd, Brenda Parsons said her conversation also “took a different turn,” and she wanted to share some of the “profound” things her sister said.

Parsons said Oldroyd told her, “I knew more and I saw more than I told, and because of that, my heart could either grow bigger or grow bitter.”

But instead, Oldroyd told her sister, “I learned about love, not the love that says it’s love and quietly or not so quietly, judges and pushes its way onto another as the right or the wrong way to be. But the kind of love that can love the unlovable.”

Oldroyd was buried at Lyman Cemetery, just a short distance from her home — a familiar sight that carries a different weight now for those who knew her.