A Sort of Eulogy

(Things are better since I wrote what follows in my journal on the plane flying back from Seattle to New York last week. Things are almost always better when I get back to New York.)

Sitting on the plane back to New York, feeling somewhat normal, feeling pretty much tired, and feeling very, very bereft. I still haven't shed a tear and I wonder what that is about. We've looked at many pictures over the past few days. I've read letters from Dad to Mom when she was just pregnant with me and they were not very eloquent, but they were very in love and how long ago that is. It was terrible weather in Seattle, beginning with the day of Mom's remembrance service and ending last night when the temperature rose steadily through the night and melted all the snow. Thanksgiving Day, yesterday, we made it up Cougar Mountain to Mom's old house, and because Bianca wanted to, we walked the loop. I really didn't enjoy it all that much remembering how the car had fishtailed a couple times on the way up. Needn't have worried, no problem at all going down -- at an average speed probably of about ten miles an hour. We are promised a 4 hr. 32 minute flight to New York once we are airborne. I'm not sure I want to get to New York; I'm not sure I want to get anywhere, but if I want to get anywhere, it is probably back to New York. This is my sort of eulogy for Mom from the remembrance service, as I reconstruct it from my notes.

I have about five or six things to say. First, when I had just started in the Foreign Service I was a vice consul in the Dominican Republic, a country filled with people desperate to get out and go to the United States. We enforced immigration law; often three questions were enough to determine whether an individual was eligible for a visitor's visa -- do you have a job? do you have property? do you have a bank account? If the answers to those questions were No, No, and No, the person probably was not qualified. But there was a section on the application form where an applicant could cite his or her special circumstances, and so it was that one day I looked up to see a man in his forties who had just written "soy huerfano de padre y madre," and I looked at him and thought, "You're not an orphan; you're an adult man." Now my brothers, sister and I know different. We know that no matter what your age, when a parent dies you are truly an orphan.

Second, a few years ago at the Met in New York there was a special exhibition on the reign of Hatshepsut, one of the few female pharaohs and one of the artifacts was a funerary urn on which was inscribed, "Your heart will guide you and your limbs will obey you. You will prevail over the flood waters and the north wind that issues from the marshlands. You will eat bread whenever you desire, as you did when you were alive. You will see God every day and you face will behold the sun when it rises."

Third, Dana Dee told me recently of a conversation she had with Mom where Mom said she did not want us to be sad at her death because she is now where she wants to be.

Four, when I had recovered enough from my own very serious illness this year and could travel by air again, she, crying, told me one night during the visit, "I never thought I'd see you again," and that of course started me weeping as well because she'd already lost one child and couldn't stand the thought of a second going before her.

Fifth, and that lost child was of course our dear Annie and at her remembrance service here at St. Luke's I read this poem by Jane Kenyon. It is just as appropriate today. It's called Notes from the Other Side and it goes like this:

"I divested myself of despair
and fear when I came here.

Now there is no more catching
one's own eye in the mirror,

there are no bad books, no plastic,
no insurance premiums, and of course

no illness. Contrition
does not exist, nor gnashing

of teeth. No one howls as the first
clod of earth hits the casket.

The poor we no longer have with us.
Our calm hearts strike only the hour,

and God, as promised, proves
to be mercy clothed in light."

And sixth, and last, the concluding words are from Mom, in her Christmas letter from 2006, the year Annie died -- and what she wrote here applies equally to her over the last years since her stroke, "she was so brave and didn't complain. We miss her terribly. She loved life and had many, many friends. We don't understand why she was taken from us, but someday we'll be together again."