Recently,
I was asked to deliver the eulogy for a very dear friend and colleague whose
life was cut short by pancreatic cancer.
It’s only the second time that I have been asked to perform this
service, but it was the first time where the task of saying good-bye cut to the
quick. This was a friend, slightly older than me, but light years ahead of me
in his understanding of how to deal with a world that grows increasingly more
nonsensical as we age. He had one of those irrepressible personalities which
draw you in through humor and grace, only to remind you that high expectations
for perfection in others will only lead to tears (yours). The stereotypical phrase “so-and-so is larger
than life” actually applied to him (though he would never have accepted that
mantle of responsibility). He is the
second of two close friends (my colleague Annie Johnston was the first) to
leave a gaping hole in my heart. Unfortunately for me, I was raised by a
stereotypical Irish-American family who assumed that men don’t cry (unless,
that is, your 13 year old son inadvertently knocks his father's 20 year old
bottle of Jameson's Irish Whiskey off
the coffee table onto a slate floor at Christmas, 1968). So, when his wife
asked me to do the eulogy, I knew that it was pointless to dodge that bullet.
The
task of writing a eulogy is never an easy one. One frequent writer of eulogies
eloquently observed that “The writing and reading of a eulogy is, above all,
the simple and elegant search for small truths.” But, whose truths? The deceased?
The immediate family? The friends who have been gathered together, each with a
different characterization of the friendship? The writing of a eulogy doesn’t
seem intimidating until one is asked to be the author.
Having buried
both parents, I have been known to observe that, if there is a choice between a
fast death and a slow death, fast is much easier to handle. My friend’s death
was fast - less than twelve months from the time of diagnosis. In retrospect, I
now realize that, when one is asked to write a eulogy, it doesn’t matter if the
death is fast or slow, the charge generally comes in the final days; leaving
the author with precious little time to craft the perfect good-bye. It took me
a week to write his eulogy. What I
learned in that week is remarkably simple: pay attention. The death of a friend
or a loved one forces us to pay attention…to the gap left in one’s heart; to
the loss of comfort generated by the assumption that the deceased will always
be there; to the fraternal correction that is easier to take from someone who
has earned our trust.
Thomas Merton,
the Catholic convert, Trappist monk and memoirist, had this to say about the
premature death of the great Southern Catholic writer, Flannery O’Connor:
“But respect had to be maintained. Flannery maintained it ironically and
relentlessly with a kind of innocent passion long after it had died of contempt
- as if she were the only one left who took this thing seriously.”
The last line - “as if she were
the only one left who took this thing seriously” - strikes me as the epitome of
what we want from those who have left us too soon. We want the deceased to take
us, our lives, the lives of intimate others, seriously - only we have no way of
knowing whether that was ever true. So, we search the “small truths” for
glimmers of what we now know, retrospectively, we didn’t realize we wanted all
along - to rest secure in the knowledge that at least one person understood us
in ways that defy conscious description.
Oscar Wilde got that dynamic right when he penned, two generations ago,
“the truth is never pure and never simple.”
It is this
dynamic which confounds us - we want truth to be pure and simple - and. of
course, death continually reminds us that neither is true. The American poet,
Emily Dickinson, once described what the living have after the death of a loved
one as “an awful leisure.” The living
are left with “an awful leisure” that is too much with us when the sorrow is as
fresh and painful as a paper cut. And
yet, grief has its purpose. It’s the bridge between the pain and anger of the
premature loss of one whose footprints are all over the lives of family and
friends and the recognition that, in the words of NY Times columnist, Anna
Quindlen, “we are defined by whom we have lost.”
Readers of this
column may find it odd that I have chosen to focus on the eulogy of a friend to
launch the 2013-2014 school year; and yet, I
think school is always about the end-game. The present moment is merely a tool
to prepare the students entrusted to our care for a future they (and we) can
only dimly perceive. I can’t think of a better way to start a new school year
than to consider the proposition that others will have the final say on the
life we lived.
I don’t expect
teenagers to acquire an appreciation for the legacy they leave behind; but I
think it’s useful for the adults who surround them with a web of personal and
professional support to consider what needs to be in place now, so that when the endgame is played out, those who have the
last word will say: “This was a life well lived.”
One of my
favorite American plays, one that is annually tricked out for every high school
speech tournament in America
“Death ends a life, but it does not end a relationship, which struggles
on in the survivor’s mind...towards some resolution it never finds.”
“We are prophets of a future not our own.”
