We are prophets of a future not our own

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, is Robert Anderson’s I never sang for my father. During both the opening and closing monologues of the play, Gene, the protagonist, tries to describe his complicated relationship with his father:

“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.”

 Isn’t that the challenge we all face, albeit, often too late, when it comes to our responsibility for the children entrusted to our care? Shouldn’t we take the opportunity, now, to cement the message of love and hope that we assume these young people take for granted so that we can emulate the words attributed to Oscar Romero the martyred Archbishop of El Salvador:

 

“We are prophets of a future not our own.”