Bright memories

 St. Charles, Missouri. The funeral yesterday afternoon, at the venue we last visited over thirteen years ago to say goodbye to my dad, was dignified and comforting. The rain stopped just before the service began, the sun broke through, and it was a bright day after all. Grammy Dot was by explicit choice, the presiding methodist minister related, a "bright" light for us all.  

The minister tells me he was a philosophy student years ago of my old classmates and friends Mark, David, and Del at Truman State University. Small world after all.

Dot was a bright ever-smiling presence, even in the dark shadow of her terminal diagnosis. She did indeed, as her obit points out, "go out swinging."

That baseball metaphor came to her naturally, her cousin Bob Scheffing was a ballplayer, a Cubs manager, a Mets general manager, and by all accounts a good guy who'd be appalled (according to Uncle Don) at the way money and player equity have changed the game. We do all have our limitations. But we also share a common fate, as Mr. Twain said. None of us will get out of here alive.

Like Yogi, btw, Twain didn't say everything he's said to have said. But he did evidently say, channeling Epicurus, “I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”

Delivering my eulogy was personally consoling and therapeutic, the livestream (should have) closed some of the gap between Missouri and California, the other eulogists were great. 

And what a shock, as the service was ending, to be approached by my old 2d-grade teacher… and her companion who asked if I remembered a 2d grade classmate named Gary. “I’m his mother.” What a memory that moment now will be. Gary was my good friend who died, shockingly, unprecedentedly in the innocent universe of a 7-year old, of brain cancer. 

We who've lived into our seventh decades and beyond, and who are stocked with affirming memories of precious others, are truly the lucky ones. 

Postscript. For the record, and to whom it may concern: when my time comes, no time soon I hope, I'd like a Humanist service. Not that I'll be in any position to insist, but matter really is sacred and eternal enough for me. Just as it was for old Walt Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass was much in the spirit of stepsister Tracy's poem that cousin Frank read at the service. Walt: 

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,

And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,

Missing me one place search another,

I stop somewhere waiting for you.