For My Friend Sally

        Sally spent the last year of her life trying to fend off Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. She kept it at bay long enough to enjoy kayaking with fellow UUs and time with family and friends.
        She died in December, 2012.
        Her sons said she asked me to lead the memorial service. Because Sally loved nature--my daughters loved that her roof was grass and they could walk up onto it--I chose as a guide the nature-themed service from In Memoriam: A Guide to Modern Funeral and Memorial Services, by UU minister Edward Searle. I used and adapted the resources he provided and added a eulogy I wrote.
     
        For the eulogy, I interviewed her family members and close friends. The most difficult part for me was leaving out so many stories about times Sally and I had shared, like when she invited my kids and me over for pizza and Dr. Who. She served appetizers on her mother's best dishes and always stocked Sprecher root beer for the kids.

        Sally was pushy, loud, thoughtful, kind, smart, politically engaged, more apt to take over a conversation than even I am, impatient, tough, and one of my closest friends ever. I miss her.


        Sally's birthday was August 6. In celebration of her friendship, here is the memorial service I put together for her.

Photo by Jennifer Thomson

January 5, 2013

Opening Words—Responsive Affirmation

from “Out of the Stars” by Robert Terry Weston

Out of the stars in their flight, out of the dust of eternity, here have we come,

Stardust and sunlight, mingling through time and through space.

Out of the stars have we come, up from time;

Out of the stars have we come.

Time out of time before time in the vastness of space, Earth spun to orbit the sun,

Earth with the thunder of mountains newborn, the boiling of seas,

Earth warmed by sun, lit by sunlight; This is our home;

Out of the stars have we come.

Mystery hidden in mystery, back through all time;

Mystery rising from rocks in the storm and sea.

Out of the stars, rising from rocks and the sea,

Kindled by sunlight on Earth, arose life.

Ponder this thing in your heart; ponder with awe:

Out of the sea to the land, out of the shallows came ferns.

Out of the sea to the land, up from darkness to light,

Rising to walk and to fly, out of the sea trembled life.

Ponder this thing in your heart, life up from sea:

Eyes to behold, throats to sing, mates to love.

Life from the sea, warmed by sun, washed by rain.

Life from within, giving birth rose to love.

This is the wonder of time; this is the marvel of space;

Out of the stars swung the earth; life upon Earth rose to love.

This is the marvel of humanity, rising to see and to know;

Out of your heart, cry wonder: Sing that we live.

Welcome

Today, we celebrate Sally’s living and grieve Sally’s dying. Though our grief is strong and we must mourn, we will not let the shadow of death obscure the living person who touched us many times, in many ways, filling our lives with memories, meaning and love.

We have come together because we need each other

To face Sally’s death,

To celebrate Sally’s life,

And to show our love and support for Sally’s family:

Her oldest son Steve & his wife Deb, and their sons Aiden & Brandon;

Sally’s middle son Shannon;

and her youngest son Jason & his friend Dawn, and Jason’s son Trevor.

Her family would like you all to know that they’re planning a get-together to celebrate Sally sometime this spring, so they can hold it in the outdoors that Sally loved.

Singers of Life

We have come together because Sally has died. This coming together is an instinct, certainly a human instinct, but more universal than an instinct of just our species.

There are reports of what might be called badger “funerals,” of a badger dragging the body of its mate to an appropriate site, digging a grave, and then with other badgers who have assembled slowly circling the grave and together uttering a low moaning sound, like a dirge.

Others have reported animals protesting the death of one of their own kind. The naturalist Loren Eisley, in the essay, “The Judgment of the Birds,” told of an experience that moved beyond animals protesting death to seemingly proclaiming life.

Eisley had been traveling over a mountain for half a day when he sat down to rest, back against a stump. Though he looked out on a small glade, he was hidden from it. The day was warm. He was tired. He soon fell asleep.

       A cry awoke him. He looked out into the glade, bathed in shafts of sunlight, and saw there on a dead branch a baby bird squirming in the beak of an enormous raven. Eisley wrote:

The sound that awoke me was the outraged cries of the nestling’s parents, who flew helplessly in circles about the clearing. The sleek black [raven] was indifferent to them. He gulped, whetted his beak on the dead branch, and sat still. . . . [S]uddenly, . . . a soft sound of complaint began to rise. Into the glade fluttered small birds of half a dozen varieties . . . .

       No one dared to attack the raven. But they cried there in some instinctive common misery . . . . The glade filled with their soft rustling and their cries. They fluttered . . . [near] . . . the bird of death.

       And he, . . . , the black bird at the heart of life, sat on there, glistening in the common light, formidable, unmoving, unperturbed, untouchable.

       The sighing died. It was then I saw the judgment. It was the judgment of life against death.

I will never hear it again in notes so tragically prolonged. For in the midst of a protest, they forgot the violence. There, in the clearing, the crystal note of a song sparrow lifted hesitantly in the hush. And finally, . . . , another took the song, and then another, the song passing from one bird to another, doubtfully at first . . . . Till suddenly they took heart and sang from many throats joyously together as birds are known to sing. They sang because life is sweet and sunlight beautiful. They sang under the brooding shadow of the raven. In simple truth they had forgotten the raven, for they were the singers of life.

Though we are gathered in the shadow of death, and we must protest that one we have known and loved is dead, let us also be singers of life because weighing life and death, we too conclude that “life is sweet and sunlight beautiful.”

Reading

In her poem “The Cost,” Dorothy N. Monroe weighs the gains of living against the inevitability of death and concludes that she’d give whatever necessary in return for life. Monroe writes:

Death is not too high a price to pay

for having lived. Mountains never die,

nor do the seas or rocks or endless sky.

Through countless centuries of time, they stay

eternal, deathless. Yet they never live!

If choice there were, I would not hesitate

to choose mortality. Whatever Fate

demanded in return for life I’d give,

for, never to have seen the fertile plains

nor heard the winds nor felt the warm sun on sands

beside the salty sea, nor touched the hands

of those I love—without these, all the gains

of timelessness would not be worth one day

of living and of loving; come what may.

Reading 2

We don’t know for sure what waits beyond this life. But we do know that death is the fate and physical end of all living things. Edwin Way Teal, in his book The Wilderness of John Muir, provides this Scandinavian perspective:

The rugged old Norsemen spoke of death as Heimgang—home-going. . . . All the merry dwellers of the tress and streams, and the myriad swarms of the air, called into life by the sunbeam of a summer morning, go home through death . . . . Trees towering in the sky, braving storms of centuries, flowers turning faces to the light for a single day or hour, having enjoyed their share of life’s feast—all alike pass on and away under the law of death and love. . . . [A]ll are our [sisters and] brothers and they enjoy life as we do, share . . . blessings [of the universe] with us, die and are buried in hallowed ground, [they] come with us out of eternity and return into eternity.

Meditation

We will now share a moment of silent meditation, that you may reflect upon the meaning of Life in general and on Sally's particular life. Remember her as she lived. Remember how Sally’s life enriched your life and changed our common world.

Eulogy: Celebrating Sally’s Life

Consider for a moment. What comes to mind when I ask, “What was Sally like?”

Perhaps you’re thinking of some of the same traits her son Steve listed when I asked him what his mom was like. He mentioned her curiosity, her passion for learning, her drive, her sense of fairness, and of course her independence. Jason noted his mom’s sense of justice; everyone I talked to brought up her strong will and hard work—and her passion for Michael Jackson.

Given her intelligence—she had degrees in physics, math, engineering and architecture—it always amazed me that she could get lost in East Troy. She loved her GPS with good reason.

And she was never ill—until she was.

Sally credited most of what was good in her life to her parents, especially her father. Both of her parents were born in Denmark, a fact Sally took great pride in. They met and married here and Sally was born later in their lives. They were the only Danes in their small Norwegian community of Wind Lake. Her mother died when Sally was 11. Her father was a celery farmer. You may have seen the photos of the horse-drawn farm cart and men in the celery fields with their wooden tools.

The farm was right on Wind Lake and Sally loved living there. Her friend Suzie, said that Sally mentioned to her within the past year that she missed living on a lake and would like to again.

Suzie remembers the first time she met Sally and their friend Marilyn on the first day of first grade. Sally had brought pheasant for lunch. The building that currently houses the Heg Park Museum in Wind Lake, where Sally volunteered with Marilyn over the past few years, is the same building where they all went to first grade together. In the winter, across the street from the school, a low spot would fill with water and freeze over. So they’d all bring ice skates to school.

A common first grade field trip for them was to walk down the road to the teacher’s parents’ farm, look at the cows and get fed milk and cookies. The three friends went to Sunday school at Norway Lutheran together all the way from first grade to high school graduation.

Both Suzie and Marilyn say Sally was always so much fun when they were growing up.

Suzie and Sally got county maps one time, and often packed lunches, hopped on their bikes and went exploring for the day. They’d ride bikes to Waterford and always had to have Marilyn along because her bike had a big basket to hold their purchases.

They also liked to have sleep overs. When they were 12 or so, Suzie and Sally used to sneak out of Sally’s bedroom window at night. It was right next to her dad’s window, so they had to be very, very quiet. At the time they thought they were getting away with something, but Suzie figures he probably knew. They’d hike up to the old Norway Lutheran, feeling very holy in the dark and silent church.

When they were about 13, Sally’s family got a motor boat. She drove the boat often, taking her friends water skiing on Wind Lake.

When Sally had her own kids, she encouraged the same independence in them that she enjoyed as a child. She also expected the same Scandinavian stoicism from them that she had herself. She believed injury and illness were all in the mind and could be willed away.

Steve once fell out of a tree, knocked himself out on a piece of metal, woke up, crawled into the house, and laid on the floor. Sally looked at him and said, “Ah, you’re such a hypochondriac.” Another time, he smashed his finger between two football helmets, so the coach sent him home, finger swollen. Again, Sally said, “Ah, you’re such a hypochondriac.”

When her boys were in middle and high school, Sally went back to school and got her degree in physics, got divorced, and worked 2 full-time and one part-time job. She pushed herself harder than she pushed anyone else. And we all know Sally could push.

When she became a mom, she taught herself all about nutrition because she believed in doing things right. She always made nutritionally balanced home cooked meals; no boxes, no fast food.

Although she could be hard on herself, she often approached parenting issues with aplomb. Shannon was outside cleaning the pool one day when he was about 16. Sally was inside doing laundry when she found some items in Shannon’s jeans pockets. She took them outside and said, “I’m sorry I washed your pot and your condom. The condom might still be good, but the pot isn’t. By the way, have you ever used either of these?”

These events all happened in the bermed house Sally designed and helped build—decades before she got her master’s degree in green architecture.

Though not a traditional grandma, Sally was one of the kindest and most selfless people I’ve known. She often went hiking and fishing and kayaking with her son Jason and his son Trevor. Trevor apparently liked to get lost, as they called it, on their hikes. One time, getting lost added hours to their hike. Fitness buff Jason was sore and tired, out of breath, but Grandma Sally and Grandson Trevor finished the hike still full of energy. They ended the day with supper at what they took relish in recalling as the worst restaurant ever, an experience that added to the pleasure of the memory for Trevor—and Sally knew that, so she also enjoyed reliving the day, bad food and all.

As to the fishing, the boys liked to fish for carp, not Sally’s favorite, but she spent time in the freezing cold fishing for fish she didn’t like to fish for because her son and grandson liked it. During one of her final hospital stays, Sally told nurses that Trevor and his dad can’t catch fish any more now that she didn’t go out with them.

Once while Steve and Deb were away, Sally stayed with her grandsons Aiden & Brandon to take care of them. Always up for education and adventure, she took the grandkids to the children’s museum in Rockford. Aiden said it was the best day of his life.

She worked as hard at staying alive as she did at anything else. Her Ford Escort had 350,000 miles on it before she decided it was time for a new car. I think she felt she didn’t have enough miles on her life yet when she heard the diagnosis of Stage 4 pancreatic cancer, metastasized to her liver and lung. She believed she could will and work her way back to health and she gave it everything she had, with the help of her sons, her grandsons, and her friends. She told me once that she was going to get better so she could take care of me again.

She lived with Steve, Deb, Aiden and Brandon for the final months of her life. On Election Day 2012, the grandkids made posters for President Obama and other candidates Sally supported. They all stayed up together watching election results as they came in, cheering each time Obama won another state. Aiden really wanted to stay up until the end, but fell asleep just before the announcement. Later, Deb heard Sally on the phone saying how tickled she was that Aiden and Brandon were so involved with the election; both boys wanted to tell this story about their grandma. And they wanted to remember their annual Christmases at grandma’s house. They said she always seemed happy and was smiling a lot, a memory they cherish from before her illness.

She died in her son’s home, with Steve, Deb, Shannon, Jason, Trevor, Aiden and Brandon there by her side. They had viewed family slides together; they read to her. Sally was coherent and talking up until just a few hours before her death. She died as she strove to live, surrounded by love.

One brief final story. Sometime around 2006, Sally was riding in the car with Jason. She turned to him and told him she’d found this new song she really liked. She asked him, 

“Have you ever heard of this guy Michael Jackson?”

Reading 3

Those who understand and have a clear vision of how a human life (indeed all living things) fits into the scheme of things—arching beyond our little planet, further than our solar system and the countless stars of our galaxy, to include all the reaches of the cosmos—are comforted and sustained by the dispassionate beauty that strangely stirs the passions of our hearts. This beauty, for those who see it, never dies. The following words can help us remember the beauty of Sally’s life. The beauty of her life was and is one with the beauty of the universe—in life and in death.

Do not stand at my grave and weep—

I am not there, I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow.

I am the diamond glint on snow.

I am the sunlight on ripened grain.

I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you wake in the morning hush

I am the swift, uplifting rush

of quiet birds in circling flight.

I am the soft starlight at night.

Do not stand at my grave and weep.

I am not there. I do not sleep.

                                          —Anonymous

Closing Words

Having remembered Sally’s life and having considered Sally’s life in the scheme of Nature and the universe, we accept the loss, knowing that Life continues—richer for Sally’s having lived.

       Life is a natural miracle, a miracle that repeats. Let us always celebrate that the elements of the cosmos—the inanimate, soulless stuff of stars—came together and became the living and loving person who was Sally.

       Sally touched others and shaped our common world. The force of her personality—the truth and love of her life—was part of the onward urge of evolving life. We are, and we are more, because Sally lived. We are glad Sally lived.

       We know that death and love are inextricably joined together. For us human beings this reality has transcended the merely biological. Because we are made of our memories, our love never ends but passes from person to person.

       The Tree of Life that appears in various cultures throughout the world is the symbolic tree of generation following generation, from time into time. And we can proclaim that Sally’s name has been written on this Tree of Life forever.

Benediction

Please stand in body or in spirit for a benediction to conclude this celebration of life service.

       We take our benediction from William Cullen Bryant’s poetic meditation on death, “Thanatopsis.” When you feel troubled about Sally’s death, or when your hurt over your loss is too great, or when the shadow of death falls across your spirit, remember these words:

Go forth, under the open sky, and list

To Nature’s teachings, while from all around—

Earth and her waters, and the depths of air—

Comes a still voice . . . .