Peter's Eulogy for Jean
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| August 9, 1999 Peter's release from Marion Correctional Institution |
My mother wanted all of her children to feel loved.
Earlier this summer when I was recovering from my own illness, my mother gave me a birthday card. The message on it reads,
"Today I wish I could run back through time, back to when you were little. I would try to find you on your birthday--in the middle of celebrating or even better, at some quieter moment when you were alone . . . . And if I knew what I know now, I would tell you: never forget the hope and the joy, the vitality of this moment. Never forget that you deserve happiness, that your life is precious to so many people. And never forget how very much I care about you."
My mother gave of herself in more ways than I could ever understand. It was during this season in 1977 that she was going through the process to adopt me. I would grow up to become her special child--the troublemaker, the one who always needed special attention. Mom always had that to give.
She loved her husband, her children. She loved her community and held the church dear to her heart. Mom loved this church very deeply. Anyone who ever sat near her at a service would know how beautiful her voice was and how she loved to sing hymns.
Last Sunday when we sang "God of the Sparrow," I could her hear voice singing loudly. She loved that song. I always thought it was the music that she liked; maybe it was the last line of that song that gave her comfort. It reads: "How do your children say Home?"
Our mother showed us that home is when we were together, whether at the house or on one of our many family trips--or if she drove to visit one of us, which she did with devotion wherever we may be. [Every month we visited Peter while he was in prison. Not everyone knew this reference.]
So let us sing this next hymn in remembrance of Mom and give thanks to the Lord for working through our mother to teach us, and many others, how to say Love, Joy, and Home.
Jim's Eulogy for Jean
About twelve years ago Jean and I attended the funeral of an adoption advocate from the Council on Adoptable Children. People attending overflowed the allotted space, crowded other rooms and stood in the hallways to hear of his remarkable family of foster and adopted children, to hear of his humor, his caring, his struggle, and his love. To everyone's surprise the minister touched none of it, not even his name, and his remarks were confined to biblical passages of comfort and reassurance of an afterlife. Perhaps it was the family wish that he be noted only as a humble anonymous Christian in need of the Almighty's eternal mercy, a lesson for those in the audience not to ask for whom the bell tolls as it clearly tolled for them.
As Presbyterians, we have greater cause for joy. Assured that God has redeemed the world and that all is made new, we live the kingdom, here and now, without waiting, with the confidence of love overflowing us from the Eternal Spring. Few accepted this good news more happily, nor lived it with more conviction than blessed Jean, whose life we celebrate tonight.
It would be presumptive of me to claim a unique knowledge of this wonderful woman. Each of you here tonight has known her goodness in some special way, some special encounter. Many of you could as easily relate examples of her high character and deep faith.
I will not summarize her life. None of us can be contained in a finite number of words. You may read the biographical information at the photo display her daughter and sons put together so proudly, beginning first with one board and finding such a wealth of remembrance that we finally agreed to stop at four until Peter told me to make that five.
Rather let me tell you how Jean was a great inspiration to me. I often put my wordly gift to praise her in poems, typically sonnets.
Beauty to my Beast, Roxanne to my Cyrano, Dulcinea to my Quixote, she accepted them graciously if somewhat uncomfortably, feeling in humility that she could not be the model of devotion so grandly serenaded. I will read only two which hopefully capture some sense of how being married to Jean was a rocket ride of playful sensuality, heartfelt emotion, and intellectual challenge.
The first relates to her love of her children, of me her husband, and of the free-spirited wandering and discovery in the travel that she loved so much. To preface, we had left our four in the care of a teenaged sitter, had visited with our dear friends Steven and Susan in New York, and had spent the day in Mystic, Connecticut, a town of seafaring history, whaling museums, tall ships, Captain Ahab, Moby Dick, and all the paraphernalia of 19th century American maritime industry. Misquamicut is the Native American name of a public beach nearby where we went for a walk in the moonlight:
At night in Misquamicut's still-warm sand
You stick-scratched our children's names one by one
Knowing by the hour, they would all be gone
Erased by the Atlantic's second hand.
Next morning, having the time of our life
In a sunlit century bedroom, we
Played eager whaling captain home from sea
At long last to his faithful waiting wife.
However brief, such evanescent signs
Must to some high eternal court convey
Our true devotion, powerfully sway
Their judgment, for relying on these lines
They must conclude with wistful, envied sigh
That no two ever loved, but you and I.
In this next, I must explain we met at Indiana University and had a scandalously brief courtship--thirty days from the time we met on a blind date to the time of our engagement. I had dropped out of graduate school and was in a quandary about being drafted to fight in Vietnam or going to jail as a conscientious objector to indiscriminate bombing and torture of the captured, and Jean was a student in the graduate Spanish program in preparation for a career in the foreign service.
On intense evening walks we discussed everything, discovering our backgrounds, shared values, plans for the future, what hurt us, what healed us, our fun, our pain, in that blessed romantic headspin of delight and joy that someone could be so attuned, so admirable, so admiring, so full of promise we lost sleep anticipating another day in the presence of the beloved. We are seated on a park bench outside the IU Student Union.
Once, when I was young, and slim, and golden
Of an Indiana summer, your head
Upon my shoulder gently lay. Moonlight
Softly filtered through late autumn's yellowed
Leaves, made pearls of teardrops on your scarf.
Then your words came into me, scholar long dead,
Like spring's mountain freshets bubbling crystal white
Enlivened all from winter's icy hold.
So have we melted, time and time again
With words, thoughts, and flesh--we every hunger fed,
Defeated seasons in this angels' flight
Tapped eternal power and with its fire glowed.
For this then did we in history pair:
To grow by love and then to glory share.
How encompassing was Jean's love? Look at her family. Look about you who are here tonight. Look to those whom she served. Was there anyone, rich or poor, high or low, in whom she did not see Christ as alive or waiting to be born?
However often she was frustrated by poor health, she mustered the energy to help. She was quick to listen, to forgive, to encourage, and to hope. She prayed in secret but loved openly and vulnerably and without limit, shining like a lamp on a lamp stand.
So let us remember with great happiness the gift that was Jean, that her grace was God living in our world, and that we shall all meet again in the glory of saints before the Everlasting Creator.
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| October (?) 1966 Our earliest picture together |
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