EULOGY - PART 1 OF 3

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to throw away; a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace.
—Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

I am sure that everyone here has experienced the following scenario with the person that I call grandma, and that you, variously, may call mom or [name] or [nickname]. Soon after she answered the telephone or the door, the following words issued forth from her mouth: “Why has it taken you so long to call, to visit?” A few minutes into the conversation or visit came the next question, regardless of how long you intended to speak or stay: “When will I see you again?” And, then, inevitably, at the end of the call or the end of the visit came these words: “I am glad you got to talk with me.” or “I'm glad you got to see me.” I imagine that these were the words that the doctor or the midwife heard from the infant [name] right after she took her first breath of life.

A TIME TO BE BORN
[Name] was born into the world on [date] in the town of [place] to a farmer, [name], and his wife, [name]. She was the third of eight children, a family of ten in a house of too few rooms. She speaks of the homes that she grew up in: “[There were] too many to count and most of them were dumps and very small. My fondest memories of lived in houses are best forgotten. They were usually shacks, drafty and cold.” It was a life of relative poverty, especially by today's standards, and one that was crowded with the other members of the family, with little time to one's self. Yet it was also a time of life on a farm, and the freedom of not being fenced in. It was a time of catching a moment alone to nap on the trundle bed or play hide-and-seek in the hay loft with one's siblings.

A TIME TO DANCE
I believe that it was this family of origin that helped form [name] into the individual that she was, and I use the term individual in both its positive and negative connotations. My grandmother could be both very loving and very ornery, a word that she used to describe herself. I suppose that you need to be both in a family of ten, trying to define who you are, to carve out your own niche in life, to stand out from the crowd, so to speak. As a child she dreamed of being a doctor and of someday traveling to Brazil, because as she says: “The first time I heard the word [Brazil] as a place in the world, I wanted to go there and see it. [It] sounded so romantic.” She enjoyed geography class. She was an avid reader, devouring literature and poetry, and in later years crime novels, and even tried her own hand at writing. She learned to drive at the ripe old age of 29, and never really liked it. She attended Moler Barber College in Bremerton, becoming one of the rare female barbers, a woman in a man's profession, cutting the hair of men. She was, to put it kindly, a lovable eccentric.

A TIME TO BREAK DOWN
She married my grandfather, [name], whom her parents disapproved of because “he'd been married before and he was a Lutheran,”at the [place] courthouse in what she described as “not a traditional wedding” on the day of her father's birthday. She divorced him at a time when divorce was frowned upon. She remarried and lived with her second husband, [name], both of them often oblivious to the world as they drowned their lives, individually and together, in their addiction to alcohol, until his death from cirrhosis of the liver. In the haze of her own advanced alcoholism, she missed the warning signs of the colon cancer that was growing in her intestines until it was rather advanced. It nearly took her life. Her body was ravaged by the surgery, radiation therapy, and chemotherapy that were necessary to save her.

A TIME TO BUILD UP
[Name], later [name], and, still later [name], sometimes known as [nickname], was many different people throughout her life—daughter, sister, wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, barber, alcoholic, cancer survivor, friend. The alcoholism that defined a majority of her life, ironically, gave her a new opportunity to live, to repent of the life she had led, and renew and restore relationships with many of the people gathered in this room. Her body could no longer digest and absorb the liquor and beer that she so loved. That didn't mean that she didn't want to not drink. I asked her about ten years ago, in a candid conversation, if she would still drink if she could. She emphatically answered “yes!” with a longing in her eyes. But, she valued life enough to decide to remain around. The last quarter of her life, the past twenty years, were lived as a sober cancer survivor. She became the mother and grandmother that she had not been for years. She volunteered her time at the Cancer Thrift Store until her health wouldn't allow her to remain on her feet for long periods of time. She spent the last few years of her life in failing health. Yet she did so with little complaint. Instead, she spent her time baking and doing crossword puzzles. She played Skip-Bo with her friends. She drank coffee and enjoyed her unfiltered cigarettes. She read books and watched television in the evening. She emailed many of us in the wee hours of the morning when she couldn't sleep, oftentimes sending pictures of family members living in the Midwest or what amounted to electronic chain letters.

A TIME TO DIE
And, then, came the mini-strokes. And, then, a few weeks ago, came the heart attack and congestive heart failure and the news that she could not be operated upon, so she was sent home with medication and good wishes. And, then, just over a week ago, came the stroke that in mere hours would take her from lucid to incoherent to unconscious to hooked up to a ventilator at Harborview Medical Center, where she had been airlifted, to being removed from the ventilator to breathing on her own, which was unexpected, to thirteen hours of a death watch by members of her family to her last breaths taken in this world. It was the escape of these last breaths on Friday, October 5, 2007 in Seattle, Washington that brought the life that began in [place] eighty years earlier to an end. It is the escape of those last breaths that have brought us here today to mourn the loss of one loved, to mourn the death of mom, grandma, [nickname], [name].

My grandmother was asked, What events during your lifetime changed the world the most? Her reply was: “Cars, planes, and, in the last 50 years, science—transplants and that stuff. I don't believe in prolonging life like that. There is a time to die.” And, in that, she speaks a great truth that many of us find difficult to own like she could.

---

Eulogy is by Troy's Work Table and was delivered to a standing-room only crowd at the maternal grandmother's memorial service. The picture was taken by the sister-in-law at the same.