Remembering: Notes from a Memorial Service

One of my more influential graduate school professors was Jean Westcott. If you ever hear me say (which I do frequently to my clients), "awareness precedes choice", she's the one that taught me that. Last Saturday, I was at her memorial service on this really beautiful day, held in a chapel in the hills of Oakland.

Jean is the first person I've personally known who has died the way I wanted to - with a sense of fullness. I wasn't there at the end. In a lot of ways, I didn't feel close enough and wanted to intrude. I read her blog entries in hospice, and later that of her friends as they updated it for her, the tail end of this particular journey. It was wonderfully inspiring to hear some of her beloved friends speak about her life and the meaning she gave to their lives, and vice versa.

One of her colleagues, Mary Gelinas, shared a few key life lessons that she picked up from Jean. They included the lesson that shared questioning make for strong friendships - that eploring some of life's richer questions in company is so important. It reminded me of how important it is to have communities of inquiry. Another of the key lessons is that grief and gratitude are kissing cousins, something I had to smile at because it's definitely one that hit home for me. For Mary, it was gratitude that she had a friend to grieve so much over and grief over having someone she felt that much gratitude for.

I caught through her friends a glimpse of a woman I admired, though I didn't get to know her on the levels her longtime friends did like some of her college friends. She was particularly remembered - and the spirit they spoke of was familiar. The wise and funny woman with the rumpled cap of gray hair and deepset eyes. Her friends reported of getting phone calls asking, "Hey, wanna spend a month traveling in Southeast Asia with me?", of meetings in random train stations, impromptu trips - a life with a great deal of adventure. It made me grin because I can so see the mischief in her smile. Her smiles had so much joy and mischief in them.

I think part of why I found it so meaningful is that it crossed my mind that the woman I'd like to become I hope might be remembered as people have remembered her, and how glad I am to have Jean as an inspiration for it.  So many people said that being around her, they could be more them, the best of who they are for the faith love she had in other people and for her sense of stretching boundaries and asking questions, and her mischief and fun. She was someone who helped the people around her be more of who they are as human beings by her encouragement and existence. That's definitely true of my experience of her as one of my teachers. And I know she lives in me and in the people's faces I looked into. I know it in me in the way I hold markers and facilitate groups, to the way I talk to my clients about awareness.

I was occasionally late to her classes - less late than to others because she had a policy of making people sing if they came in late and actually enforced it. Running late to her funeral, it seemed somehow apropo that one of the friends and mentors I made through Jean, a woman named Liz Williams, led us all in song. Song was an important part of Jean's life, and the choir she belonged to that sang at this service attested to that. The choir sang a song called "Kinder" and they said that Jean used to especially love the last line of the chorus. The chorus goes:

I know I am blessed
I know all I ever wanted as this
I know I don't need more
I got what I came for.

It makes me joyous to know that Jean knew at the end that she'd gotten what she came for in this life. That same sentiment was repeated in the opening prayer of the service that ended with, "let me be open to all possibiliteis, living the full circle of my life in gratitude no matter when that circle is complete." This was totally Jean - she lived a fully lived life with deep humor, wisdom, and gratitude.

I'm including other stuff from her memorial service program because I want to remember it. At the end of the program was a thank you and farewell from her to the people in her life. It was simple - a single line and a quote. The line said, "My life is fuller because you were in it", and the quote was from one of my favorite books, "Eat, Pray, Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert.

"In the end though, may we all give up trying to pay back the people in this world who sustain our lives. In the end, maybe it's wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we have voices."

There's something beautiful in this idea of just surrendering before the miraculous "scope of human generosity"- and to just keep saying thank you and BEING thank you. There were people at the funeral who have sustained my life at various times and given me so much - a few other former professors who imparted lessons that I continue to carry in me, much loved classmates who have studied with me in times of stress, my ex-husband sitting a row in front of me also grieving for Jean. Jean made incredibly crafted and colorful puzzles, working with wood, for children. I bought him one for one of his birthdays, putting a message on the backs of each of the puzzle pieces.

It's harder to type through tears, though grief is mingled with a sort of distance, a grief but not-grief. I remember attending a workshop with Deida and being inspired by something he said to think that for me, at the end of my life, I want to have given everything in my very last breath, so there will have been nothing ungiven and therefore, nothing that the world has lost.  I sort of feel like Jean did that - that she gave everything she had and "got what she came for", so in a sense, there is nothing left to mourn because there was nothing ungiven. I want life lived that fully for me and for everyone I know.

This first poem, "The Ship" captures so well and so beautifully I think the experience of those of us on this shore saying goodbye. "Her diminished size is in me, not in her." She was physically tiny - built not much larger than I am, and she looms big in my mind.

I am standing upon the seashore. A ship at my side
spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and
starts for the blue ocean.

She is an object of beauty and strength.
I stand and watch her until at length
she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where
the sea and sky come to mingle with each other.

Then someone at my side says:
"There, she is gone."

Gone where?
Gone from my sight. That is all. She is just as large
in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left
my side and she is just as able to bear her load
of living freight to her destined port.
Her diminished size is in me, not in her.

And just at the moment when someone at my side says "There, she is gone,"
there are other eyes watching her coming
and other voices ready to take up the glad shout:
"Here she comes!"

And that is dying.

--Henry Van Dyke (1852-1933)

The other poem from her program was written by another poet that I love, Mary Oliver, titled "In Blackwater Woods". I love the last lines in particular, holding the words, "To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go." 

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.