We lost my Nana August 9, 2016.
What follows is the eulogy I offered at her funeral.
“Let us talk of graves and dust and epitaphs
Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth. . .” 1
-Richard II
When mother gave me the phone call on a Wednesday evening that Nana had died, I hung up the phone, I sat down and I cried. As prepared as we may be, we are never prepared. I sat on the floor and “with rainy eyes wrote sorrow on the bosom of the earth.”2 The pain of loss; losing someone we love always hurts. T.S. Eliot calls the separation the “broken jaw of these lost kingdoms.”3
On a night shortly after I received the news, Nana visited me. I remember sitting straight up in bed.
“Nana? What are you doing here?“
“These are the lessons that I have learned in life and I am passing them on to you,” She said.
”Don’t be a burden.
Love life.
Live life.
Live life well.
Help others to love life.”
And with a smile and a glint in her eye, she put her hand up to my face to touch my cheek, took her thumb and wiped away my tears.
That was all. It was over. It was so powerful for me that I wrote down everything I could remember as soon as I woke up.
John Donne said, “All mankind is of one author and is one volume. When one person dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated. God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice, but God’s hand is in every translation and his hand shall bind up again all our scattered leaves for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.”4
So, let us mourn her loss, but celebrate her translation.
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