Marguerite's Eulogy, Yours and Mine

Marguerite's Eulogy, Yours and Mine

By John Taylor; 2006 October 19

Yesterday we buried my Aunt Marguerite. So organized was she that she had the flowers "from the family" bought and paid for, so that we did not even have to go to the trouble of forgetting to offer that final gesture. My father's doddering frailty has upped several notches in the past few weeks and it was all we could do to get him to the funeral just a little late.

Aunt Marguerite was an ardent upholder of the Anglican Church, a lay nun, and very much of the old school. By that I mean that she strongly objected to women priests. They were allowed in about a decade ago and in that short time have made an exclusively male institution into an almost exclusively female one. Marguerite's church, St. Albans, still had a man priest but she fell out with him, as she did with so many friends and contacts in her darker, migraine ridden hours. When she moved to the nursing home in Stoney Creek she was delighted to find a man running it, until he moved to Winona and a woman took his place. She was furious with him for doing that but my brother succeeded in persuading him to give the funeral. Unfortunately, the eulogy was tattered by Bob's bred-in-the-bone pessimism and negativity. The poor priest clearly wanted to say good things about Marguerite but did not know her very well personally and had been fed a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde portrait by big brother Bob. True, she had been the spoiled youngest child of the family (the only girl of a generation of boys, long awaited and fawned over by all the adults, according to her brother, my father) and had become increasingly short tempered in her declining years... for a tiny woman of less than 5 feet tall she somehow had all of us, especially the men in the family, terrified to death of her. His speech showed that he had little, beyond her dedication to faith and the church, good about her to say. That was a pity, for she lived as saintly a life as you could ask for. She was surprisingly learned in Christian lore. A decade ago she donated her library of theological literature to some higher-ups in the church, and by her account their jaws dropped and wondered who this was who was reading such weighty tomes. The eulogy, unfortunately, she could not control as had done the giving of the flowers from the family.

We gathered at the grave site, the priest read some words from the printout and we said hello and goodbye to a handful of Marguerite's friends and traveling companions. The curator of the Battlefield House museum was there; she had helped as a volunteer there for time out of mind. Her traveling friend handed out to the family framed photos of Marguerite and herself in Israel, at Gaspe, in England, France and other places they had traveled. These huge chunks of her life, as well as her love of her family, nieces and nephews and grand nieces and nephews, were not mentioned in the oration. The traveling companion said uncertainly, "Oh, these are Thomas and Silvie I guess, I heard so much about them as they were growing up..."

Afterwards the remnants of this family got together at a retro hotdog and hamburger joint near Woodlawn Cemetery and ate overpriced ice cream. Silvie and Thomas played happily together and Thomas played away at the under-priced video machines, which cost a quarter to play. The scales cost only a penny, and I found out that I weigh a good ten pounds less. Good news. Bob's American wife, Louise, whom I had met only twice before, was present and his daughter Bobbie and her daughter Angel. We mentioned the possibility of an annual family picnic, perhaps in Leamington where Jitka is. I indulged in an orgy of photos and Silvie spontaneously took a video with the digicam of Bobbie enquiring about their pets, Twitchy and Malley.

Then we all drove over to Aunt Marguerite's place to divide the spoils, which Bob has to get out of the retirement home apartment before the weekend. I took a car full of junk, including boxes full of Marguerite's photo albums. I will have to go back to Stoney Creek again today for another load, probably. Silvie was and is still pocked by chicken pox and Grandpa stayed in the car with the kids so that she would not communicate the illness to the still living residents of the retirement home. As always, Grampa let Thomas play with every knob and dial in the car, and my trip home was spent driving and flipping knobs back to where they are supposed to be.

Before retiring for the day I went cursorily through these photos and wondered what to do with the bundled mass of ancient photos of old relations, most of whom she could not name or remember herself when we taped her a couple of years ago reminiscing over them. She had tried to organize this job to, but it came after her first stroke and, pathetically, the handwriting on some of the packages was a scrawl, written by a useless, floppy appendage that had been a steady right hand before. Marguerite had given up, put a rubber band around them and simply scrawled "Old Relations" on a paper attached to the bundle. Thus fades the glory and name of the family.

I found myself yesterday at the funeral and now the next day, pondering weak and weary over how such a fiasco might be avoided at my own funeral. I would not have any life summed up as was Marguerite's -- though I must say I have attended far worse eulogies. My Aunt Amy's second husband Russ's oration was given by an egotistical pastor who positively imagined flaws to flaunt during the oration. People are bad enough without having their eulogist dream up bad deeds done in youth! Come to think of it, I would not have any stranger give the eulogy, far less a friend or family member. Only I am qualified. I joked afterwards that I would climb out of the coffin and give the talk myself rather than have such a eulogy. Somebody suggested a posthumous video. Yeah, that is the ticket. I fervently disagree with Aristotle, who wrote in the Rhetoric that,

"All eulogy is based upon the noble deeds -- real or imaginary -- that stand to the credit of those eulogized. On the same principle, invectives are based on facts of the opposite kind: the orator looks to see what base deeds -- real or imaginary -- stand to the discredit of those he is attacking..."

Rather I agree with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who very perceptively noticed that, "The eye repeats every day the first eulogy on things,- `He saw that they were good.'" Yes, a eulogy has little to do with our good or bad points, it has to do with the wonder of God looking back at what He has created and seeing that it was good. That, and nothing more, for there can be nothing more.

So first off, I would avoid talking about myself, good or bad. Not that I am not the most self-centered SOB you could ever ask for, I am. It is just that I am sick of it all. Life and death, good and bad. What are life and death supposed to be but jumping off points, releases from all this garbage?

I think my own bred in the bone cynicism has been worsened since our toilet broke down. Now every time we flush we have to dip a pail into the bathtub and dump it into the old trlet. I look back at what my body has created and see that it is bad, very bad. Evil smelling, ugly.

My old friend Bob Morrison used to say that whenever he felt himself falling in love he would look very close at the skin of what he called a "being" (an eligible female) and think about all those blemishes and flaws on that microscopic level. After that he lost his avidity. For me, after the toilet broke down whenever I find myself attracted to someone, being or not, I think of the vat of excrement they produce in a year. I think of flushing their toilet for them. Is that person's toilet or yearly vat of bowel movements any smaller or less foul smelling than mine, or anybody else's? I find this very effectively rubs out the magnetism, even any affection that might have remained. I look at everybody with disgust, and I can almost reach out and touch what it says in the Bible about God being no respecter of persons. I think of that stinking vat and all respect is out the window.

So for my eulogy, the less said about me, my body and all it produces, the better. I see every eulogy as a last gasp attempt to avoid the topic of me, good and bad, and a way to help others think about things other than that too. Eulogize to help others jump off from my life and look only at where it was leading when it ended, where good and bad seemed meant to be leading. I will never reach it but I can point that way. My ability to do that is what makes me a servant of the All Highest.

As for my eulogy, I would talk about the Baha'i principles, where they are, where they are going, where I think we could go in carrying them out. I would take my last chance to go over the Badi' calendar, the measure of our life time in relation to the Manifestation's life. I would try to hint at where we could take principle and time -- and I would still say "we" in this presentation because my mission will not stop, it will continue in the breast of Abraham. I will be behind every effort to carry them out.

Ask yourself: what is the meaning of my life? It has no meaning in itself for you. Its meaning is primarily for me, not anybody other than me. You get the message through my service to God, indirectly. That is why God enjoys calling us servants, because that is the part He made, the part He finds good. We are here to serve, we are not ends in ourselves like He is. For all others a life lived acts as a vector, an arrow pointing to places the servant never visited, never accomplished, but which others can attain. As "He saw that it was good" teaches, the most important function of a eulogy is not to praise or blame, it is to perform in the broadest sense of the word, an autopsy like the one God performed on the Sabbath day.

That is why only I can give my eulogy, for that is my eye on my life and the world, and it must sum up all of my times when I took myself into account at the beginning and end of the days of my life, like an hourglass with the sands of time dropping smoothly through to the bottom ... add up all of my self-examinations and you get this, my final autopsy, my eulogy.

In fact, when my brother messed up a little and placed Marguerite's obituary on the same day as the funeral, I thought of Aunt Marguerite's disapproval. "You should have had it into the Spectator yesterday," she would have complained. Instead he was busy flying up here from Florida, where he is working as a carpenter. I thought: this is how people live on from beyond the grave, when those who have known them think of what they would think as they do things that would have concerned them. And that is why backbiting and gossip are such bad infections, because they live on after we have been buried, like our excrement lives on if improperly recycled. So yes, when you think of me do not think of my misstatements and verbal slips, think of my love for the Baha'i principles, they have sustained me through all this. In fact, do not wait until I am dead, you can start practicing now. John, principle. John, not gossip.

In my self-eulogy, then, I would talk about the Master's Tablets of the Divine Plan, how we are following them through. I would talk about the needs of humanity, especially our need to find a common path back to our creator. I have learned writing about the principle of One God over the past year that One God is the principle of the principles, that this is the only thing that is worth talking about, all else is frivolous distraction, unworthy of mention at a eulogy.

In my eulogy, I would also include news, news about the world and about the Faith, about things that matter more than that corpse in that coffin there. In fact, why not have a twelve day long funeral festival, one oration for each principle? If only there were enough time in the day to prepare it, eh?

If I had my way, there would be so much substance in eulogies that there would be funeral groupies going around from funeral to funeral just to benefit from the edifying eulogies. And for those who do not have the gift of eloquence, let them hire a learned scholar to do so in their stead. The most brilliant young minds should be able to make a living and a name by giving eulogies for homeless, unknown stiffs, anybody who could not give or pay for their own eulogy. That expense can be covered by the state and rich donors, as were the theatre performances of Ancient Greece. These performances would assess and give meaning to the sad lives of those who fill the unnamed pauper's graves in cemeteries.

In fact, these funerals of the indigent should have the most attention, attract the most interest. If a person was sick or poor or died before their time, that should be the object of a major enquiry, consummated by the funeral oration. Only the best intellectuals should have a right to speak there. Make it such an event that policy makers would have to attend in order to do their job. Even when a life and death were routine, without lessons, why not share news at the eulogy? Let there be no newscasts on TV, TV should be banned for health reasons anyway, along with other inherently sedentary "activities." Let news and events be fed out to the world in eulogies.