Eulogy For a Best Friend

Crocuses in our front garden in late March

Seven months ago, I wrote on this blog, “I have faith spring will come again—and I hope it brings only what we are able to bear.”  I had no idea then that just as the first crocus opened, glowing a translucent purple in the sunlight, the phone would ring, and I would learn yet again how much loss we are able to bear.

On March 23, 2015, my beloved friend of twenty-four years, Amy Winans, died.  I have written and said those words so many times now—Amy died—but each time, I feel a small shock. 

This is the (only-slightly-edited) eulogy I delivered on March 28 at the memorial service for her at the Unitarian Church of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, much of it written during sleepless hours that week:

Amy and I became friends in the beginning of 1991 at Penn State.  Our mutual friend Andrea introduced us so we could help each other study for our PhD candidacy exam.  Amy helped me with American lit, and I helped her with British.  At our first meeting, one evening in the Kern Graduate Commons, where the food service was closed for the night, I noticed Amy picked at the Chinese take-out she had brought with her.  “She is clearly more interested in the conversation,” I thought; I was hungry, and the Chinese food looked good to me.  I had a similar thought more than two decades later, as we sat across another table, this time in St. Louis, where Amy was a presenter at 4Cs, the major, annual, college composition conference.  As I ate my share of the vegetarian platter we had ordered at the Ethiopian restaurant, I had to remind her to eat. 

Most of our friendship was long distance, especially after I moved to Champaign, Illinois, in 1997 to join the English faculty at Parkland College.  But we stayed in touch always, and we found ways to share our experiences in real time.  When the TV show ER was in its heyday, we would get on the phone during the long commercial break halfway through the episode and compare notes.  When she was on the job market the fall after I moved to the Midwest, we consulted by phone about what she should wear to job interviews at the huge, annual MLA convention. 

Mostly, though, we wrote.  Emails with Amy’s signature cheers, “Go team!” (this woman who did not watch sports) and “You can do it!” got me through my dissertation and many other challenges.  She was also the most devoted cheerleader of my creative endeavors, sending me beautiful paper to use in my art and mailing me books about art and writing.  Less than a week before she died, she forwarded me an announcement about a workshop I might want to check out. 

One of Amy's multi-part letters.  She often wrote over
a few days, sometimes on flights, at the airport,
at her daughter's swim lesson.  The sight of her
handwriting brought me comfort.

I always scanned my inbox for Amy’s emails first, and her handwriting in our mailbox was one of my greatest joys and comforts—and constants.  We exchanged hundreds of letters.  She joked that some future graduate student could write about our letters for her dissertation.  Here are some of Amy's letters to me, mailed in South Africa, Raleigh, Seattle, Puerto Rico, and, of course, Harrisburg.  One was mailed to me when I was in India.

To Amy, I wrote like I wrote to no one else: journal-like letters.  The night after I heard she had died, I couldn’t sleep.  So I did what I often did when I couldn’t sleep:  I wrote to Amy.  Here is that letter.  I wrote it on purple stationery.  Amy said I was the greatest supporter of her passion for purple.  I take pride in that position.  I am reading from a copy; I left the original with her this morning.

Champaign, IL. Wed. March 25, 2015.  5 AM

Amy dear,

I cannot sleep, so what else to do but write another middle-of-the-night letter to you?  This is the first morning I will wake up—if I sleep—knowing you will not write me another letter.  I cannot say “you will not be here” because you will always be here, with me.  After twenty-four years of friendship, you are a part of me.  Nothing I say, especially in my heartbroken state, seems enough.  You believed in my best self, Amy, and you helped me to believe in it, too.  You were my constant: your handwriting appearing in my mailbox nearly every week—until the depression struck you—your love in the hardest and happiest of times; your keen, editorial eye on my writing; your itineraries in my inbox, always making sure I could reach you.  How will I reach you now, my friend?  To whom will I write in the middle of a crazy day to be reassured I will survive this profession we love and which wears us down?  For whom will I buy purple?  Whom will I write at 4 AM and trust to understand?  Who else can read my 4 AM handwriting?

There is a large Amy-shaped hole in the world now, and I will have to learn how to live in that world, a world I couldn’t imagine before but have to inhabit now. 

Somehow, all of us, but especially Tony and Aurelia, will have to learn to live without your presence and to remind ourselves of the love with which you showered us.

I miss you my friend.  I always will.

Love, Umeeta

Now I would like to read you a poem that makes me think of Amy and her passing: “Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard” by Kay Ryan.  [Here is a link: Kay Ryan's "Things Shouldn't Be So Hard" ]

Amy left deep tracks in so many lives, on so many of our hearts.  Things shouldn’t be so hard.

Amy's crocuses were blooming the week she died.

I’ll end with Amy’s words, words from one of the wisest people I have ever known.  The first quote is from an email she wrote on the evening of Thursday, September 2, 2010. I was struggling with a new course and recovering from two car accidents in which I had been rear-ended while at red lights and left with pain in my right shoulder.  Her words put things in perspective:  Remember how Oliver has that poem that begins “you don’t have to be good”? Maybe as you think about your Lit class…  “you don’t have to be perfect” and remember it all. and get to it all…You get to be human—honest!  

I’ll close with a quote from an email Amy wrote in the early morning of January 29, 2014; I had been asked to write a chapter for a book, a chapter I was not sure I wanted to write, and Amy was helping me to decide how to respond.  She wrote: Feel free to give a call if you want to talk about the decision regarding writing.  My main suggestions at the moment:

1—what would be the most self-compassionate thing you could do?

2—set aside the shoulds (just read this in a letter from my very dear friend…) and follow #1.

Marilyn bought me these pansies to pot in Amy's memory.  On the Monday after the memorial service, we potted them  in what we have always called "the Amy pot," a teal, ceramic pot Amy brought for us in 2004 and in which, every year, I plant annuals that make me think of Amy.  Those pansies are still going, even in June, so I have bought two pots in periwinkle blue, a color Amy loved, and have planted summer flowers in those.  We will now have three Amy pots.  But how strange it is to plant flowers in memory of Amy instead of reading about her gardens in letters from her.

Flowers from Amy's memorial.  At the church, we surrounded them with photos of her and with academic journals in which her articles had been published.  Marilyn and I brought the flowers home with us and set them on our dining table.  In the top right corner of this photo is the candle Marilyn and I bought in Taos last summer.  We lit it every evening for Amy for weeks, until it burned down.  Each night, as I blew it out, I said good night to my dear friend.  I hope she is at peace now.  

I flew back to Pennsylvania in April for a weekend memorial service at Susquehanna University, where Amy was a beloved member of the English faculty.  While Amy's other best friend, Judy, drove, I took photos, imagining Amy making this drive hundreds of times.  I had never been to her campus before because it was an hour from her house--and I thought I could visit it another time--so on this visit, I took it all in: her department, her office, the view from her window as she sat in her chair.  

As I sat in Amy and Tony's living room on the second Sunday in April, I came across a pack of cards that belonged to Amy.  Each card had a different flower on it.  That the flower for friendship was purple, Amy's favorite color, seemed just right. 

I painted this "yarn bowl" for Amy at the end of February (I didn't include a photo of this bowl in my February post because it was a surprise for Amy, and she read my blog).  She knitted, too.  She received the bowl the week before she died, and she mentioned it in her last emails to me.  The bowl combines her favorite color, purple, and mine, blue.  It has our initials on the bottom.