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.

November

The prairie on the last day of November.

Starting thirty years ago—when I moved to the United States after growing up in the warmth of India and Kuwait—November became the nondescript lull between the brilliant oranges of autumn and Halloween and the lights and sparkle of the holiday season.  Until Thanksgiving and my birthday arrived at the end of the month, November seemed merely grey and increasingly cold. 

This year, on a Saturday in early November, just when the trees had lost most of their leaves and the wind seemed to freeze my bones, this month of transition reminded me of the hope and faith it takes to move through our days. 

In the morning, Marilyn and I attended the church wedding of a middle-aged couple.  The ceremony was brief, but we could all see that the exchange of words had transformed the lives of the couple.  As they walked out of the sanctuary together, their smiles were wide, their faces nearly aglow.  With faith and hope, they had made promises that were to last them their whole lives.  Their whole lives. 

At noon, Marilyn and I walked to our neighborhood park, where an Indian family that lives two doors from us was planting a tree in memory of their beloved daughter and sister, who had died just before her twelfth birthday after a brief illness.  She would never marry.  She would not even be a teenager.  Her whole life was done.   

As I shoveled some dirt around the root of the tree and then watched her young friends and her six-year-old brother do the rest, I thought of the hope and faith with which we love the people in our lives. We plan for our lives together.  And then, sometimes, we are devastated by how our plans have to be laid aside. 

At the same time, I thought how planting that catalpa tree, which in November was bare, just a collection of skinny branches really, was an act of hope and faith.  In the spring, the tree will bloom.  In a few years, it will cast some shade.  Eventually, children may sit under it and have a picnic.  As we held hands in a circle around the tree, all of us, whose lives were touched by this young, bright, loving girl, imagined that tree.  One person had brought bulbs of white grape hyacinth to plant under the tree, and the children placed those around the roots, helped by the adults.

After the tree was planted and the kind men from the park district had set the memorial plaque in place and laid down the mulch, our small group hurried down the street to our neighbors’ house.  There we ate simple Indian food, sipped on hot apple cider, and found some comfort in being together. 

When Marilyn and I came home that Saturday afternoon, we worked on the annual task of moving the furniture from our deck to our garage.  As I moved the heavy umbrella stand in the red wheelbarrow, I imagined bringing it out again in the spring, imagined setting out the deck furniture and hanging up the backyard swing in front of the blue spruce trees.  I have faith spring will come again—and I hope it brings only what we are able to bear.

As I pushed the wheelbarrow, I noticed berries from the hawthorn tree gathered by November rain.

A History of Marriage Equality in Cake (with a tangent about tax returns)

On June 1, Marilyn and I went to our County Clerk’s office, which was open that Sunday to allow same-sex couples in civil unions to apply for marriage licenses on the first day that became possible in Illinois. By signing a piece of paper, we converted our civil union to a marriage.   Our marriage became effective as of three years earlier, the original date of the civil union. So, one minute we were not married, and another we had been married nearly three years. It felt like science-fiction, very joyful science fiction.  Now, our relationship is recognized both by our state and by the federal government. In Illinois we are equal to every other married couple. After decades of activism, the process was simple and the mood at the County Clerk’s moving and celebratory.  
  
I joke with Marilyn that our relationship’s legal status has been inversely proportional to the size of the cakes with which we have celebrated our union.  

On the afternoon of June 1, we celebrated with a small, brown-sugar-oatmeal cake, one of our favorites from The Cake Artist’s Studio. We shared it with a couple of close friends over cups of coffee after we all went out for barbecue.  Later, the four of us watched the local news coverage of the historic day at the County Clerk’s office. 

Three years earlier, when we had our civil union on June 17, 2011, we had five small cakes because we had so much to celebrate:  the fifth anniversary of our commitment ceremony, progress towards equality, and our civil union.  The ceremony at the courthouse lasted only two minutes and thirty-eight seconds, but it was as moving as our forty-minute commitment ceremony at the Unitarian Universalist Church had been five years earlier. Our state now recognized our union (though the federal government still did not). More than fifty local friends stopped by our house in the afternoon for cake and champagne. 

Back in 2006, when we had our commitment ceremony, we had a three-tiered cake, which we designed with the Cake Artist, and we even had an extra round cake to make sure there was enough for the hundred guests at our reception.  When my father asked whether our ceremony would be recorded in a government office and my mother asked whether an announcement would appear in the paper, I was touched--I was sorry I had to tell them both no.  The ceremony and our union had no standing in the eyes of the law.
 

When the marriage equality bill was first passed in Illinois last fall, Marilyn brought us a cake from—where else?—The Cake Artist’s Studio.  Even while we celebrated, I wondered whether filing tax returns would become easier.  After our civil union, we had to file more tax returns than we did before.  The state needed us to file as a married couple, but to do that we had to create a federal tax return as a married couple—a return we could not file with the IRS.  So when we did our taxes, we had to generate four returns: two federal returns that we filed as single people, and then the “fake” married federal return to generate the married state tax return. It made us crazy. I joked that this was a conspiracy: “Sure! We’ll give those gays equal rights.  Well, almost equal rights. And then we’ll make them fill out extra tax returns.  Even better, we’ll make them fill out tax returns that they cannot use.”   

I am thrilled to tell you that from now on, we can file one federal tax return as a married couple, and our state tax return will be generated easily after that, as it should be.  Ah, equality!  I think this calls for a slice of cake. 

(The formatting on blogspot is not cooperating today; please excuse the inconsistencies).