Lives

I've always been a reader. My first genre that I remember liking as a genre was biographies. I like learning about how different people led their lives as I tried to make sense of my own life.

I gave a little more thought about that going to some family funerals when I was young but mostly I tried very hard to be respectful to the grown-ups around me who were grieving. 

At some point once I left home I started going to more funerals. During the start of my teaching career I went many times a year to funerals for students (whether I knew them or not), almost of all of whom died in drunk driving accidents. The eulogies all sounded the same in their attempts not to address the role that drinking and driving played in ending a life full of potential. Eventually our university started a van program that students were encouraged to call and the number of student funerals dropped a good deal.

I was first department chair in the 1990's; I felt responsible for my department members and always made a point of attending the funerals of their parents and spouses.  Around that time, maybe because I was finally ready to hear it, I found myself engaged by the stories of the lives of the folk who had died. There was a variety, from funerals that were one long agonized cry of loss to celebrations of full lives well-lived. The latter were the ones that I spent more and more time tried to identify with, wondering what it meant for me to live my life well.

I'm older and there have been many people whose lives have intersected with mine. I go to more and more memorials and funerals. This past Spring a woman at work stopped off to drop off a gift for a mutual friend; I knew that she had cancer but not until I met her did I realize how short her lifespan was. I had heard good things about her and asked if she had a little time and just started talking to her for thirty minutes. She was a very very good person, and I learned more detail a short time later at her memorial about the way in which she was good to her loved ones and colleagues.

I have a colleague that I overlapped with thirty years ago in issues connecting our two departments. He was bright and enthusiastic and I've learned that such people are gifts in my life. When I found out he was suffering from cancer I reconnected. He is facing his shortened lifespan with courage and care for his wife and small children.

I learn so much from lives well-lived. Part of that is knowing that it is possible to live well. Sometimes when things come at me sideways it is hard to have faith in that and yet I keep running into folk who manage it in worse circumstances than I experience.

Yesterday I went to the funeral of a friend who died at 85. By all accounts my experience with her was not unique; she was clever, helpful, enthusiastic, and funny, qualities that I aspire to and sometimes manage. When I was hired to teach full-time part of what my department sought was someone who could help improve our use of technology. The woman had just been hired to be our new director of academic computing (the title was worded differently but that was the gig) and she was one of the first people I met in my interview.  During my early years on the job she helped me to do good things re technology. She was funny, enthusiastic, clever, and had an appreciation of the absurd that I find in the best of my colleagues.  Funerals are inherently sad but she lived well and I feel as if everyone in the church knew that deeply. I'm glad I went.