The mother of dear friends of ours died
recently at the age of ninety five. His son gave a eulogy at her funeral which
worth reading.
“My dear brothers and sisters, family and relatives,
companions and friends,
We have gathered here because we remember Irene, my mother, who touched so many of our lives in so many different ways. We all share a common bond with her and we feel her loss in the measure in which she touched our lives. For me it seems like an unending ocean of sadness, and yet I cannot but celebrate her life her nine-five years here. There are the memories we bring to this final farewell, and there will be many more we take away from here. They should all help to lift our sorrow, to pick up the pieces of our lives and heal our hearts. Otherwise our loss might draw in the horizons of our lives, like enclosing walls of sorrow, dark, desperate, crushing.
Every goodbye is a little death and now the final good bye, when one who touched our lives as she did, leaves us with an emptiness that only resurrection hope can fill, already now, but not fully yet.
This is a mass of the resurrection and I ask you to bring to this mass memories to celebrate the life she lived and the new life she now enjoys. We all want to be remembered by those we leave behind. The haunting lines from Rabindranath Tagore, she included in her memoir, express it so beautifully:
Remember me, still remember me (Tobu mone rekho)......
if I go far away,
still remember me …
If tears come to your eyelids
If play ceases one day, one spring night,
still remember me
If work is stopped one day, one autumn dawn,
remember me
If I come to your mind,
yet heavy tears no longer brim
in the corners of your eyes
still remember me
Remember me, still remember me
(Tobu mone rekho)
How do we want to remember the way Irene, my mother, was? How would she like to be remembered and how would we like to be remembered by her from where she is now?
No human life is perfect. But of those who have gone before us we want to tresure the happy, soothing memories to heal our sometimes unhappy, disturbed hearts. In the liturgy we ask God to forgive our dearly departed Irene, remembering that we all need God’s mercy and unless we forgive others we ourselves cannot receive God’s pardon. For it is in forgiving we are forgiven, in giving we receive, in dying to ourselves that we are born to eternal life. So as we remember Irene, my mother, what images of her will we treasure and what hopes will we dare?
An image I treasure is of Mum, sitting in our large living room alone in the dark, when the whole house was silent in sleep. I had once crept up on her to find her crying as she prayed her fifteen decade rosary. Go to sleep now, she said to me as her told her beads for her many, many intentions. I could only guess at rupture my father’s death must have meant for her. Everything seemed “like ashes in the mouth”, she had said to me then.
We have gathered here because we remember Irene, my mother, who touched so many of our lives in so many different ways. We all share a common bond with her and we feel her loss in the measure in which she touched our lives. For me it seems like an unending ocean of sadness, and yet I cannot but celebrate her life her nine-five years here. There are the memories we bring to this final farewell, and there will be many more we take away from here. They should all help to lift our sorrow, to pick up the pieces of our lives and heal our hearts. Otherwise our loss might draw in the horizons of our lives, like enclosing walls of sorrow, dark, desperate, crushing.
Every goodbye is a little death and now the final good bye, when one who touched our lives as she did, leaves us with an emptiness that only resurrection hope can fill, already now, but not fully yet.
This is a mass of the resurrection and I ask you to bring to this mass memories to celebrate the life she lived and the new life she now enjoys. We all want to be remembered by those we leave behind. The haunting lines from Rabindranath Tagore, she included in her memoir, express it so beautifully:
Remember me, still remember me (Tobu mone rekho)......
if I go far away,
still remember me …
If tears come to your eyelids
If play ceases one day, one spring night,
still remember me
If work is stopped one day, one autumn dawn,
remember me
If I come to your mind,
yet heavy tears no longer brim
in the corners of your eyes
still remember me
Remember me, still remember me
(Tobu mone rekho)
How do we want to remember the way Irene, my mother, was? How would she like to be remembered and how would we like to be remembered by her from where she is now?
No human life is perfect. But of those who have gone before us we want to tresure the happy, soothing memories to heal our sometimes unhappy, disturbed hearts. In the liturgy we ask God to forgive our dearly departed Irene, remembering that we all need God’s mercy and unless we forgive others we ourselves cannot receive God’s pardon. For it is in forgiving we are forgiven, in giving we receive, in dying to ourselves that we are born to eternal life. So as we remember Irene, my mother, what images of her will we treasure and what hopes will we dare?
An image I treasure is of Mum, sitting in our large living room alone in the dark, when the whole house was silent in sleep. I had once crept up on her to find her crying as she prayed her fifteen decade rosary. Go to sleep now, she said to me as her told her beads for her many, many intentions. I could only guess at rupture my father’s death must have meant for her. Everything seemed “like ashes in the mouth”, she had said to me then.
....After her
ninetieth birthday she told me she was loath to leave this planet earth, she
liked it here. But then her gradually failing sight and hearing
enclosed her space, while her undaunted spirit struggled with the dissonance
between her clear, incisive mind and her frail, failing body. ...
Even now I hear her echoing the words of Rabindranath Tagore to us:
"Let my thoughts come to you, when I am gone, like the afterglow of sunset at the margin of starry silence." (Stray Birds). In the afterglow of her sunset now this is my dedication to my mother for I know the sun is rising on her in another better place to which we all are called.
A Dedication to Em
For Em, the gem
whose gentle sparkle
of flickering light
reflects, refracts,
enhances, nuances,
brightens, enlightens
as she polishes to perfection
opaque resistant stones like me.
With filial reverence, loving respect,
boundless admiration, unbounded appreciation,
and irrepressible hope that
the glorious burst of colours
at the sunset
will only presage an ever more
beautiful, wondrous dawn.
With Dad now she's home at last,
the memories are ours
to share and care and carry on.
Even now I hear her echoing the words of Rabindranath Tagore to us:
"Let my thoughts come to you, when I am gone, like the afterglow of sunset at the margin of starry silence." (Stray Birds). In the afterglow of her sunset now this is my dedication to my mother for I know the sun is rising on her in another better place to which we all are called.
A Dedication to Em
For Em, the gem
whose gentle sparkle
of flickering light
reflects, refracts,
enhances, nuances,
brightens, enlightens
as she polishes to perfection
opaque resistant stones like me.
With filial reverence, loving respect,
boundless admiration, unbounded appreciation,
and irrepressible hope that
the glorious burst of colours
at the sunset
will only presage an ever more
beautiful, wondrous dawn.
With Dad now she's home at last,
the memories are ours
to share and care and carry on.
Your (sometimes ungenteel) son
Rudi.
Rudi.
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