It has been an emotional couple of weeks. In consideration of the life and loss of my beautiful cousin Joy, I have experienced complex revelations in my heart, my mind, and my spirit.
On September 23rd, I got my mom’s text about Joy in the five minutes between my 2nd and 3rd period classes. And my heart dropped. I still had a whole day of teaching to get through. My principal came in for an observation 3rd period and I went into a familiar auto-pilot, grateful for my tried and true curriculum, with years of experience tempering personal feelings to fulfill my professional responsibilities.
And this, by the way, is one of the most fascinating qualities I’ve developed as a teacher: the ability to hold shit together and prioritize the needs of my students while quietly sitting with deeply personal emotions, knowing there will be time later to really feel and fully process them.
I know plenty of moms who do it all the time.
In leadership, this is one of the most challenging and necessary skills…it is also one of the most incredibly humbling: to embody the belief that, in this moment, there is a greater need calling me outside of my own feelings.
And so, when I got home, Jen asked what she could do to support me, brought me a small glass of “the good bourbon” on the rocks, and gave me time to write. And I cried out onto the blog through my previous post “Joy” without thinking or proofreading or revising.
And I gave it to God.
I read it back, after spending the entire day holding it together and subconsciously percolating, and I finally took a deep breath of realization, “Okay, so that’s how I’m feeling about Joy.”
The next day, Joy’s best friend read my post and shared it with the family. And the morning after that, she reached out to ask if I’d write Joy’s obituary.
No hesitation. I’d be honored. Absolutely.
I’ve never written an obituary before. How could I possibly capture her entire life inside a snapshot? How do I translate her essence with the limitations of words? I googled templates and suggestions, I read a bunch of examples. They all seemed a bit impersonal and dry.
I learned that rookie journalists usually start their careers in obituaries as their first assignment. I figured if an obituary is usually made public and written by fledgling journalists, I could approach it as painting a portrait, not only for those who loved her, but maybe I could write it in a way where even those who never met her would have access to fall in love with her too. I asked her best friend a ton of questions throughout the day and shared it with them hoping that her family would recognize Joy through the words and feel they accurately and appropriately represented their daughter and sister and friend.
And then I went to happy hour with a dear friend and ordered a scotch on the rocks because I just finished writing the most important thing I’ve ever written. And my friend and I toasted Joy and talked about what a big deal it is to speak on behalf of someone we love and also wondered what we’d want someone to write for our obituaries. And I reflected on the spectrum of emotions I felt while I was writing it: the responsibility I felt to honor my cousin and her family, the compassion and sympathy for those who might read it and their loss, the challenge of writing in a completely different style for an open audience…and also, a quiet and persistent acknowledgement of my own mortality.
My friend left happy hour to pick up her son and I stayed to finish sipping my drink.
I got a text from Joy’s best friend. Can she call me?
Of course.
“Hey, so the obituary is perfect and beautiful and everyone is just so grateful and thank you so much and also, we were wondering…because the guy Joy wanted to deliver the eulogy (she planned and organized everything for her service and reception beforehand), he was like a little brother to her and he’s a pastor, but he can’t make the service on account of it being his 20th wedding anniversary and…would you at all be up for writing and delivering the eulogy?”
No hesitation. Absolutely. I’d be honored.
I got you, fam.
I got you, Joy.
And then I hung up the phone as the waitress passed by and I ordered another scotch…because holy shit.
If an obituary is a public portrait of a person, a eulogy is the Sistine Chapel. It is sacred and holy. It is dignified and polished. It is intentional and expressive. Eulogizing is quite possibly one of the highest callings we have as human beings…to not only praise, honor and validate the impact of someone’s life, but also to deliver a poultice to those who are grieving the loss of that person.
I went to acupuncture the next day and told my good witch healer about my week so far. She said, “It’s an incredible honor and an enormous responsibility and it’s normal to feel caught off guard when we are finally called to do it and realize now it’s our turn.”
And then she asked me how I was doing. I hadn’t really thought about myself much. She told me that losing someone in our own age group hits different than when we lose someone older. Not that it’s any more or less tragic, the grief just comes from a different place…a place with a steady heartbeat of “that could’ve been me.”
And she poked me full of needles and I laid there with plinky plunky music centering my own beliefs about life and death and purpose and existence. I thought about how Joy’s battle with cancer taught me about courage and resilience and acceptance and fear. I breathed in her love of nature and animals and wondered if leaves contemplate their own existence in the summer months. Do they feel nervous? Do they even know with the first chilly autumn breeze that it’s only a matter of time before their green fades to gold and they have to let go?
The last two years, I sat heavily with Joy’s prognosis of 24 months. What does that even feel like to be stamped with an expiration date? Would I even want to know how much longer I have to walk in this body? How would knowing when it ends change how I live right now? Would I wither away in personal grief focused only on the morbid countdown? Could I find the strength Joy channeled as she continued working and finding bright moments in every single day as she endured chemo and radiation and steroids and hospital visits and declining mobility and hard days when she was fighting for her life? Would I be able to find the beauty of my precious life through irreconcilable fear?
The only way we are able to answer that question for ourselves is in the moments we are tested on it. And it is only in times when we stand facing our fragility that we discover our strength. However complicated it’s been for me to understand why and how Joy was taken from this life as she was, there was poetry in her courage, an irrevocable determination to live every single day hanging on to that tree branch with gratitude and dignity as the temperature dropped in anticipation of winter. With everything she had, she never gave in and she never gave up.
I sat with the gravity of writing her eulogy, looking for a way to define a woman I always experienced as wholly undefinable.
Joy believed her name absolutely defined who she was and how she lived. For her eulogy, I found a quote by Mary Oliver, “If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.”
I sat with the responsibility of delivering a message of hope to all of us who loved her and knew her.
She told me she felt closest to God being in nature. I found a quote by fellow naturalist John Muir, “On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than of death. Instead of the friendly sympathy, the union of life and death so apparent in Nature, we are taught that death is an accident, a deplorable punishment for the oldest sin, the arch-enemy of life…(but) Let children walk with nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life, and that the grave has no victory, for it never fights. All is divine harmony.”
And then I went to acupuncture on Thursday and my good witch healer poked me full of even more needles after I told her the service was on Saturday. And whatever she poked at made me cry the whole way to work on Friday morning. All day long I felt on the verge of tears…the immensity of responsibility and honor finally hitting me now that it was written and ready for Joy.
I cried most of the morning yesterday before the service…for the loss of my beautiful cousin, for the honor of her family’s trust, and for the surprise confidence I found in myself through the process. It was a rare opportunity to face my own fragility and recognize the dimensions of my own strength reflected back. A customized gift basket of experiences, emotions, and revelations I believe were passed along to me directly and with love from my beautiful, brave, badass cousin Joy.
