Thank you to all of you who have sent condolences through many emails and many, many cards.  I would like to thank each of you personally, but of course cannot.  Your words of sympathy and encouragement made it easier to bear up under the incredible grief I feel every second of every day. Grief is a strange bedfellow and I am doing my best to get on with life as Al would have wanted me to do.

Al’s Memorial Service took place Thursday. August 19, which was a month after he died due to his older brother not being able to make the trip until then.  Fr. David Shalk, a friend of ours, officiated at he Catholic service although Al was not Catholic.  I am grateful to my parish, St. John Neumann, Sunbury, Ohio, and its pastor, Fr. David Sizemore, for allowing the service to be held there as I was greatly comforted.  I am very grateful to all who came to honor and remember Al and to support me.  The beginning music was my husband’s beloved Bach, followed by my niece Annie singing our favorite hymn, “On Eagles’ Wings.  Al’s niece Gabriella, an opera singer, sang the “Lord’s Prayer” and “The Wind Beneath Wings.”  I carried my beloved’s ashes out to Sarah Brightman’s melodious and haunting “It’s Time to Say Goodbye.”    At the risk of repeating parts of what I have already related on this blog, below is the Eulogy I delivered for Al:

 

Al’s Eulogy

I loved my husband. Our first conversation on the phone before we met was about broccoli, gardening, and nature. Thank God he loved he loved dogs and horses for if he didn’t I was in trouble. I was a “goner” as soon as we met. We met January 20, 1984, on the coldest night of that year and we knew that we belonged together. We just knew. We weren’t sure how; we weren’t sure why. We just knew that no longer would we be alone. Our first kiss in the restaurant parking lot sealed our future.

We were married six weeks later . . . the feisty gal from Brooklyn (Al hated New Yorkers, go figure)—the queen of excess and Irish emotion and the master of moderation and restraint. The earthy hopeless romantic and the complete realist with a wry sense of humor.

A poem from the romanticist Elizabeth Barrett Browning describes my way of expressing my love for Al:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

I love thee to the level of every day’s

Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.

I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;

I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.

I love thee with a passion put to use

In my old grief’s, and with my childhood’s faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints, I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life! and, if God chooses,

I shall but love thee better after death.

In Al’s desk I found the following Alfred Lord Tennyson poem in Al’s writing; it describes Al’s way of expressing love with his own brand of humor perfectly but doesn’t say much for me:

In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.

He will hold thee, when his passion shall run its novel course:

Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse.

To explain further Al’s sense of humor, I submit the following: his favorite tee shirt which I hold up now and which sweetly reads: “My next wife will be normal.”

What is the measure of a man: for Al it was honor, integrity, ethics, honesty, strength of character, and stoicism. He believed in hard work and no complaints.

For Al it was the love of his children Carolyn and Stuart, his grandchildren Audrey and Darren, his brothers Bill and Jack, now deceased, his sister Susan and his nieces and nephews, and me.

For Al it was gardening; farming, nature, red tailed hawks, bird watching, Celtic history and music, Bach, his beloved Cavaliers and the Rattlebridge fame we achieved together, his mare Buttercup to whom he sang the Gilbert and Sullivan tune, “They call me Buttercup” from the time she was born. For Al it was science, his great passion for sailing especially with his brother Bill. And for Al at the very end it was Jesus Christ whom he had spent his lifetime at least publicly denying.

Before we were married, he told me: “My soul is in your hands” and I took it very seriously. I felt that if I were a better Christian and a better person, I could set the example to bring him to Jesus. Al despised the hypocrisy of organized religion with its corrupt scandalous leaders who should have been the epitome of God’s grace and kindness to man. I explained that because men were fallible, it did not mean that belief in the goodness and omnipresence of God was tainted. I prayed for 26 years that Al would believe as I believe. He balked. His soul was never in my hands but in God’s hands all the time. Two days before Al died, he became filled with anger physically pushing me away and harshly uttering that “he hated this world and wanted to leave this earth.” I climbed in beside him, held him tight, and fervently told him to let go of the anger and the darkness in his head for it was the devil’s work. I begged him to accept the light and God’s love. I said the “Our Father” and he joined me in the prayer. I asked him to pray to Jesus and he said “I am” and physically relaxed. Later he told me to ‘let him go” please let me go and I told him yes, it was okay to go.

The night before he died, he was restless and agitated. My niece Annie and her husband Eric, both of whom loved Al very much and whom he loved, and I held a prayer vigil over Al. I once again crawled in beside him as close as I could, inhaling his scent, and whispering my love for him and more importantly God and His Son Jesus’ love for him. Eric said that Al visibly relaxed as peace descended upon him.

Al died the next day very peacefully and I know he died believing—the answer to my prayers.

Recently I had researched near death and dying experiences which seem to mirror each other around the world. Dr. John Lerma, hospice physician at Houston Medical Center, wrote the book Into the Light which chronicles the stories of dying patients who testified that they saw angels and sometimes Christ at their bedsides embracing them with incredible love. Sometimes inexplicably a white feather would appear in the room–a sign that the angels were filling the room with light.

Even though I believe that Al is in heaven, I have begged Al and God for a sign. The other night just before closing, I pulled into Lowe’s and at my feet as I got out of the car lay this white feather. The smaller feather Annie just found in the barn at the farm Al loved so much, the only white feather we have ever seen at the farm. I have my sign.

The love of my life is with God watching over those he loved especially me and cringing that I now have access to the checkbook which he knows I will screw up for before I was married I balanced my checkbook by changing banks every four months. He is also worried that I will never change the oil in the cars. Al took good care of me. He was my rock, my support, my solace, and my friend. A friend just wrote me: “In knowing Al, a person of quiet wisdom with a sneaky little dry sense of humor, there is one thing I loved seeing each time. This is a man who really "got you". He knew you inside and out and loved you. He loved sharing life with you.” Yes he really “got me” and I “got him.” Two souls that came together on that cold night.

Not a demonstrative man verbally he still told me many times: “all I do and my life is for you.” His support allowed me to fly but he was always and always will be the “wind beneath my wings.” His love is alive in my heart, but oh, my Albie, I miss you so . . .