{"id":725,"date":"2010-08-26T01:14:12","date_gmt":"2010-08-26T05:14:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rattlebridge.com\/blog\/2010\/08\/26\/eulogy-for-my-al\/"},"modified":"2010-08-26T01:14:12","modified_gmt":"2010-08-26T05:14:12","slug":"eulogy-for-my-al","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rattlebridge.com\/blog\/eulogy-for-my-al\/","title":{"rendered":"Eulogy for My Al"},"content":{"rendered":"

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. <\/strong><\/font><\/p>\n

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Al\u2019s 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\u2019s beloved Bach, followed by my niece Annie singing our favorite hymn, \u201cOn Eagles\u2019 Wings.  Al\u2019s niece Gabriella, an opera singer, sang the \u201cLord\u2019s Prayer\u201d and \u201cThe Wind Beneath Wings.\u201d  I carried my beloved\u2019s ashes out to Sarah Brightman\u2019s melodious and haunting \u201cIt\u2019s Time to Say Goodbye.\u201d    At the risk of repeating parts of what I have already related on this blog, below is the Eulogy I delivered for Al:<\/strong><\/font><\/p>\n

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Al\u2019s Eulogy<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

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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\u2019t I was in trouble. I was a \u201cgoner\u201d 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\u2019t sure how; we weren\u2019t sure why. We just knew that no longer would we be alone. Our first kiss in the restaurant parking lot sealed our future. <\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

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We were married six weeks later . . . the feisty gal from Brooklyn (Al hated New Yorkers, go figure)\u2014the 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.<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

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A poem from the romanticist Elizabeth Barrett Browning describes my way of expressing my love for Al:<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

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How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
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I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
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My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
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For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
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I love thee to the level of every day’s
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Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
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I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
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I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
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I love thee with a passion put to use
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In my old grief\u2019s, and with my childhood’s faith.
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I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
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With my lost saints, I love thee with the breath,
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Smiles, tears, of all my life! and, if God chooses,
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I shall but love thee better after death. <\/font><\/em><\/b><\/p>\n

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In Al\u2019s desk I found the following Alfred Lord Tennyson poem in Al\u2019s writing; it describes Al\u2019s way of expressing love with his own brand of humor perfectly but doesn\u2019t say much for me:<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

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In the spring a young man\u2019s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.<\/font><\/em><\/b><\/p>\n

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He will hold thee, when his passion shall run its novel course:<\/font><\/em><\/b><\/p>\n

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Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse.<\/font><\/em><\/b><\/p>\n

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To explain further Al\u2019s sense of humor, I submit the following: his favorite tee shirt which I hold up now and which sweetly reads: \u201cMy next wife will be normal.\u201d<\/em><\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

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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.<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

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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. <\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

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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, \u201cThey call me Buttercup\u201d 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.<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

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Before we were married, he told me: \u201cMy soul is in your hands\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019s hands all the time. Two days before Al died, he became filled with anger physically pushing me away and harshly uttering that \u201che hated this world and wanted to leave this earth.\u201d 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\u2019s work. I begged him to accept the light and God\u2019s love. I said the \u201cOur Father\u201d and he joined me in the prayer. I asked him to pray to Jesus and he said \u201cI am\u201d and physically relaxed. Later he told me to \u2018let him go\u201d please let me go and I told him yes, it was okay to go.<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

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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\u2019 love for him. Eric said that Al visibly relaxed as peace descended upon him. <\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

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Al died the next day very peacefully and I know he died believing\u2014the answer to my prayers.<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

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Recently I had researched near death and dying experiences which seem to mirror each other around the world. Dr. John <\/b>Lerma, hospice physician at Houston Medical Center, wrote the book Into the Light<\/u> 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.<\/b><\/font><\/p>\n

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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\u2019s 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.<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

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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: \u201cIn 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.\u201d Yes he really \u201cgot me\u201d and I \u201cgot him.\u201d Two souls that came together on that cold night.<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

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Not a demonstrative man verbally he still told me many times: \u201call I do and my life is for you.\u201d His support allowed me to fly but he was always and always will be the \u201cwind beneath my wings.\u201d His love is alive in my heart, but oh, my Albie, I miss you so . . .<\/font><\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/strong><\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[17,29],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rattlebridge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/725"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rattlebridge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rattlebridge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rattlebridge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rattlebridge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=725"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rattlebridge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/725\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rattlebridge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rattlebridge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rattlebridge.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}