1 Corinthians, 13

The words I spoke to honor my Grandfather, February 2003…

When some of us decided to speak today about my grandfather, my brother Eric commented that we would be “reduced to words.”  And he was right about that.  

All of my adult life I have been attracted to the power of written words on a page, but today I am struggling with what is in any way adequate to tell you about Grandpa.  It was easy the think that my Grandfather would never grow old.  If you look over all the photographs that are scattered across the front of this room, you can see that from the time I was a very little girl until now, Grandpa looked the same.  You could almost say he was ageless.  While the years passed, he remained a place of steadiness and love standing by quietly watching his grandchildren make their way into their respective adulthoods.  And while we weren't necessarily graceful or lovable through the process, he unfailingly was.  

Through the years that hurtled past while we lived through whatever maelstrom, joy or growing up experience we might be in, there was something that we all understood; something unspoken between us.  It went: find Grandpa, find your base, find your center again.  He was our friend, our rock, our old angel man.

His five grandchildren are very different…and of the five, I was the "horse-crazy kid."  I got my first horse when I was five.  Grandpa got him for Steve and me as a Christmas gift.  "Baron" was his name.  Baron was a horse on his brother Woody's farm, but come Christmas morning 1963, Baron stood outside our front door with a big red ribbon woven into his braided tail, a big bow at the bottom.  I was taken.  I have loved horses for the rest of my life.

Some of my best days and memories with Grandpa were the two of use hanging out in the little red barn in Plant City and caring for my colt, Aslan, and the two mares we had there.  Whatever I was doing…cleaning stalls, moving hay bales or grooming horses, he was right there with me.  He always wore his work clothes: Dickies and a vintage-style Pith hat to limit the sun.  He took turns with me for all the manual labor parts of taking care of a horse barn in the right way.  I still have two horses and for years and--as recently as a year ago--Grandpa cared for one of them.  He liked doing that.

Grandpa and "Hasta," my cutting horse

As respects barn duties, I have two words for my family: hay baling.  Those were the few days a year when it was time to fill up the big barn from Grandpa's hay field.  It was the sweatiest, most back-breaking thing we have probably ever done together as a family.  Grandpa drove the tractor wearing his work uniform, those khaki Dickes, a red bandanna over his head with his Pith hat, while my Dad and brothers and sisters, Steve, Eric, Luana, Deanna and her husband Kirby and I threw and stacked the bales of hay in the barn.  They weren't light.  My Mom and my sister-in-law, Vicky brought pitchers or lemonade or tea for us.  I have to say that in hindsight, it was fun.  We laughed.  We talked.  We walked behind the hay trailer and called each other "slow-poke,"as we took took turns getting tired.  Or, we lent a hand to climb up on the stacked bales for a ride back to the barn when the hay trailer was stacked and full…a hayride.  We were a team.  I guess I should speak for myself on that front, but I wouldn't trade those sweaty days for anything.

My brother Steve, brother-in-law Kirby and Stevie stacking hay

I look back on those days with such a grateful heart.  Those sunny days in that cool barn allowed us the time to talk…about the way the world used to be, the different way it was then, about life, about practical stuff.  Born in 1911, his eyes had seen so much in his life.   I was learning perspective.  I was learning practicality, but mostly I was soaking in the love of my good Grandpa, knowing without a doubt that he would rather be spending time outside with me in that little old broken- down barn, than anything else he could be doing.  His family was his first priority.  He didn't spend a lot of time talking about it.  His actions spoke for him.  My Dad always said "Grandpa wasn't a talker.  He was doer."  And that is about as right as he could put it.  Grandpa went through everything with us. We would not have had it any other way.

Breast cancer was a rude interruption in my life at 38 years old.  When I was going through chemotherapy we joked together about having peach fuzz on our bald heads.  And when that chapter of my life was over and I had the son that all my doctors said I would not be able to have, I brought him to my home in Florida and laid him in his great-grandfather's arms.  It didn't matter what it was: new babies, weddings, funerals, cancer, new jobs…Grandpa was always there.

Grandpa with Stevie, his first great-grandchild

There were hundreds of days and hundreds of stories in all kinds of different settings, but the underlying reason for all those wonderful times was clear: Grandpa loved us deeply.  He loved us entirely with no doubt.  And he loved us with the same degree of earnestness that we loved him…perhaps more.  It is hard to find the words to tell the place Grandpa held in each one of our hearts.  He never, not once, let any of us down.  Whatever good that I am as a person today is in great part from all he taught me by his life and by his steadfast, unconditional love.

When Grandpa was in the hospital and we were
trying so hard to encourage him and help him to get well, we made sure that he was alone as little as possible.  We didn't want  him to feel the isolation of being a hospital patient.  We were afraid of losing someone so precious to us.  And when it was all said and done, I realized that the message of his life was coming back to us then; that the love he gave us all through the years would help us find our way without him.  I realized that, in the end, the only antidote to the isolation is love, the antidote to fear is love and today, as we are grieving, it is the only antidote to loss.  It is what sustains us above all else.

My Grandpa has gone to be with God now.  Our old angel man is living with the God's angels.  In the Bible, it tells us that love conquers everything.  My Grandpa taught me that too.

*********

I Corinthians, 13 ... If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned,1 but have not love, I gain nothing.

4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

8 Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. 12 For now we see in a glass darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

13 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Chickens

At the time, I couldn’t imagine the man he would become, much less the notion of him as a man.  My brother Steve was only 14 years old, but my father was raising him to be a capable, self-reliant man in the most old-fashioned sense of the word.  In fact, I can’t imagine my teenaged son doing a lot of the things we did back in the day.  We lived on a five acre chunk of land on the highest point in Hillsborough County.  In fact, it was named for my great grandfather, Henry Pugh Kennedy.  The local folks referred to it as "Kennedy Hill."  And that was where we lived with a small assortment of livestock…and chickens.  The chickens were as near-cherished as my Dad 
could muster in an emotion for farm animals.  Most days they laid their eggs and happily chirped and pecked the days away on our sunny Florida small farm.

When Dad’s chickens began to disappear, we were worried.  One by one, we'd find the remnants of a former loved hen when morning came. There was a fox that was stealing the hens, a true master of stealth.  And after an entire week of waking up to feathers strewn untidily all over the back yard and around the pool deck, I decided that this fox must have had  a death wish because our Dad, Papa Pierre, was getting ready to pull out the stops.  He had tried to fox-proof the hen house with no luck.  He double-locked it, wired the roof shut, then he triple locked it.  The recalcitrant fox continued to prevail.  The hens were nervous.  They stopped laying eggs.  And when evening came, there was always hopeful discussion at the dinner table of the new tactical improvements to the chicken house.  No, the fox would not win tonight.  No, he wouldn’t.  

Inevitably though, we would awaken to beaks and feathers and assorted gross-looking discarded body parts. Worse, the fox had the temerity to drag all that mess across our pool deck.  The consensus was a mixed “ewwh” from all of us kids and downright shocked outrage from Papa Pierre.  Now, he would resort to his “big gun,” my 14 year old younger brother Steve.

“Boy,” he said the next night after dinner.  “I want you to find a big ball of string.”

“Yeah, Dad?” said Steve.

“And then, I want you to take it with you when you go to bed tonight and tie it around your big toe.” 

Now, my brother Steve was truly the model kid.  He made good grades.  He was an athlete.  And unlike his big-mouthed big sister, known occasionally for her stubbornness, he was unfailingly respectful.  But as soon as the words “big toe” passed out of our father’s mouth, he began to look suspect…and also a little perturbed.  

“Aw, Dad.  How come?  I just wanna go to bed.”

“Listen here.  I’m gonna tie a dead hen at the other end of that string and leave it out by the hen house.  Now when you feel it pull on your toe, just get up and shoot that fox with the 12 gauge.  I am going to get that fox or bobcat or whatever it is that is stealing my hens." 

“No, Dad.  I think I am going to be doing that,” my brother said.

And that was the end of the conversation.  My brother Steve was on the hook for getting that chicken-stealing fox.  I felt bad.  I was often a little jealous of some of the fun stuff my Dad did with my younger brothers: target shooting, driving the riding mower, building stuff…but at that moment, well, I was really glad to be a girl. 

That night we all went to bed in our usual way.  That is, except for my brother Steve, who had gone to bed early in anticipation of the fox watch.  He was sleeping the heavy sleep that falls on a teenager with a very long string attached to his big toe.  The 12 guage shot gun sat, oblingly, nearby with the safety clicked to the “on” position in case duty called.  The string, went off the top bunk bed over our the bottom bunk bed and over our sleeping kid brother Eric.  It passed out beside the closet and out the bedroom door.  It went through the living room, out the back double glass doors and through the backyard to the pasture where the chicken house was located and, accordingly, was attached to one very dead hen. 

It’s almost 40 years later and now I can’t remember if I heard the gun go off that night, but on my recent Christmas visit home I was reminded again of those chicken days back in the 70’s.   All these years that have passed, all forty of them, Dad has always had some chickens pecking around the place.  And among these we've had some famous ones in the family lore.  There was "Peep-Peep," and "Henrietta" and there was even a scraggly little rooster named "Mister Kennedy" accompanied by another even dinkier rooster named "Fancy-boy." We sure have had our chickens.

This past Christmas, Mom and I walked outside after dinner to discover red feathers scattered about the woods near the house on the family compound.  Papa, by that time, was in his comfy reclining chair taking a post-Christmas dinner nap.  I wondered how many times over the last forty years Papa had lost chickens just that way, still always fighting the good fight trying to keep them safe.  I shook my head a little realizing how much things were the same…in that way at least.  Here we were, all of us grown now, with children and even grandchildren, but the chicken saga continued.  The sameness of that small thing struck a chord with me.

My brother Steve wasn’t nearby at just that moment that Mom and I walked outside.  He'd taken the grand babies to his house to nap, but I knew: if I walked myself on over to his house around the corner and handed him a ball of string and a shotgun, he’d know just what it meant.  He’d probably have a good chuckle about it too.

Joie and "Peep-Peep..."

Wait for me

Since the day that I watched Aslan come into the world, I was completely enchanted and in love.  My love for him was pure.  In the last weeks of his life, despite really feeling terrible, he always greeted me and checked my pockets for treats or licked my hand.  In his lifetime, he gave me far more than I could ever give back to him. He too, was family for me.  This letter is for him:

Wait for me...

I waited for you…and finally, on April 12, 1984, you arrived.  It took you forever to stand up and get off the ground to nurse and I was worried that you wouldn’t do it soon enough; that you’d get worn out before you figured out the gravity thing, but you finally did.  I beamed over you like I’d birthed you myself and all the neighbors in our quiet country neighborhood came on foot or by horseback or by car to welcome you to the world.  I watched over you like the most careful nanny.  In my life, I was a horse girl, then a horse teenager and finally and best, a horse-woman.  You were that baby, that foal, that I swore I’d always raise and keep forever.  All the love in the world was around you standing there on your long, wobbly legs.  At first you were a little shy, but I rubbed your head and ears and legs and back and spent hours with you day after day as those long spring days ushered you into your life with me.  At first, I was just another familiar curiosity and then a quickly recognizable part of your lovely baby days of grazing by your mama's side and running for the sheer joy of stretching those amazing equine legs that are to me to this day, mysterious in their power for all their slender beauty.  My friends sent me cards of congratulations on your arrival and came to see you.  I called you my baby...and you were certainly that.

You were named “Aslan” for the lion of C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia.  Lewis’ Aslan is great in size, great in heart.  His beautiful eyes carry depth and warm light and when you look inside of them you can only speak truth.  His mane is full and golden and those who look upon him are humbled at the sight of such regal power. 

It was much, a huge name really, for such a small foal, born too with a golden mane, to wear.  And somehow now, these many years later, I pause to consider how it was that you were able to do that…your simple eloquence, your peaceful comfort with yourself and gentleness with all those around you.  I couldn’t possibly have imagined how the 100 pound miracle that I had waited for all my life, watching as you discovered the world, would change me.  You were my steady light bringing gladness to me throughout the paths my life took. 

There were times when I went long periods without seeing you, but you were unfailingly there for me.  A drive down the black paved road lined with moss-hung oaks.  I turn off the pavement onto the gravel path by the pasture. A whistle at the fence and a call from me brought you running and whinnying.  You never disappointed me.  Not once.

Time passed and then you were two.  When I slid over your back the first time, you casually turned your head to look back at me as if to say “what are you doing up there?” Our bond was like that...trusting, natural and easy.

It is January 2005.  My mind is straining to send you a message as I fly home to Florida to be near you, “don’t leave beautiful one.  Not yet.  It’s not time.” You lay on a surgery table in a place I’ve never been…”I am coming Aslan.”  The constant echo of my heart is “stay, stay, stay with me.  Please don’t go.”  And I realize too what this means: if you leave me, one more light in my life has gone dark.  Things that are precious leave…one by one…until there are only the pictures in my mind and an ache that never really goes away.  One more passage. One more good thing not here.  Mercifully, you recovered and I brought you to be close to me here in the North.

January 2006…you are sick again.  Gail is calling me from the barn.  You are in pain.  It is worse.  We have to do something…trying, trying to help you.  The vet, more x-rays, phone calls, the farrior, massages.  What else…what else can we do?  There must be something.  There must be.  The gut-wrenching realization then...oh God…there isn’t.  There is no way for me to take the pain away.

It is February 17, 2006.  You are standing now.  The vet has nerve blocked your feet.  You aren’t hurting.  You have most of your favorite things right there in front of you:  peppermints, sweet feed, apples…people you know and trust.  And I am there too, just like when you arrived.  All the love in the world is right there again.  It’s all around you.  I rub your neck and kiss your nose and thank you for being such a fine wonderful gentleman and for all you gave me.  Gail holds my shoulders and walks me away, around the corner.  I do not want you to see me crying.  This sad place in time is indeed, the one last thing I could do to help you.  Sweet one. Celebrated one.  Light of my life.  A part of me is going with you.

But you will never really leave me beautiful sweet boy.  You will always live in my heart and in my mind…and that’s where I’ll always look for you, there, in that shimmering place in memory: off the black pavement, down the gravel road to the pasture where you will come running and whinnying as I step out of my car door and call your name.

Arms full of flowers...

     It is early morning…and it is raining.  Once again, I am on my way to visit my grandmother's room in the hospital.  Early dawn in this place is eerily silent.  The corridor lights of the floor have not yet been lit.  I walk into the darkness, the soles of my shoes squeaking like the windshield wipers of the passing cars outside.  The morning's palest manifestation of light and shadow spills in through the cracks of the windows, casting melancholy in its wake.

    I enter her room hearing the empty sounds that I hear each day: the respirator keeping rhythm like a ragged timepiece in measured expirations that signify a pulse, but really call out to me the ebb of a heartbeat.  The suction of the nasogastric tube and the intravenous lines giving out occasional alarm bursts caution my hope. This breathing I hear is artificial.  An acrid smell hangs in the room and wondering for only a moment if it is against hospital rules, I open the windows.  The raindrops splatter the windowsill and my face, but the sound of the rain outside the room is somehow soothing.  As the fresh air pours into the room, I remember that if it weren't for the sadness that the mother of my father weren’t here, in this bed, dying, that it is springtime in my Florida home.

    In this bed lies an elderly comatose woman, her long gray hair tumbled across the pillow, the lines of her face tell the unconscious narrative of a life. 

Finally, I do not wonder who she was.  The expectant lift of her brow is gone now.  I can see the tiny blue lines in her skin.  She looks worn and tired, but the remnants of a former beauty still remain.  And with my twenty-something year old eyes, I realize that the beauty of her youth has really given way to a deeper kind.
 

    While she lived, she was so strong, always able and filled with endurance and courage that always came just when she needed it.  Her frailness now in this bed, frightens me.  Medicine offers nothing to help her now.  The stroke was massive.  I think how she would hate this.  No voice.  No control.  As I look at her in this unwanted sleep, I remember that I am an extension of her.  I am reminded of my own mortality.
 

    I begin to do the things the nursing staff does not do, things that would be important to her.  I wipe her face with a warm cloth.  I comb her hair that has become disheveled, taking care that I do not pull too hard and that it is away from her face.  I put lotion on her cheeks.  They are dry, but smooth for an aged woman.  I adjust her gown and fluff her pillow as much as I can without lifting her head, sometimes talking to her, wondering if she hears.  I try anyway.  I tell her things I always meant to tell her.  I tell her that I love her, trying to remember if I have lately.  And inside my head, angry at myself for not saying it every time I saw her.

    Her name was Joan Marie LeClaire Kennedy.  Once she was a beauty queen.  As a child, I had seen a picture of a young woman in a drop-waist dress, twenties style, with bobbed, slightly-waved hair.  She was pretty, smiling, with her arms full of flowers, and her eyes full of dreams.

    Born in Kankakee, Illinois, she went to Tampa, Florida with her contractor father, mother and sisters, May, Blanche and Mary Louise.  In 1928, she won the Miss Tampa Beauty Pageant.  Soon after, she caught the eye of then County Commissioner Harry P. Kennedy, the grandson of Thomas Pugh Kennedy who helped to found the city of Tampa.  Despite a an age difference and some raised eyebrows, she married him.  It was scandalous.  It was fabulous.

    Their marriage lasted more than twenty years when Harry had a heart attack and died leaving her alone with their three children.  The Depression had not passed over Harry.  His fortune had been wiped out.  Joan Marie was completely broke. 

   

     While she had always painted for her own pleasure, she found that she could actually sell some of her paintings.  Her seemingly innate business acumen helped in making some real estate transactions and soon she built a house next to the apartment building she and Harry owned along Bayshore Boulevard in Tampa.  Living there, she managed her small property.  It wasn't much, but it gave her the financial independence that enabled her to pay their debts.

    Joan Marie loved the city and being outdoors.  And as the years passed, her face became a familiar one in the downtown bustle of old Tampa.  She was growing older as the city did.  She loved to tell stories--all kinds--of growing up within the walls of a convent; of old Tampa and its characters; of the grandfather I had never known and of my father as a child.  She loved red hair, French history, Baroque and Impressionist art, antiques and mostly, with her artist's eye, all her "pretty children," which meant all of us, her l3 grand-children.  This was my grandmother.  This was where I came from.  And here she lay in a hospital bed as I stood next to her and tried with my mind's might to will her to stay here--with us.

    The rattle of the hospital breakfast cart is outside the door now.  The smell of hot biscuits drifts in through the door and it is time for me to go.  Once again, as every day she has been here, I kiss her forehead, hold her hand and say goodbye--just as though she hears.  It is the last time I will see her.  She died the following morning.

It was Mother’s Day and momentous for me in a thousand ways. I saw my father, the bravest, toughest man I knew, weep like a child. It was the first time.  I saw him in a new way, but with the all the tenderness a daughter carries for her father.  Now I realized in earnest how he was more than a father.  He was a son too.

    Joan Marie was my grandmother.  She had three children, thirteen grandchildren and was well-known by the people of our city.  She was an artist, a poet and a dreamer.  It is only now that I realize how she did a thing that is most difficult for any of us.  She made her own way.  To do that, she paid a price.  Perhaps she was whispered about as eccentric, "an artist's temperament," people might say.  But she knew all that and still, she still chose those things in that part of life she sought.  I was only a child then.  I didn't understand such a need.  There was much she showed by example that escaped my childish impatience.  That kind of individuality was too abstract a concept for my grasp then. But it was in those days before she died that any of what she tried to say finally broke through and I began to understand the way that she lived and all that it allowed.

    When she died, there were lots of things to be divided.  I got an antique lamp, a book of her poems and a painting that she did, but the best of what was hers had come to me in smaller, intimate ways throughout my life in her stories, her humor, her love of art, her reverence for beauty and in her resourcefulness.

  I find myself thinking of her often.  The memory is not painful now, but as the days pass and I reflect on our relationship it is bittersweet.  I wish I could tell her that it wasn't for nothing; that her efforts, her example, did not fail; that if I have somehow escaped the status quo in even small ways; that if things have been different or better, then I owe her a debt for her tender legacy.  And though she could not answer in those final days, I hope that somehow she knew...

I finally got it.