On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfill the promise of our friend’s life also, in our own, to the world.
Henry David Thoreau
The temptation is strong to turn those we love and lose into monuments. In the weeks after their death we seek solace from the pain of loss, and turn toward that pain, again and again, like a ship pointing its prow toward an onrushing nor’easter. The risk is that in seeking to brace ourselves against the ravages of feeling that pain, we turn to the pain too often, we seek it out, we come to need it as a companion through our days, and tell ourselves that in letting the pain become us we are honoring the one we have lost. We are not. We are living our own inner drama.
My father, my mother and my three brothers and I all spoke at my sister’s memorial service earlier this month on the University of Colorado Boulder campus. I was last up, and paused a moment before deciding what to say. My sister, raised in snowless San Jose, California, always loved snow; it made her feel alive. Outside, a heavy snow was following as we remembered her and it felt like a beautiful cosmic gesture.
The snow made me think of James Joyce, and I considered trying to recite the last paragraph of his greatest short story, which burned in my mind as I stood there, but not word for word. Here are those words now: “It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
Instead, in my remarks, I talked of my sister as a mother, and also reflected on how it’s not enough to remember those who have been great friends to us, great mentors, but also to let their presence be a living, ongoing component of our lives. We want to stand with Thoreau in focusing not on our pain or loss or the reduced capacity that both bring, and instead on the responsibility we have – to the departed loved one, to ourselves, to life itself – to be strong and brave and lean into the daily choices that go into being there for other people. To engage in this kind of double living, as Thoreau put it, is not merely to add to the richness of life, but to multiply it.
The American Transcendentalists were important to my sister Jan and me when we were both in or near our twenties. We spoke of Thoreau and Walden Pond, and in founding the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods with Sarah Ringler in 2012, I was in essence taking a half-step to Walden (you’re welcome to come and visit us). For Christmas in 1981, when I was nineteen, she gave me a small hardcover of Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” which she inscribed, “Thank you very much for your support as I struggle for ‘self-reliance’ and you have all of my support as you do the same.”
Jan did have her struggles, as we all do. I was thankful to a man named Willie who spoke up at the memorial service to talk of having had a conflict with Jan, and how she reacted afterward (scolding him, in effect, for believing for a second that a disagreement could in any way diminish her respect and love for him).
If we are to live up to Thoreau’s challenge and live out a commitment to the best in those we love and lose, we must also continue to see them for the three-dimensional, flawed figures they were. What I know for sure about my sister is that she was often caught in the trap of having not enough time, and that she faced hard choices, and surely suffered from them: She could not be there for everyone, could not reach out to maintain every close contact she cherished, and yet still she gave of herself so much she often ended up exhausted and sick with a cold.
I think the way to honor her best is to live the healthy life she valued – spiritually healthy, emotionally healthy, balanced and present – to the greatest extent possible. I will ask for her help in this: Thanks to the vision and generosity of my parents, Nancy and Gerard Kettmann (that’s him in the picture), and the fine work of my brother, we were able to enlist the services of wood artist Del Cover to construct a bench that we have placed on the back slopes of the Wellstone Center, alone looking out on a stand of redwoods. It’s a calm, beautiful spot where I once sat for a long, passionate, loving conversation with my sister: Visiting that spot now, I feel her presence like a hand on my shoulder and I feel her love of nature encouraging in me a sense of calm, of peace, and of joy.
Jan’s life was amazing in many ways, and her accomplishments were impressive; her legacy as an education researcher will live on. But for me the path to the kind of ongoing relationship, the double living of Thoreau, is to focus on what she and I loved together and to let that be enough. She was not more than human. She was very human. She was my sister. I’m thankful her spirit remains so palpable a presence to so many of us, especially near the redwoods – it will be strong in the Redwood Grove her daughter Heidi is seeking to have dedicated to her at Big Baisin, and, for me, especially on the bench bearing her likeness in a small redwood forest near Santa Cruz, California.
– Steve Kettmann, co-founder, WCR
Steve’s earlier blogs:
Were You Kind to Someone Today?