LYNNE'S EULOGY

On Colette Amelia's blog today she talked about death and eulogy's and how we don't really know the other person. No one really knows the real Colette Amelia, not really. She suggested we write our own eulogy and so I did. It's a funny little piece, and would be totally different tomorrow, but here it is.

Lynne's Eulogy

Lynne, as you all know her, isn’t the Lynne she was. She was a little girl who would watch the jet trails in the sky and wish with all her might she could be on that plane, going somewhere, it didn’t matter; she wanted to see it all.

She wanted to meet people in robes and saris and loincloths and business suits. She wanted to sit on riverbanks with strangers and talk in foreign tongues and laugh, throwing her head back. She wanted to cry with strangers, and put her hand on the arm of the grieving woman. She wanted to share the stories and laughter and a bowl of steaming food, cooked over an open fire. You’d think that since Lynne didn’t do these things that it would just be a dream but it wasn’t. To her it was real--as real as dreamer's dreams can be. Someday, she’s always said to herself. Someday. So what if it doesn’t happen in mortality, it will happen.


She wondered things. How did the earth stay in its spot in space? How does God know her thoughts and the thoughts off all his children? Who orchestrates the coincidences that, in retrospect, aren’t coincidences at all? Why were some people born beautiful and some not? Did God love everyone equally? Her mom said so. Her mom was an optimist, a worker, and a believer. Should she take the opinion of her mom or form her own. She formed her own but formed them from the live coals of her mother’s faith.

She grew up to find life wasn’t what she thought it would be. She laughed when she didn’t want to, and found that it was almost as good as being really happy. And most of the time she was happy. She loved her parents and sisters and eventually had a husband and children that she loved more than she could imagine. She cried when the children went back to school in the fall and cried when the children had troubles. She never wanted anyone to suffer even though she knew suffering brought growth. She wrung her hands and people wrung her heart.

She hated that people defined who she was by the way she looked. No one knew, not really. So she wrote and in some of her words the real Lynne was revealed. Maybe a granddaughter will read the words in the future and will say, This is who Grandma was. And it might be. And then when that grandchild finally breathes her last, at age 95, Lynne will be the first in line to greet her and weep for joy at having more family join her, for that’s what it really is for Lynne. Family. Family and God and the Savior and her faith.

And then she will take her granddaughter by the hand and introduce her to people in robes, and saris, and loincloths, and businesses suits and say to her, These are family, too. Wait until you hear their story. For, as Lynne has always said, it is all about the story.