Ananuthathing. I realized that of all my Exes, Special Guy is hands down the favorite. There never has been, and I dare say there never will be, anyone like him. He and I connected on so many levels. Y'know, if something awful were to happen to me--another terrorist attack, the unexpected suicide of someone I love, getting tested for HIV and finding out I've seroconverted--some hit me right in the gut thing... I'd call Special Guy. And that would be a huge help.
Something else. I don't know if I've mentioned this previously in my blog. It might be a surprise. In 1999, my sister Kathy died. My Ex and I were in New Mexico on vacation at the time. We had one more full day to go when the phone call came. We flew home immediately. At her funeral, in St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, I took advantage of the rubric in the Book of Common Prayer in the service for the Burial of the Dead that said that "At this point, a member of the family may speak." I stood in the pulpit of the church where I had grown up and talked about my sister. (I'll conclude this post by printing the text of what I said.) I think I was pretty effective.
A few days later, I was sitting with The Ex having dinner back in Brooklyn. I told him that I realized, in part because of speaking at my sister's funeral, that I wanted to pursue a goal I had always had: I wanted to become a priest. I started down that road, and was sort of on my way to the seminary when I left him. When I spoke to the priest at my sponsoring parish after the split, he said that he had to seriously had to rethink my application. It seems that in his mind, I and my Ex were all of a piece, and this was so unexpected. I took my cue that all bets were off.
I was bitter for a while. I have always wanted to be a priest. And, I think I would make a good priest. I'm temperamentally, intellectually, and characterologically suited for it.
So why do I bring this up now? (As if that is a question I ever ask myself while blogging...) It's like this. That book I'm writing? Y'know what it is? It's a series of sermons. That's what it is. Good sermons, in fact. Not preachy, not "This is the 'right' way to do things and you've been doing it wrong" or worse still holding myself up as a model of sanctity to be emulated. Rather, I pose questions which I hope that the reader will come away seeking to answer, and in searching out those answers, will come to see the world in a new way.
And so, in a way, I am becoming a priest. Just not in the church that I expected.
You don't have to address me as "Father." But "Sir" would be nice.
Anyway, here's what I said at my sister's funeral...
On behalf of my family, I would like to thank all of you for coming tonight to this church where all of the Kramer children were baptized, so that together we can celebrate Kathy’s life, grieve the loss of her presence among us, and pray together that she will share in the glory of Christ’s resurrection.
Kathy and I were very close. I think it is a testament to the person that she was that I am far from alone in that. Kathy had a heart the size of Iowa. She loved many people. I remember her telling me once that she wished she was better at holding grudges when someone took advantage of her, but she just didn’t seem to have a span of attention for that.
I miss her terribly. It seems unreal to me that she’s not there to call or to visit, that I will never again hear her voice and her laughter. In fact, it is her words that I miss most keenly. Particularly her turns of phrase.
“When they taste this, they’ll scream, they’ll cry, they’ll live other lives.”
“I took that gray and turned it purple.”
“They didn’t know what to do, so they did it all.”
“I can’t dance and it’s too wet to plough.”
“Stay off the roads, I’m gonna be driving dangerously.”
“Boom. Done.”
And of course her stories. I loved always to listen to her stories. I doubt that there’s not a person sitting here tonight that I haven’t heard Kathy tell me about. When I was little, these stories were like Greek myths to me. Describing people in outrageous situations who do brave things, crazy things, stupid things, and raise sordid circumstances to the level of beauty through the power of laughter. Through these stories, I learned most of what I know about what it means to be a human being.
Something you may or may not know about Kathy was she was unbearably shy. The first time she met you, she was terrified of you, sure that you wouldn’t like her. I’m an exception to that. The first time she met me she said, “Mother, there’s something wrong. He looks just like Mr. Magoo.”
Among Kathy’s strategies for overcoming her shyness and for getting people to see her worth and her beauty was to feed them. Kathy understood better than anyone I’ve ever known the sacred power of food. When my partner (The Ex) and I had been seeing each other for only a few months, (The Ex) invited me to come along to a party with friends of his from work. I would be meeting them all for the first time. People coming to the party were asked to bring along something to eat, salad, bread and cheese, something like that. I called my sister for ideas. I made a tri-colored seafood mousse served on a bed of seafood pasta salad with tomato, spinach, and white fettuccine. They screamed, they cried, they lived other lives.
It is my prayer that the element of Kathy that lives on in me, and in all of us, is that generosity, the readiness to love and be kind and to give.
Thank you again for coming tonight. There’s going to be a reception following the service at B. Maxwell’s right up on Court Street and I hope you will all join us.
Peace be with you
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