While ours was not always an easy relationship, I fondly recall summers spent in the Big House (no, not THAT kind of big house) trying to stuff my brother down the laundry chute and getting caught in the Murphy bed and sacking out on the sleeping porch with my siblings and my cousins, watching the heat lightening flash in the distance as the ceiling fan whirred overhead. There was always unlimited vanilla ice cream and a can of Hershey's syrup to douse it with.
There was also, unfortunately, always that family portrait in the living room that featured a 3-year-old version of me, front-and-center, with my finger shoved up my nose.
So a weekend with girlfriends has been set aside, and a weekend with my family in Omaha has taken its place. While my ties to that side of the extended family are complicated, my ties to my parents are less so. It's hard to come to terms with the grief and loss my parents are bearing, and it's absolutely the right thing to do to be there for them. And I think I need to say goodbye to my grandmother, regardless of what happened in the past. I can say completely objectively that she was a strong, smart, and spirited woman and that she will be missed by many.
As part of the service, H asked if I could read an excerpt from The Little Prince, which happens to be a pretty significant book in our family. It's one of my favorites - such a simple story with such a profound message. Every time I've read it, I've taken away something different depending on context. Today's reading of it yielded this passage, which had me sobbing like a dork. It comes at the end of the book when the little prince decides to die at the hands of the snake in order to leave Earth and go back home. While his death -- his physical absence -- is heartbreaking, he wisely teaches that what is most important is invisible to the eye, and will persist in the heart of those who loved him.
"I am glad that you have found what was the matter with your engine," he said. "Now you can go back home." [...] "I, too, am going back home today..."
Then, sadly - "It is much farther ... It is much more difficult..."
I realized clearly that something extraordinary was happening. I was holding him close in my arms as if he were a little child; and yet it seemed to me that he was rushing headlong toward an abyss from which I could do nothing to restrain him..." [...]
And I knew that I could not bear the thought of never hearing that laughter any more. For me, it was like a spring of fresh water in the desert. "Little man," I said, "I want to hear you laugh again." [...] But he did not answer my plea. He said to me, instead: "The thing that is important is the thing that is not seen...[...] It is just as it is with the flower. If you love a flower that lives on a star, it is sweet to look at the sky at night. All the stars are a-bloom with flowers. [...] And at nigh you will look up at the stars. Where I live everything is so small that I cannot show you where my star is to be found. It is better, like that. My star will just be one of the stars, for you. And so you will love to watch all the stars in the heavens... They will all be your friends. And besides, I am going to make you a present..."
He laughed again.
"Ah, little prince, dear little prince! I love to hear that laughter!"
"That is my present. Just that. [...] All men have the stars, but they are not the same things for different people. For some, who are travelers, the stars are guides. For others they are no more than little lights in the sky. For others, who are scholars, they are problems. For my businessman, they were wealth. But all these stars are silent. You -- you alone - will have the stars as no one else has them - "
"What are you trying to say?"
"In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night. You -- only you -- will have stars that can laugh. And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window so, for that pleasure... And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky. Then you will say to them, 'Yes, the stars always make me laugh!'"
[...] And now six years have already gone by... Now my sorrow is comforted a little. That is to say - not entirely. But I know that he did go back to his planet because I did not find his body at daybreak. It was not such a heavy body... And at night I love to listen to the stars. It is like five hundred million little bells.
Now admit it: aren't you a little verklempt, too?
