Happy Birthday, Wanda June

We held Karen's memorial yesterday.

Distant family and friends started arriving Thursday and on Friday they were all pitching in to help make our Saturday observance go over as well as possible. I spent the day announcing that I was not going to do anything--and I didn't. It wasn't that I didn't want things to go well but I was focused on the memorial and delivering the eulogy and I was surprised to find I didn't have the bandwidth to give even a fraction of a fuck about other things. I am grateful that so many people pitched in and didn't care that I was opting to socialize while they tidied and organized.

Like I said, I was pretty much obsessed with the eulogy. When Karen and I first reconnected more than a quarter century ago, I was super-broke so I wrote a book for her for Christmas (this remains the only "novel" like thing I've ever written). Over the next several years I'd write a lot more for her. This was the first time she'd ever actually requested I write her something and given the situation I felt tremendous responsibility to live up to her clearly confused perceptions of my typing prowess. And I felt overwhelming pressure to do right by her.

And in fact, that pressure extended to the service itself. Late Friday night, after another self-disgusted pass on the eulogy I had a moment of panic and worried that everything we were doing was going to go terribly wrong. Karen and I had made some unusual choices and I was concerned that we would offend the church people attending from St. Paul's and maybe even piss off the funeral home.

In the end, I changed nothing and went with it. Everything followed the plan Karen had wanted and approved.

And everything went well. No, actually, everything went magnificently.

Half an hour prior to the official start time of 1PM, we began playing music. I'd put together this playlist about two years ago and every song has a purpose and most have some intense personal meaning (I cannot listen to the Lou Reed songs here without utterly losing my shit). Accompanying the music was a projected slide show of photos of Karen throughout her life, some of which you can see throughout this blog post.

Here's a link to the playlist: Bon Voyage Entrance. Quick note: the last song was actually played as people left, it was not part of the walking in playlist.

After that bit of cheeriness, it was time to set the tone for the memorial that would follow. To that end, Karen had chosen the following video to be played. This was the real test--and the laughter that greeted the video was just about the most welcome sound I'd heard in ever.

In our infinite consideration and wisdom, the program required the reverend from Karen's church to somehow follow that bit of solemn reverence. Somehow she pulled it off with tremendous aplomb.

This was followed by readings and shared stories from the attendees. Dash led off the Open Mic section of the celebration with a fantastic off-the-cuff speech expressing his determination to remember the truth of his mother. Everyone that spoke did so from the heart and while there were plenty of tears, there was more laughter. The room was filled with warmth and a sense of togetherness and community that surprised me but when you consider the genesis of it all--Karen--it really shouldn't have been so unexpected. She had brought people together and inspired happiness throughout her life. Why should have this day been any different?

All in all it didn't just go well, it was wonderful. It was a comfort. It was cathartic. And the hours we spent afterward at home, with so many friends and family remembering her and just having fun...well, that was extraordinary. I will never be able to thank Karen enough for providing me and kids with such a great day.

As for the insurmountable mountain that was the eulogy, I managed to deliver it without breaking down. People seemed to receive it well. I think I did well by her and that was all I wanted to do.

I've copied my eulogy below. This is more or less exactly what I said although I added and edited a bit on the fly.

EULOGY

Early on in our New York life, well before we got married, Karen and I saw Nashville at the Film Forum. She’d never seen the movie and I had been so young when I’d originally seen it I’d basically forgotten it. When we stepped outside the theater it was a freezing cold January day but it was sunny. We started talking about the movie and it turned out the highlight for us both was this one scene featuring Keenan Wynn.

I remember this for a couple reasons. First, it was a great walk home. I’d lost my gloves so I stuffed my hands in my overcoat pockets and she hung on my arm the whole way back. Every time we had to wait to cross a street we’d embrace and a few times we missed our light but that was okay because we just extended that embrace while we waited for our next chance to cross.

Second, I remember that day because it notably created our personal shorthand for those very rare and intense moments of feeling you experience with art and artists. We called them “Keenan Wynn Moments” and we were pretty stingy when it came to doling out the coveted Keenan Wynn status. Few things were—or are—Keenan worthy.

But with the benefit of hindsight filtered through the lens of, let’s say, recent events, I’ve come to believe that these moments were never about Keenan Wynn or Brando or Rickie Lee Jones or whoever but instead they were really all about Karen. These were actually Karen Coffey moments because without her they never would have resonated so deeply with me. If I didn’t share something with her it was almost as it if never happened. And during my reflection over the last couple of weeks, I’ve come to realize that that sort of intense clarity and impact of the moment wasn’t limited just to these rare isolated instances but, rather, they were just the most prominent of the daily remarkable occasions that defined our 37 years of caring for each other.

So, really, my life has been all about collecting as many of these Karen Coffey Moments as I could, from the time when I was 15 years old waiting every morning on the corner of Orange and Second so I could walk her the last couple blocks to school to a little more than two weeks ago. The most keenly felt and most gratifying experiences in my life were all shared with her and I’d like to share two that bookend our marriage.

First…Over the course of our honeymoon there were a lot of mishaps—a tennis injury that I inflicted upon her, a dodgy hotel, a massively delayed flight, and a very very unfortunate overnight journey on the Orient Express—but what I remember most from that trip is one evening Karen and I spent in Salzburg. Every August there’s this month-long Mozart festival and we had picked up tickets to a string quartet performance at this castle that sits on a large hill high above the rest of the city. At intermission, the two of us wandered out onto the, I don’t know, I guess you’d call them ramparts or something and we looked down at the city. There was a full moon above us and below us a layer of fog rested atop the city.

We looked down at Salzburg and marveled at how beautiful it was, with these thousands of sparkling lights trying to pierce the fog over this classic kind of storybook village. They shot Sound of Music there. Anyway, we stood there for a long time, right up until they announced the performance was about to begin again. But right then, somewhere in the city a symphony orchestra was performing Beethoven’s Ninth and just as we turned to return to our seats they hit the Ode to Joy and all of these voices just came swelling up from down below us. So, while everyone else at our concert took their seats, we stayed outside. Just the two of us, no one else. We stayed out there until the symphony ended and was replaced by just thunderous applause and cheers from what we liked to consider as the concert’s secondary audience. We cheered and applauded, too, Karen laughing and clapping with her hands above her head. After that, we spent about five minutes or so trying to figure out how to get back into the castle. It wasn’t easy—those places are literally built to keep people out. And I think Karen needed to use the bathroom so that made our inability to get inside just a little more urgent and a little more entertaining.

Still, it was magical. It was. I was never more in love with her than at that moment, some eight days give or take into our marriage. And honestly I was never any less in love with her, either.

More recently…

Karen’s last responsive day was October 19, which was just two days before she died. She had the strength to do just three things that day. First, she smiled when our longtime friend Cliff visited and held her hand. Second, she opened her eyes and whispered “Hi” to her daughter who was perched right next to her bed and chattering away at her. The third thing came later that night. Understand: Karen was really struggling with pain at this point and unfortunately it was necessary for us to periodically move her for her longer term comfort, but moving her hurt. Enough for her to cry out at times. We apologized all the way through it, each time we did it.

And yet…this one time, this one last time, as I leaned over her frail and broken body in order to lift her just enough to shift her just a little bit, she somehow managed to get her left arm across my back. Her fingers spread out and I could feel her pressing her palm against my back. 48 hours before she’d leave us, she wanted me to know she loved me. And to reassure me that it was okay to move her. She was taking care of me. 

It was her last conscious act. It was my last Karen moment.

That final action speaks to the core of who my wife was, why she mattered to so many people, and while she’ll continue to be a touchstone in our lives. I’ve never known anyone who was so deliriously and joyfully in love with the world and who and what it offered. The breadth of her unbridled love is exhausting, frankly.

Just to illustrate this, a few things…

Karen loved:

Leonard Cohen, Aimee Mann, Barbra Streisand, Marlon Brando, Vanessa Redgrave, William Shakespeare, Anton Chekhov, William Faulkner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Louisa May Alcott, Einstein on the Beach, Laurie Anderson, the IT Crowd and all of the Oz books.

She loved Game of Thrones—both on TV and in print. She loved The Lord of the Rings—on screen and in print, although, honestly, it was the movies (especially the extra-long director’s cut) which were dearest to her heart.

She loved working in her garden. She loved her roses and inexplicably loved the lilac bushes I bought her that refused to bloom. She loved her weekend trips to the nursery, planning our new front yard, and dreaming about putting a pool in the back.

She loved Buchhardt Gardens, the butthole of Sauron, going on cruises, suites at the Bellagio, and she loved all the fantastic Saturday nights we spent in New York with Vito and Cathy and Rayleen and Cliff.

She loved matzah ball soup, Marie Belle chocolate, holiday dinners at the Moonstruck Diner, anything dinners at the French Laundry, Girl Scout cookies including the weird kind of nasty ones, real deal barbecue, John’s Pizza whole pie not a slice, and every single thing at the Festival of Pies.

She loved Die Hard, Die Hard 2, Die Hard: With a Vengeance, Live Free or Die Hard. But A Good Day to Die Hard…eh…not so much.

She loved Sour Diesel, Grandaddy Purple, Jack Herer, and especially Chem Four. I’ll be honest here: she just loved smoking weed. It might have taken her 50 years to get around to it but, man alive, did she ever become a pothead. You have never seen anyone enjoy the act of smoking a joint more, announcing “Pot is great” while rolling the smoke around her tongue and beaming. She loved trying to blow smoke rings even though she never managed to do it.

She loved the Chicago Cubs, the Dallas Cowboys (especially Emmitt Smith), Torvill and Dean, the Olympics in general, and became a late-in-life boxing fan with a deep affection for Gennady Golovkin, Vasyl Lomachenko, and Robert Guerrero. She never cared for Floyd Mayweather, though, but that probably speaks well of her.

She loved decorating her home, even though she didn’t have a real flair for it and relied too much on mirrors. She tried to spruce up our bathroom by placing a mirror over the toilet but she put it at such a low height that basically any man who happens to stand while using said toilet is ambushed by a moment of the most intimate sort of self-reflection.

She loved everything I ever wrote even when I didn’t.

She loved Maggie and Zoe and Smokey and Ivan and Otto and Calvin and Alice. She loved every dog at ARF and she loved visiting ARF just to see them.

She loved working at Synergy and Wells Fargo because she loved the people she worked with, finding them to be a reliable source of both joy and inspiration.

She loved her parents.

She loved her sisters.

She loved our brave, heroic children with a ferocity that was almost frightening.

And for some reason, she loved me.

And now she’s gone. Even though, in a way, it doesn’t feel like it.

One of the weirder things of life since Karen passed has been a stubbornly persistent sense of her barely removed presence. A feeling that she’s somewhere in the vicinity, maybe just around the corner or in the other room. I feel her presence in the universe so keenly I keep expecting her to walk in the door.

And I have given up trying to talk myself out of this. That she’s not here. Because I think she hasn’t left. She is, in some strange and wonderful way, still so very present. Her love endures where her body does not. I see it in the faces of everyone here. I have experienced it with every kind act you fine people have performed on behalf of my family over the last three years. I live it every time I talk to our children, who are just as delightfully idiosyncratic and flat-out amazing as she was.

We were married for a long time and Karen’s love—enthusiastic, unflagging and limitless—buoyed me through every day. It buoys me still. I feel that strong, certain love as surely now as I ever have. The difference now is that I cannot return it. We cannot return it. That’s the heartbreaking part.

But while my heart is broken it is somehow also full. Full of love for her and full of the love she poured into me each day we were together. So while I am torn with grief, what I feel most deeply within me is gratitude.

I am so very, very grateful.

Thank you, my darling girl.

I have been so blessed.

We all have been.

May we have more such lucky days ahead.