Sunday, April 3, 2011
Catherine Rainwater Eulogy
St Ed's Service 02 Apr 11
The following beautiful piece is from Catherine Rainwater, as presented at the St Edward's University memorial service held on Saturday, 02 April 2011.
Catherine was one of Michele's dearest friends from the University. Catherine is editing Michele's book on displacement.
Catherine Rainwater
Eulogy for Michele Kay
(December 2, 1944 - February 16, 2011)
April 2, 2011
St. Edward's University, Our Lady Queen of Peace Chapel
Many years ago, I learned by negative example that a long road trip in a Volkswagen could provide a pretty accurate measure of a friendship. I value each and every friendship that I'm lucky enough to maintain, but the ugly truth is that some of them wouldn't bear up under the stress of travel in a Volkswagen farther than three or four hundred miles, even under ideal road conditions. I learned through that same negative example to gauge accurately a companion's travel mileage capacities, and to avoid getting into a car with a person not likely to hold up past the county line.
I never took a long road trip with Michele in a Volkswagen, but I know in fact she was an Austin-to-Boston sort of friend. She was thoughtful and considerate, a great conversationalist, a person who listened and remembered, a friend with no end of her own fascinating stories to tell, but who always wanted to hear mine. When Michele asked a question, she was genuinely interested in the answer. I never heard her talk simply because there was open air space. She was always on the trail of a point, or ferreting out some deeper understanding. During her long illness, as the verbal skills she valued failed her, I could still see clearly in her large, expressive eyes an enduring curiosity and capacity for listening.
Though I no longer have a Volkswagen, I did enjoy a few short road trips with Michele throughout the too few years we knew each other. One I remember fondly occurred in October of 2008. My mother had passed away a few weeks earlier, and now I had to return to the old cemetery in Brady, Texas, where she is buried alongside family and old friends, to see that her headstone had been set correctly. Perhaps because Michele had buried her own mother not long before, she insisted that I shouldn't carry out my melancholy chore alone. She enjoyed car trips, and volunteered to ride along with me. Gladly, I accepted, for Michele's company was a gift at any time. We decided to make a day of it, not to rush, and to find a place to eat lunch in Brady.
Around 10 a.m., we set out for the cowboy town my mother loved that calls itself the Heart of Texas. Along the way, we talked about our mothers, born in the same year, who seemed to share some things in common, perhaps generational, despite their distant, different origins—her mother from the sandy Plains of Giza, now buried in a Jewish cemetery in London; my mother from the rolling plains of central Texas, now buried less than a mile from where she first drew breath.
As we drove past fields of cows and goats and horses that define the open Texas Hill Country, Michele said, "I thought I was okay when my mother died, but I really wasn't." I felt acquainted with Michele's mother, though I never met her, based on autobiographical essays Michele had written and I had read. I could easily picture Paulette who, like my own mother, had a flair for fashion and a variety of old-fashioned convictions. Michele's compassionate nature showed in her regard for her mother. Before Paulette died, Michele called her every day in London and visited her at least twice a year. Even though our mothers were both way past 90 when they died, we missed them, and we were their children still. We laughed and called ourselves some old, pathetic orphans.
Along the way to Brady, we stopped for the necessities—that is to say, to buy club soda. At the windswept, lonesome cemetery, all was well. Michele wandered among marble angels while I arranged a few Gerbera daisies near my mother's freshly cemented marker. I wondered what my friend was thinking in this resting place of several generations of my family. I knew that her own family's exile from Egypt, when Michele was 12, was only the first experience in her life that led her to feel she was a stranger, without a country, without a home, without even a native language to anchor her in place and time.
Michele said, not long before she passed away,
"I always believed when I died I would be buried in England. But my mother is buried in a Jewish cemetery, and my father's ashes are in a non-religious cemetery. For the first time since my parents met, they couldn’t find a way to be together. It wouldn’t make sense for me to be buried over there. I feel, now, here is where I will be buried. I love this house. I would like to be buried in the back yard."
It made me happy to know that after moving to Austin and eventually marrying Robert, Michele at last had found the place where she belonged.
As we left the cemetery, the sun shone down on my mother's black, granite marker. In the glossy, reflective surface, I saw the sky, mirrored as it will be there for all my own remaining days, and beyond. I'll never forget, and I'll always be glad it was Michele who accompanied me that autumn day, before the grass had had a chance to grow across my mother's grave.
Next we were off to lunch at Mac's Barbecue on Highway 87. There I was amused by the girl from Cairo who, as an adolescent, had adopted English as her native language. Her comprehension of the English dialect, central Texan, was complete. I just wish now that I'd asked her to try to speak it. Among camouflage-clad October hunters, we ate barbecued chicken and were amused by the ambient conversation.
"I'm'na drive on over't S'nangelo an' gitt 'at trailer t' put down by the creek," said one. "Ep," said his buddy. "Musquituhs dang near drove me crazy out 'air at that creek las' time I went fishin'. Kep flyin' in m'ize all mornin'."
"Gitcha piece-a pie?" a passing waitress asked.
"Oh, no thank you," said Michele, glancing down at the untouched three-quarters of the one-quarter chicken she had ordered. "I'm quite full."
The crack reporter never missed a beat. Here among us all in Texas, she was, most certainly, at home.
