Eulogy for Michele Kay, Feb. 19, 2011
Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Austin, Texas
Bruce Hight
Email intro . . .
On Nov. 9 I received the following email, addressed to me and Bruce Todd, which I quote in its entirety:
“Bruce and Bruce –
Michele is busy planning her funeral this week.
She is wondering if you two would like to speak at it.
What do you think?"
Signed, “Robert”
I will treasure that email for the rest of my life.
It is so Michele – asking a question: but you know how you are supposed to answer;
And so unflinching in the face of her fate . . .
And it is so Robert – that so direct question: What do you think?
So of course I said yes. But getting through this will be difficult.
Michele’s family – Robert, her children Warren and Deborah, her grandchildren and her extended family – have suffered the greatest loss.
But like all of you here today, I have lost one of my best, dearest friends.
Like you, I have relished all of the stories about Michele.
Still, underneath the good humor and the company she so enjoyed, there’s an enormous well of sadness.
Speaking today is not made easier by the fact that Chuck Lindell wrote a fine obituary about Michele for the American-Statesman’s news pages.
Peggy Fikac and Mary Ann Roser did the same for the family’s own obituary.
And so did the journalism students at St. Edwards University, in the student newspaper, the Hilltop Views.
Each of them, in different ways, captured the astonishing sweep, the grandeur of Michele’s remarkable life.
Born in Cairo, grew up in Hong Kong, went to Saigon – a war zone! – in the 1960s to get a job and so much more! And she ends up in – Austin Texas?
How lucky we are that she did.
.
Journalism . . .
Michele and I were colleagues for a number of years at the Austin American-Statesman. And later, as she was building the journalism program at St. Edward’s University, she asked me to teach a class one semester on editorial writing.
I could not say no to Michele and I taught the course with her considerable help.
As you can see, she had one more assignment for me before she left, and I think she would want me to talk a bit about being journalist – which was so important to her.
Journalists have argued for at least 100 years whether ours was a craft or a profession.
Either way, it is -- at its best -- an obligation, a duty:
To try to get at the truth of a thing. To throw light on the government or business or academia – even sports, or society.
To get it right. To be fair – but also not to be intimidated or fooled or seduced by flattery, or laziness.
Now, Michele could laugh at herself, her eccentricities, her A-type personality, that machine-gun way of talking she had – not so much talking, but strafing bursts of words at whoever or whatever came into earshot or eyesight. Like most journalists, she was something of a gossip. And truth is, journalism can be a lot of fun.
Those who worked at the Statesman know the Feliz Navidad story. But you’ll have to go to the reception today to hear that one.
But when it came to her duty as a journalist, she was fierce – dead serious. She would not be denied.
For Michele, there was always one more call she wanted to make for a story. One more source to check out. Another fact to double-check.
She was determined to know the whole story, not just what people wanted her to know. And she expected the same of those who worked with her.
Michele agonized over mistakes, however trivial.
Michele practiced her craft adhering to the highest professional standards of her chosen field.
She set those same high standards for her students and faculty at St. Edwards.
She did her duty. And now her duty is done.
.
Friendship . . .
I want to touch on one other thing about Michele: Her great gift for giving and receiving friendship.
The range of those friendships could be astonishing, and as large as the crowd is here today, it is only a part of her extensive network of friends, contacts, sources and others, all of whom would pick up the phone when she called.
Of course, some took the call because they feared what would happen if they did not . . .
One reason why Michele was such a good journalist was that she had so much curiosity – and that curiosity made her such a great friend.
The pews here today are stuffed with her best friends.
When she asked you how you were doing, it was not a rhetorical question.
She really did want to know how your kids were doing, how your job was going, where you had visited, what interesting books you had read or classes you had taken.
Michele could be disarmingly frank, sometimes, about her own problems and troubles. And she could be surprisingly direct in asking others about theirs – but then, good journalists can be that way.
If Michele was your friend, you had a friend you could trust completely, and know that if you needed her, she would be there.
.
Robert . . .
Her best friendship, of course, was with her husband, Robert.
They did not have enough years together, but the years they did have -- they lived to the very top.
Over the last two years, all of us who valued Michele as a friend -- however much we loved her and however often we visited her -- could still go home and away from her suffering.
Not Robert. He was there -- every day – taking care of her all day, in that very practical, just-the-facts-ma’am, engineer’s way of his.
He was spared very little as the woman he loved and married struggled with her disease.
Robert, I think I can claim safely to speak on behalf of Michele’s legion of friends when I say thank you – thank you so much -- for taking such good care of her.
To the very end, Robert was faithful to his vow to love her in sickness and health:
To a degree we pray that will never be required of ourselves. Robert, we are awed by your example, and grateful for it.
And all of here are proud and privileged to call Robert and Michele our friends.
.
