Eulogy

    We held Aidan's funeral today.  Just like last night, many people came; some of the same people from the wake, but many others as well.  More teachers and aides from Albany came.  People from the hospital in Springfield came.  Good friends from Boston and New York City came.  It was another outpouring of love for Aidan.

      The ceremony took place in the church that Maureen and Maggie attend.  The space was filled with all sorts of people.  Maureen and Maggie and I had picked out the music and the readings and we felt they captured some of what Aidan's life means to us.  The pastor, a close family friend who knows Aidan well, knit the various words and lyrics together with his own understanding of our family. 

     Maureen and I served as pall bearers, along with Aidan's cousins and one of the women who had helped him for years in the local school.  It was important to feel the weight of the casket as we lifted him into the hearse.  We have always lifted him; we know his weight well.  Picking him up those last times helped to impress his memory into our muscles.

     We blew bubbles as the graveside.  This was Maureen's idea, linked to the summertime playgroup she has run for the past several years, where the kids would blow bubbles all over Aidan.  It was good to see close to a hundred people all blowing bubbles, the iridescent spheres drifting up to the sky.

    Afterward we went back to the church, where members of the congregation had generously arranged lunch for many of us.  It was just another example of how people are good.

    I spoke a eulogy for Aidan.  It is reproduced in full below.

A Eulogy for Aidan M. Crane
Spoken on March 22, 2006
Community Bible Church
Williamstown, Massachusetts

  Aidan – our son, our brother, our grandson, our nephew, our cousin, our student, our friend – lived a full and rich life.

  He touched many, many people in his fourteen years. It seems a short time, it is a short time in comparison to the span of many other lives, but his youth did not limit or diminish his effect on the world. His presence radiated throughout this town and outward to places far and wide. Just look around this church today. His life, his unique gifts, his wordless love, is what has brought us all here today. We are a group that, were it not for Aidan, would probably never have come together in quite this way. There are people here who, though they share the same small town, might never have crossed paths were it not for Aidan.

  His web of loving friends and relations stretches throughout the county, up into Vermont, over to  New York, and Eastward to Boston. In the past few days we have received phone calls from Florida and Ohio and Arizona from people who know and love Aidan. Emails have come from California and Wisconsin and Texas.

   Love for him spills across national borders. A woman in Japan, Reiko’s mother, who once visited in Williamstown some years ago and met Aidan, has been praying for him in recent days, her words rising up into the sky over Hokkaido.  Friends in Australia are casting flowers into the waters of Sydney Harbor in his memory.   A man in Malaysia sent a quotation from an ancient Chinese philosopher in his honor. And an internet acquaintance in South Africa is reciting a Buddhist sutra for him.

    In fourteen years Aidan connected with more people than any one of us can know. He filled a large place in the world.

  His effects on the people who met him were numerous and varied.

  Aidan often brought out the good in people. This was especially true for the children around him. When he was in school here in Williamstown his classmates made him a part of their doings in countless ways. They knew he could not see, and that it was best to engage him through his sense of touch. Many a day it was, when he would come home from school and we would find flowers and pebbles and sticks and grass tucked in the crevices of his wheelchair, the daily evidence of how his friends had brought him things to feel and sense, to connect him to their surroundings

  He also moved many of the adults who encountered him. I remember some years ago, we were up in  Manchester. We rolled into a little restaurant to have some lunch.  Maureen went up to the counter to order some food. I stayed with Aidan and Maggie, who was then just an infant. We ate. It was all fairly normal. But then a man, who had been sitting at a nearby table, got up and came over. A complete stranger. And, out of the blue, he said he had noticed us, and what a beautiful family we were, and how lucky we were to have each other. This was Aidan’s work. Aidan had inspired him.

  Aidan was a great teacher. For those who took the time and opened themselves up to his view of the world, his lessons could be transformative. I know there are many teachers here with us today, talented teachers, inspiring teachers. Some of you taught Aidan both here and, more recently, in Albany. Some of you worked closely with teachers and others in the schools Aidan attended. Some of you are teachers who, while they never taught Aidan, know well what good teaching is all about. It is about that moment of recognition. When the thing you are trying to get across finally gets through and a light of understanding shines in the eyes of the learner. That is what Aidan, as a teacher, could do.

  He taught us about patience and perseverance and strength. He taught us about the value of each human life and what really matters in any life. In a world where fashion and fad and products and sales gimmicks seem to dominate the definition of value and worth, Aidan quietly offered another perspective. Sitting with him at home in all of his simplicity and beauty, I often relearned that those material things and desires don’t really matter at all. What matters is our human connections. What matters is the cultivation of our closest loving relationships. What matters is the daily performance of our common humanity. That is what Aidan taught us. He brought that light of understanding to us.

  Aidan could impress people, sometime in unexpected ways. Maureen remembers a moment some years ago, when she was with Aidan at a summer school program in Adams. Another boy in the class was watching as Maureen gave Aidan some food through his stomach tube. He looked on in wonder as Maureen slowly pushed the liquid food through a syringe and into his tube. He said:

  “What are you doin’?”
“Just giving Aidan some food,” she replied.
“You mean he gets his food that way.”
“Yes, that’s how he gets his food.”
“How come?” the boy asked.
“Oh, he was born that way,” Maureen answered. “You know some kids have blue eyes and some have brown; some have black hair and some have blond. Well, that was the way Aidan was born: he gets his food through a tube.”
The boy looked at Maureen in wide-eyed amazement: “You mean he never has to taste broccoli?”
“No.”
“Cool.”

  He was cool. He was beautiful. He was strong.

  And he changed us. He will have a lasting effect on us.  For those who knew him well but did not have as much time with him as those closest to him, the changes he wrought may be rather subtle, but powerful in their own way.  He is there inside of you. Perhaps one day you will see a boy in a wheelchair, a purple wheelchair pushed by a loving mother, and an image of Aidan will flash in your mind and a warm wave of recognition and remembrance will wash across your heart. Or maybe you will hear that name, “Aidan,” and a hundred memories will leap to mind. He will be there and he will return time and again.

  For Maggie and the children who grew up with him, he did not so much change their lives as shape them from the very beginning. He was foundational, a part of the very stuff of their being, a daily expression of the marvelous diversity of humanity that they have become accustomed to.

  For Maureen and me, and those others closest to him, it is safe to say that we are not now what we had been before he was born. We have grown in ways we could never have imagined. We have become something more than what we were. His love for us and our love for him has magnified us.  He changed us fundamentally for the better. This is not merely a matter of memory, though we will remember him. It is more than what we will find in the pages of his book, it is something deep inside the pulse of our lives.

  And in those changes he brought to us and the world around him, in the love he inspired and absorbed, he lives.  He lives in me; he lives in you; he lives in all of us.

Comments

[The Rambling Taoist]

Amen!

[Jon Chow]

Sam, this is so moving and beautiful. It brought tears to my eyes. Thank you for helping to share Aidan's presence with those of us who did not get to know him personally.

[Caitlin Mairin Rooney]

Thank you for posting your eulogy, Sam. Somehow, I always thought that, even though I had left Williamstown, I would be there when Aidan left his body for parts unknown, yet the limitations of my own body kept me from making it back in time for the service. Knowing that you, Maureen and Margaret were surrounded by people who love you all was a great comfort to me yesterday, and being able to read the words that I would so much have preferred to hear you speak is a comfort of a different sort today. Hearing about the bubbles (first from Donna and now in your posting), I could feel them on my own skin and feel the warm sunlight from the day the five of us went walking out by Mount Hope Farm. (Funny, I can't remember any pain that day.) I will see you, Mo and Maggie as soon as I can, and until then, you will remain in my heart and on my mind, as always.

[Heather]

I also have a profoundly disabled son named Aidan. Because we spell his name the same way, a librarian recently suggested your book for me. Little did I know! I couldn't put the book down and finished it within 24 hours, despite the continuous care Aidan requires. Many pages could have been written by my husband and myself. The hospital difficulties were almost identical, with the same erroneous explanations given, in 2004, about our Aidan's pain not being real pain, despite morphine being the only thing that eased the symptoms of a supposed neurological problem. Aidan's way must become required reading for all children's neurologists!
The most valuable part of Aidan's way is the spiritual, philosophical perspective. I have said for some time that Aidan is my greatest spiritual teacher. Recently, I have been reading Eckhart Tolle's Book "A New Earth" and participating in the weekly online workshops he cohosts with Oprah Winfrey. I was getting stuck in some egoic assumptions based on the difficulties of raising Aidan. After reading your book, between chapters 4 & 5 of Eckhart's, I got the AHA moment I needed to continue! Thank You so very much, Sam and Aidan.