A Service of Remembrance and Thanksgiving Reflection Diana ...

[Pages:3]"A Service of Remembrance and Thanksgiving" Wellesley Class of 1966

50th Reunion: June 4, 2016 "Reflection"

Diana Chapman Walsh

At the end of my first year as president, in 1993, I hosted the closing dinner for the 50th reunion class. In those days, they and their guests stayed Sunday night after everyone else had left. And the president gave a speech drawn from the archives to evoke memories of their four years on campus.

The 50th reunion class that year was the Class of 1944, the year many of us were born. I felt young, as the rookie president that night, prompting memories for those women who had graduated a month before I was born, and who seemed, I confess, rather old.

And now here we are. Well many of us. But we are incomplete. This is our time to remember the 52 we have lost to death along the way, some very early on our path to this point, others just yesterday, so it seems.

All are very much with us here, now. In coming together to honor them, to celebrate their lives, to express our gratitude for who they were -- to us, to their families and communities, to the world -- we reclaim missing parts of ourselves.

Rainer Maria Rilke, the German poet, wrote to a friend in 1924 that:

"The great secret of death, and perhaps its deeper connection with us, is this: that, in taking from us a being we have loved and venerated, death does not wound us without, at the same time, lifting us toward a more perfect understanding of this being and of ourselves."

And so I am exceedingly grateful to all who worked to create this opportunity for us to more perfectly understand ourselves.

Reunion is a time to take in the joy of being together. We shake our heads in disbelief: "Where did the time go?" We turn a corner to come upon an unexpected flash from our past inscribed on the landscape, the buildings, in the peal of the carillon. We squint through the fog of time-space and glimpse the friends we knew long ago, and fleetingly register a visceral imprint of who it is we once were.

We recall the promise and uncertainty of the emerging women we were then, unformed still, and with no way to know who would be here -- who we would be -who we would have lost, the toll those losses would have taken, the legacy those departed would have left, the gifts they would have given us to ease our way on.

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We laugh off our declining mental and physical capacities as we deposit our recollections in a collective memory bank and take comfort in our shared plight, the ever louder intimations of our own mortality foreshadowed in our "organ recitals" of bodily parts that are letting us down.

Knowing that we are mortal, of course -- having to live that reality -- is what it means to be human. We do know, at some level that, as Hafez writes:

"Death is a favor to us." If we can "keep our scales in balance" he says, then "the impermanence of the body should give us great clarity, deepening the wonder, in our senses and eyes, of this mysterious existence we share, and are surely just traveling through."

This is the lesson our classmate, Marion Meschter Kane, brought us at our last reunion in her brave and incandescent talk on "Finishing the Future." In reflecting with such wisdom on what her life had taught her about "how to live so we are finished when we die," she invited us to think creatively about the ends of our lives.

That many of us have been doing so is abundantly clear in this year's Class Record Book. So many of those entries hint at what one expressed as "a shame that the older we get, the quicker time passes, since now I, at least, want the days, weeks and years to pass more slowly."

And many end in words evocative of Mary Oliver, who has read her poems to the Wellesley community from this very pulpit.

"To live in this world you need to be able to do three things," she wrote soon after the death of her beloved Molly Malone Cook. "To love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes, to let it go, to let it go."

In later poems, Oliver emerges from the dark well of grief to appreciate the light -- as again -- have many classmates, in their accounts of personal loss.

"The two major projects of my life are over," wrote one shortly after publishing her last book and then losing her husband to cancer. "This makes me sad but also gives me a sense of liberation. I don't have to worry any more about accomplishment -- just about enjoyment, exploration, and adventure."

Happiness and love: mirror images of grief and loss, each infusing the other with deeper meaning. When my younger sister died, I was drawn to Thornton Wilder's book, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, a fictional story of a bridge collapse that consigned five innocent people to death. It ended with a reflection that, with some poetic license, we might adapt to our situation here, on this day:

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"Soon we shall die and all memory of [these 52 friends] will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while ... and forgotten. But the love will have been enough. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning." It may not be too great a stretch, in the end, for us to acknowledge, during this brief interlude in a playful weekend, that even as we revel in one another's company we are learning how to die, we of the vintage year, moving inexorably forward in the reunion parade. Soon we'll be on walkers and in the antique cars. Learning how to die with grace and equanimity, as Marion coached us to do. Taking our cues from those who march the parade route ahead of us. This is as it has been for all of human time, with Rilke's "great secret of death," and the myriad rituals humans have evolved to ease their pain for as long as we've been on the planet. Yet, on the margins of our minds today, a small voice worries that we are facing existential threats that have no precedent: an uncertain future not only for us but possibly for much of life on Earth. Maybe. Maybe not. We can't know for sure. But this we do know. Whatever the future holds -- for us and for coming generations -- panic, hostility, denial will only make it worse. And so we deliberately choose to turn toward reflection, toward connection, toward compassion for all with whom we share the imperiled Earth. Perhaps this is our work for as long as we still have breath. Bringing clarity and solace to those who are looking to us for clues, as we accept our limits and move through the pain of loss. Perhaps it falls to us to embody the meaning that survives in love ... redemptive and holy, to live each moment fully in its transience and mystery. To carry forward the inspiration we found this morning in our class meeting: to find ways to extend our hearts and to know how resilient we are. Wellesley Strong. Fifty years strong. Learning, Laughing, Loving.

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