Speech for a Beloved Friend’s Sillybration of Life Service

The clock just ticked past midnight, and I looked at my calendar and noticed it is the birthday of an exceptionally dear departed friend—one of the most exuberantly creative, kind, and inspiring individuals I have ever had the privilege of knowing. She was more unique than a snowflake, more grandiloquent than a queen, more versatile than a Cirque du Soleil acrobat.

A Renaissance woman of the highest order, she excelled in everything she did, whether it be writing, art, research, collecting, or teaching. She was the world’s leading expert on FUN in learning, and she sparked thousands of future teachers to integrate creativity, joy, and play into their classrooms. Her office was an art installation filled with toys, books, and eccentric STUFF of every variety.

She has now been gone thirteen years, and I still find myself missing her tenderly. I always thought of her as my Doppelgänger older sister as we shared so many kindred passions—from writing to collage art to books to typography to hats to thrift-store assemblage fashion to pattern-matching to word-coining.

She also taught me much about grief, writing poetically about her mother’s death the year preceding her own. I learned the following quote from her and used it in The Art of Losing:

“It’s so curious: one can resist tears and ‘behave’ very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer … and everything collapses.”
—Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette

The Art of Losing

I thought you might appreciate the speech I delivered at her Sillybration of Life service along with the video Michael and I produced of the last gift I gave her—a poem I commissioned by a gifted young poet who composed and typed poems on the fly at Farmers Market.

I shared my friend’s essence with the poet, spent around twenty minutes shopping, and returned to discover the following exquisite work of poem-art, which she had typed on her vintage Royal typewriter using red ink on a scrap of ragged taupe paper. I recorded her reading it, later weaving these pieces into the above video to play at her service.

My friend wept when I gave her this gift and played that recording for what was to be her last Christmas.