Funerals

How many memorial services is too many? At some point they start to add up and then they are a part of your life pattern. Unlike celebrations where you usually wait to be invited, attending memorials is generally your decision. Yesterday, I attended a service for a professional colleague thinking that our professional connection was the primary reason to go. I had a personal feeling about it, too, knowing that she and I had, for many years been the only two Asian women in a large, predominantly white female professional group. I doubt it had meaning to anyone but me, probably not even to her, since we rarely met and hardly knew each other. It turned out that I only met one person I knew and suddenly felt more like a witness than a participant.

More than 300 people gathered to share stories about a woman I hardly knew. They described how she had dedicated her life's work to one nursery school. One person at a time, the depth of the community revealed itself: an African American mother who travelled from the Bronx in the '90's to bring her boys to a school that welcomed them and made them feel part of a community; teachers who had worked at the school more than 20 years ago, but remembered how this colleague reached out to them; a salesman who said that he made a cold call to this school twenty years ago and because of the director's warm response he entered into a business relationship that has, over time, turned into a friendship; a father who said that the director had always sent him on his way reassuring him that his son would be fine and now, he felt that the community had gathered to send the director on her way; a younger sister who told family stories about how she, her older sister and her younger brother were the three youngest of 10 children.

The moment that sticks in my mind, however, is when a boy walked up to the lectern and asked that all the alumni come forward to light candles in memory of their school's director. From every corner of the room young people walked toward the candles. Most of them were black or hispanic males, some were white and a few were Asian. I had recently heard at a meeting a comment that the independent schools are wondering where all the black boys in New York City are; they are the one group that is underrepresented in most schools. But here they were, the majority of this group.

Then a young black man stopped at the microphone on his way back to his seat and spoke. He said that he had attended the school in the '80's and had recently been asked by a friend how he had made it through life and avoided becoming a statistic. He commented that all the forces were in place for that to happen, but something had saved him from falling through the cracks. He set out on a detective's search for the answer and ended up at "the scene of the crime," his nursery school. So, recently he had gone there to be reminded of the love and care that had set him on a path to adulthood. With tears in his eyes he said, "The one thing I just forgot to do that day when I saw the director was to say thank you."