Today has been a very difficult day. Last week, I lost one of my heroes and she will be laid to rest today. Losing a loved one is always a very sad and difficult thing, but living the life we do - literally half way around the world from our home country and away from family and friends, these feelings are compounded. This is especially true when there is no way that you can arrange to get back for funerals and an opportunity to say goodbye, short of buying the plane.

My Great Aunt Eunice was and is very dear to me. She passed just 7 months shy of 98, a beautiful, rich and fully lived life and I will miss her more than I can express. She was my own maternal grandmother's baby sister. While my grandmother was a wonderful woman in so many ways, we were never very close. My relationship and refuge was at my Aunt Eunice and Uncle Leo's.

My Aunt Eunice came from a family that was well educated and the love and importance of learning was passed on. As a result, Aunt Eunice who was born in 1919 graduated from school at the age of 16. By 18, she was teaching in a one room school house, an extraordinary experience for an amazing woman. 

After she got married, she was not allowed to teach as was he norm in those days.  So she turned her talents and attention to helping her husband, my beloved Uncle Leo, in his coal mining business and to raising my cousin Melody - she took neither job lightly and as they say put her shoulder into both of their successes. Years later she returned to teaching after graduating with a BA in education...as times had changed, so did the requirements to teach. But Aunt Eunice's myriad of special gifts was her ability to bring out the best in each unique child, a gift I myself benefited from and value to this day. While my Aunt Eunice was amazing in her own right, her husband - my Uncle Leo was equally amazing and they formed an extraordinary partnership that was filled with a love so deep that it could not help but enrich everyone around them. In some small way I took comfort knowing that finally after being without him for almost 26 years, her passing meant that she was able to hold his hand once again.

I have been truly and doubly blessed because over the years I have had a chance to not only be close to my Aunt and Uncle, but also to their daughter Melody and her husband Jim - a relationship I cherish. When Melody called me with the news of her mother's passing, we wept together but also reminisced over the amazing person that her Mother was and how grateful we both were to have had her in our lives. Melody afforded me the the opportunity to write a letter to be read at the funeral for my beloved Aunt Eunice. After thinking about it for a couple of days I decided to share it on my blog. I am doing this because my Aunt Eunice did not have to reach out to me, she did not have to welcome me into her home and count me as her own, but she did. As a result, despite the discomfiture of my own "otherness," I felt I belonged, I was loved...and I knew it. I had the benefit of an amazing woman who "saw" me, who understood me, who listened to me and that, made all the difference.

For all of the Aunt Eunices and Uncle Leos out there...

My Beloved Aunt Eunice,

The strangest thing happens when someone that we dearly love passes.  It seems that the world should stop, if even for a while, so that the magnitude of the beautiful being that we have lost in our lives is registered throughout the entire fabric of creation. But God was smarter than that. Despite our broken hearts and teary eyes the the sun still rises and sets, and the demands of daily life continue. I believe this is because God never meant for us to rendered immobile by our sadness. Instead we are to be driven on by our incredible love and devotion to our lost loved one  so that we might seek to even in the smallest way fill their now empty shoes. This is truly how God's light passes from one generation to another in the sparking of new beacons, even as we are still mourning the loss of our own guiding light.  

You have always been that beacon for me. Your wisdom, grace, and profound unconditional love provided me safe harbor from my earliest memories and through my life. Despite the fact that I was so much younger than my siblings and a city kid too boot, you never made me feel other, but instead celebrated, loved and fiercely defended my differences while simultaneously making me always feel that with you I was home. I have taken your lessons and the guidance you gave me so freely over the years and I diligently apply every day. I greet people by name, I see them, I spend time to make sure they understand they are heard. I reach out to those who need and work every day to leave my corner of the world better than it was the day before. 

There are no words, even given all the languages of the world that could ever fully express my profound gratitude and abiding love that I have for both you and Uncle Leo. Thank for seeing me, for recognizing and appreciating the individual that I was. And even if all of that were not bounty enough in my life, you showered that same love and understanding on my child, Andrew - as you already know there is no greater thing in the world for a mother to know that her child is well and truly loved. By opening your heart and your home to us both, Andrew was afforded an opportunity to get to know and love the family who lived so far away, to learn their history, their stories and on whose shoulders he stood.

I am sitting at my desk in India as I write this letter because there was no way to make it back to Illinois in time for the funeral.  And while my heart is still heavy and tears still fall when I think that I will no longer have you to visit when I come home, I want you to know that I know whose hand you now hold. You and Uncle Leo perhaps did not know it then, but you provided a blue print for my understanding of what a loving marriage and a real partnership looked like. As I now have a loving marriage and a real partnership, I take great comfort that you are now reunited. Your beloved Melody and her sweet Jim are precious to me and I promise to make sure they know as regularly as possible that they are so loved.

In closing, I would say this. I love you and have loved you my whole life. You have filled my memories with love, and I will miss you every day. My beacon is lit. 

With my deepest love,

Deidre