Eulogy of Gwen Swanson

This is the eulogy I delivered Monday morning at the Mosaic Church in Portland, Gwen’s church.

Everyone seemed to think I did okay.

To write it I walked with Christy – paraquatlung of old – to a nearby park and we sat at a picnic table and filled up a brainstorming page, while a yellow swallowtail butterfly fluttered here and there and back again under the tall pines around us.

Anyhow, I’ll write more as soon as I can.

***

Gwendolyn Kathleen Swanson was born to William and Grace Swanson. She was preceded in death by infant siblings, Jeremiah and Jennifer, and by her paternal and maternal grandparents and three uncles. Her parents did not precede her. They are here. That’s Bill and Grace right there.

My name is Alex Russell. I am Gwen Swanson’s fiance, and will always be.

Gwen was intrigued with quantum physics, and other odd things, so she would appreciate such a state being held in indefinite suspension.

I am here to speak a eulogy.

Eulogy means “good words.” It is speaking good words about someone, usually someone who has died.

There is nothing in the definition that requires that the good words reveal things that people did not already know.

It is a good thing. Because, if that were a requirement, it appears that I would be forced mostly into a stunned silence.

I have discovered, we have all discovered, that many, many people could see Gwen, and not only remembered her, but kept her, even if they had not known her or spoken to her for a long time.

Because Gwen’s sudden illness and death has shocked so many into the art of eulogy.

It is beyond belief. If you have looked into her Caringbridge site – just type in “gwenswanson”, all one word, when you get there – you will see what I mean. People have written there. And people have been writing in Facebook. And on their own websites. Uncontrollably.

People knew.

So I need not fear speaking to you. I don’t like public speaking, I don’t do it, but I am not afraid now. Part of that is probably glove anesthesia, or something like it, but also I get to speak about Gwen Swanson, and you are people who knew Gwen. Today, all of you are my dear friends. Everyone who has been crying is my friend.

So, now, the job is mostly to repeat ourselves. Let’s talk about the person who was just here, who was just in this very room, just moments ago, wasn’t it?

To start, I will steal from two people. Her old co-worker Aaron, who worked side by side with her at the Hibbing Tribune, wrote: “She was one of those kind, gentle souls who put others first as a sort of reflexive instinct.”

He saw true.

Angelique in Australia – Australia! – a friend of both of ours, wrote that Gwen was “graceful, grateful, eloquent, and curious.”

How Gwen would have argued with that first one! She thought she was clumsy. She’d fall over anything. But … grateful. I don’t know how many people you could say were as grateful and as willing to gratitude as Gwen.

Eloquent – she tried so hard at eloquence. And she never served pre-packaged meals when she talked, she never thought that they were the right thing. In saying things, in feeling things out, she always cooked fresh, she always assembled things fresh to be sure they matched the picture.

Curious – she was always curious. She was curious about all sorts of things. She loved reading about science, ideas, other countries and societies, she loved talking about the Bible and about God. One thing that would have had her over the moon would have been to get to meet Neil Degrasse Tyson. She loved fascinating new stories, weird new art and old art, and wild juxtapositions of color. She loved Ray Bradbury, and she mourned him, when he went a little over a month before she did. She loved the language of Shakespeare and the King James version. She would take old VCRs apart to look at the innards. She loved going through three hundred sequential exercises in an electronics kit.

And she never felt that, because she wasn’t interested in something, that meant it wasn’t important. She was better that way than anyone I think I have known.

And she did not decide that, because she had reached an understanding of something, or a take on it, that that was understanding, or that she was simply right. When she was trying to understand something, she would take that rock and roll it all over the garden, up and down every garden path whichever way it went. She wanted to know the inconvenient bits. She wanted to know.

She was passionately interested in people, and cared deeply.

She loved animals. Except spiders, and even then she bore them no ill will, she just didn’t want them crawling on her. She loved the rats she brought home, and named them Cosmo and Frank, and nursed them wonderfully as they got older. She was alive to living things.

And she cared deeply about her kiddos.
And was absolutely fascinated with them, and loved talking with them, and playing with them, and watching them, and wondering how their lives would go. She was always talking about the things they said and the games they invented and the sweet way they were. She loved them.

And her kiddos knew she loved them, and their parents knew she loved them. One of the most wonderful things that happened when she lay in her last room was that two times the parents of kids of hers called, and talked to her on the phone, and they put their kids on the phone with her. She could barely speak a word, she was losing her words, but she tried. She tried for those kids. I heard her say “Thank you.”

And one of the mothers arrived in person when Gwen had just died – and insisted on delivering a message to Gwen in person anyway, as she lay there.

What is that?

Who was this who just left?

She loved art. She loved music. She loved making music. She loved watching the grace of the dancers on the competition shows. She loved beauty. I remember how she’d set out for the bus, with the camera, to go somewhere new in town. She was always looking for moments. She was always looking for a new light. Her photographs from her rambles are full of moments, angles, accidents of corner and beauty – they are full of her eyes. She was always looking and listening.

She was a seeker. In this way, and all sorts of others.

She was a happy four-star geek. She was a Trekkie. She would speak deeply and insightfully about the relationships among the X-Men. If you want documentation of this, or closer to a signed confession, there is evidence on our little table of her things. We made it to The Avengers. We did make it. She loved it so much.

She was fun!

In work she was serious. She had no vanity. She did not think she was anything wonderfully special – often she felt she was struggling. She felt intensely her own limits. But she tried. She always tried. She gave everything a hard shot, and when she had a bad day she tried to do better the next. She never talked herself up in her head. She never faked anything.

She always tried to do a good job.

She took her responsibilities to heart and made them her own. When she was a reporter, she always tried to hear the people she was talking to and to write it down right. She always wanted to draw things right.

She suffered her imperfections and her failures hereand there, day to day, in her work. She talked to me about them, and she didn’t blow them up into a tragedy, but she never gave herself a free pass. She just went on trying.

And when sometimes someone didn’t understand what had happened and thought she had done a bad job when she hadn’t or when it wasn’t like that, she suffered it, but she would not go to war to straighten it out. Things were never about her ego, as hurt as it sometimes was. She loved recognition, but she was humble to her bones.

She was earnest.

I could repeat the word earnest over and over until it became a chant, and that would be a right contribution to this eulogy.

She was for real.

I’ll tell you – she never knew that so many people appreciated her so much or remembered her so well. Maybe at the end she began to. Because of the messages on Caringbridge. Because of the celebrations she heard us talking about. She never knew, she never thought she was doing anything more than soldiering on.

I think she said it very like this: she thought she was just a little brown mouse.

She suffered it. She said that it didn’t seem like anything had ever come easy to her. She just tried and tried and tried….

And it is true that sometimes things didn’t go right for her plans.

(Boy.)

She could hurt. She came from pain, partly. Bad things happened to her when she was young. And things hurt her along the way.

She hurt because of her weight. For a long time, she thought she was ugly. Ugly. You have already seen her pictures when you came in. I do not need to say anything about that, do I?

But she never stopped trying.

And she never stopped hoping.

And she always wanted to help.

Always.

She always wanted to help. She always wanted to do something good.

She was a peacemaker.

In conversation, she was glorious. She was always respectful, and always talked to the part of you that was sane, whether or not it was visible at the time. She loved understanding the people she was talking to, and where they were coming from. She would always ask questions to make sure that she had understood you correctly, and the questions were great.

When she would apologize for being unfair or unkind in talking with me, generally it would not have made a needle twitch in a high-tech detector! When she apologized to me, I was usually left blinking.

You could talk with her about anything, and she made people feel safe talking about anything with her. You knew she wouldn’t make a caricature of you, or stick with one, just to make her own standpoint feel more secure. Both her wild range of interest and her deep avoidance of personal ugliness made her a dream.

She always kept listening.

Her caring sense of proportion made you saner, and you could trust it because you knew she was peering at yours too. Without her to talk things over with, I am much more of a fool. I am much more afraid of being heedless in some way or doing something dumb. I have been thinking in the last few days about getting a knitted sampler to put up on a wall, that will say GWEN WOULDN’T LIKE IT. I think I’m going to do it.

I am going to miss the kind light of her thought laid over the world.

I remember her laughter. She could chuckle. She could chortle. She could completely lose it and be absolutely helpless and close to anoxia for ten minutes or more.

(It will not surprise those who knew her best that she and I first really hit it off with a deep conversation about farts.)

I remember her anger. She got angry, she could become enraged and seethe with smoke coming out of her ears, when people put their own desires or wishes or priorities, even principles, any principles, above people and their pain. She was angry about obliviousness to pain, she was horrified at the cheapening and death of innocence and trust, at the failures of kindness, at all the little vanities that keep us self-excusing jerks. She hungered and thirsted after – decency. Just decency.

I remember her faith. Her faith was always with her. Because she carried it with her. She wanted to look at everything, she did not want to fake anything for herself to make her choices easier, she always thought things over, and she carried her faith everywhere. She always made the choice of faith, and she knew it was a choice, and she kept true.

She was always true. In all ways, and in this.

I remember her talking with the chaplain in the hospital – this was after they had given her the news. She said that she had been sorting through her jukebox inside and one song had kept popping out – “Day By Day”, the song we just sang. She sang it for him, smiling up at him. I hope I will always hear her sweet little voice singing.

I do not think it is saying too much to say that she showed me how to die.

She was balanced, so balanced, and mostly she was concerned about other people, about her parents, about me.

And she stayed, and I think it was a struggle, until two friends had gotten across the country to see her. She had really wanted to make it until they could see her, and she made it.

And all the while, we found that people all over the place had – seen her. And not just remembered her, kept her. So many people had known how extraordinary she was, all the time.

When she died, Thursday morning, she was surrounded by people who loved her.

I will not speak of Gwen’s and my love, or of my loss, because I don’t think I could finish, and Gwen would have trusted me to do this.

Gwen Swanson always had hopes. Sometimes she was discouraged, sometimes very much so. She did not think she was a success. But she always soldiered on, trying to give her earnest best, trying to do a good job. And, though through her last spring she had truly found her feet, she was not going to reach the things she wanted to do…

I say to you that Gwen Swanson was a triumph.

She was a triumph, on the record, in the things she did, in the ways that the rest of us could see her light. She was beautiful. She was so beautiful.

This is my eulogy.

An eulogy must also consider its audience – including one possible member. The fact is that Gwen would have found much of the really extravagant stuff I have been saying ridiculous and probably embarrassing, though she’d have loved it, and blushed all over the place. She knew she wasn’t perfect. She was keenly aware of her goofs, and of all the spaces between in life.

She would say that she just tried to do a good job – and, of the people she knew who liked her, that it was nice that she got along with some people, ya know?

Gwen Swanson always tried to be a good egg.

Gwen?

You were a good egg.

Thank you. So much.