Yesterday was the funeral, and it was really difficult. Brandon, Emily, and Olivia did a fantastic job planning their part. They chose perfect music and readings (including poetry that Deb had written). I'll try to get what they read and post it here. I read two poems from Mary Oliver, which I will include here. As I said during the service, Wild Geese is what I would have like to tell Debbie when she was still alive. The Journey is what I wanted to say to the rest of us who were struggling too and who are left to deal with the loss. Here they are:

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Mary Oliver

I wish I could have told Debbie that the world was hers too and that she had a place in the family of things--a place that only she could hold. I would have wanted her to know that we didn't want her to be perfect, or even "good" as the poem says. We just wanted a world with her in it.

Here's the second poem.

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Mary Oliver

The Journey is a poem that has helped me a lot throughout my adult life. I appreciate its message of sloughing off the old burdens and peeling away from the people that take too much. We are each ultimately walking a lone journey, one that can be lonely and painful and beautiful. It's practically an anthem for recovery, one that I think Debbie would have appreciated.

Michelle