We are here to celebrate Ethel’s life and to honor her memory, but also to grieve her passing. The grief cannot be ignored. It’s real, and it comes in waves, and I am hoping that I am in a trough now long enough to get through this.
Ethel was a mensch. She was the humanest human being I ever met or ever knew. She was raw humanity unfiltered. It was as if she was a woman who had been transported from another age, a character from Sophocles or Homer or the Book of Judges. She had this ancient fierceness about her. She was fierce in her love and fierce in her mirth, and she was fierce in other ways, too. She was Judith holding the head of Holofernes or Antigone defying Creon. She was the fierce sixteen-year-old who pushed her boyfriend off a Bronx sidewalk through storefront plate glass window when he said something fresh to her. Ethel was not conflict averse. You had to fight with her before you could be friends with her. It was a kind of test, I think.
When I first met her she was exotic and unlike any woman I had ever dated. She was big souled. There was a density of reality about her, and she seemed to bend the air wherever she walked. I was in love. After she met me she said, “You! Mild mannered boy from the suburbs, teach me the ways of your people. I would live among you. And I said, “Ok.”
That didn’t really happen, but it kind of did.
And so I endeavored to indoctrinate her in the ways of the mild and the modern. But in that I failed. Miserably. I quickly understood that it was pointless. She was allergic to everything modern. She hated cars and computers and until recently even TV, but never mastered the intricacies of the remote. For her all that had nothing to do with being a human as she understood it.
She was too raw and too real and too fierce to fit in the world most of us have meekly accepted as the real one. She could not make her soul fit into its forms or meet its expectations. Sure, she found things in our world that she could love. She loved Luke with a fierce mother’s love, and for some reason she loved me. She loved the opera and live theater. She loved being in nature. She loved the children she taught. But she did not love the school administrators who demanded that she fit into their system: She was always too early or too late. She could never get the paperwork right. And. She. Was. Not. Conflict. Averse.
In the end it was her body that tamed the fierceness in her. The radiation treatment for the Hodgkin’s Disease she had when she was twenty five bought her another twenty five healthy years, but starting in 2001 her health and vitality diminished with each passing year. It was one thing after the other. She bravely met each one as they came, but these illnesses chastened her. And over these past fifteen years they purged her of so much of the piss and vinegar and hilarity that defined her when she was younger. They softened her hard edges, and a sweetness and gentleness that was always there emerged now in high relief. As the fierceness subsided, her capacity for love increased. There is hardly a thing she did in the last few years that was not for the love of Luke or the love of me or the love of her friends. It was if in the end that was all that was left—the fierceness of her love. But when you looked into her eyes you saw how she suffered. There were in her eyes a fragility and vulnerability and lately a confusion that broke my heart.
Ethel was not a saint; she was a mensch, which is my idea of a saint. She was a mensch because she suffered deeply and she loved deeply. You don’t get to be a mensch unless you understand something about human suffering by either experiencing it yourself or having compassion for those who have suffered. Suffering can humanize us, but only when it increases our capacity for love. It doesn’t work that way for everyone. But for Ethel it did.
Those of us who are Catholics talk about the communion of saints. I think of it as the communion of mensches. And Ethel is fully qualified to take her place in their great procession through history, the procession of the deeply human beings who were in their different ways a sign of contradiction to the stupidity and cruelty of a world in which they didn’t fit.
Godspeed Ethel.