Eulogy for a Tea Lady When Bija asked whether I might say a few words about Carmel today, she commented that public speaking was not her forte. As a professor by trade, getting up and talking in front of a bunch of people is all in a day’s work. But this is not an ordinary occasion or purpose. The idea of standing up here and summarizing a life to those who cherish it the most is almost overwhelming. I look forward to listening to other people share about Carmel. Perhaps the place to start is with the painful fact that has brought us all here today and that is that Carmel’s life on earth ended too suddenly and soon. We all expected more time in the strong, adventuresome, wise and caring company of Carmel. I had expected to grow old along with Carmel and feel robbed of the joy of having an old friend in middle age. Carmel is my oldest friend and our lives are intertwined in many ways. We met in the early 1970s and were housemates in college, during Carmel’s senior year at Seattle University. Both of us worked on Friday nights that year, she at the hospital and I at the library. Being of legal age, Carmel would thoughtfully pick up a bottle of Annie Green Springs wine (an early pop wine) on the way home and we would talk late into the night. A few years later I followed Carmel to Vancouver, BC, where she moved after graduation. We spent two more years as housemates, during the last year of Carmel’s marriage to her first husband, Larry, and then in the first year of her marriage to Gary. Carmel was standing next to me when a wayward car shattered my leg. I visited with her while she was in labor with Erin. We hiked and canoed, cooked, cleaned, partied and explored together. These were our halcyon days and I have a treasure trove of memories with Carmel. In the thirty years since we both left Vancouver, Carmel and I have had the pleasure of visiting and catching up in Sussex and Palo Alto, in New York and Washington, D.C. and most recently in my home in Bloomington, Indiana. As per the state motto, Indiana is indeed “the crossroads of America” and makes an excellent stop over between Sacramento and Sussex, for anyone who is foolish enough to caravan that distance with animals, offspring and trailer in tow. And that would be Carmel, god bless her. I treasure those last visits with her and mourn for the visits that will not be. Our friendship was one of intense but intermittent togetherness. It was not our habit to write or phone each other on a regular basis. We have been out of touch at times over the decades, most recently for ten years, the time that it took Carmel to raise her kids up to adulthood and for me to learn how to live and work in the heartland. I would bitterly regret those lost years now if not for one simple fact. The very core of the friendship that Carmel and I shared was the ability to pick up the conversation that began in the early 1970s over Annie Green Springs exactly where it left off the last time we spoke, whether a few hours ago, or many years. And we never ever ran out of things to talk about. Over the years in our time together, Carmel and I talked endlessly: about the people we knew and how their lives were unfolding, about issues and events, about the meaning of life. Carmel was a life- long student of the human condition, which she always viewed with a keen eye, a compassionate heart and a profound sense of humor. These perspectives and values anchored Carmel’s life as a person and as a professional. She was a quiet force of nurture and care, a calm and competent mother, grandmother, daughter, nurse and friend. In the days immediately after Carmel’s death, whenever I thought about her I had an image of a female Buddha. Depending upon your own vision of the afterlife, Carmel either is or would be acutely embarrassed to hear herself described in this way because she was above all modest about her own skills and strengths. But if you cannot extol a person’s virtues in a eulogy, then where? While a deeply spiritual person, Carmel herself never claimed a specific doctrine as her own, though she was drawn to and learned from both eastern and Native American spiritual traditions. Pragmatic and grounded, Carmel lived her spirituality on a daily basis. In the way that she lived her life Carmel comes as close as I’ve seen to an enlightened soul and I have had the privilege of getting to know a lot of different people in a lot of different places. Being the anti-dogmatist that she was, it is not surprising that in her life Carmel exemplified different streams of Buddhism. It is not hard at all to see the Chinese goddess Kuan Yin in Carmel, the life-giver and protector. I wonder whether her family members who were lucky enough to go to China with Carmel a few years back ever heard her speak of Kuan Yin? Carmel devoted her entire professional life to healing the sick and to saving lives at risk, perhaps even including some fisherman like those who pray to Kuan Yin. Carmel was a supremely competent nurse and her work as a nurse centrally defined her life. In fact, Carmel’s devotion to nursing was a life-long passion, budding early and burning constant. Carmel’s mother remembers her as a preschooler in a dress-up nurse’s cape and hat. These were a gift from her maternal grandmother, Margaret Jeffrey Tiapon, who was herself an LPN. The little Carmel who visited her grandmother at work grew into the hospital volunteer and candy striper of adolescence, and then into the nursing student whom I first met. Carmel was a thorough and happy student of nursing. She sought out all opportunities to expand her clinical knowledge and skills, including some not necessarily sanctioned by the Jesuit University that we attended. There were benefits to being the housemate of a nursing student. Carmel practiced injection techniques on uncounted oranges. Filling the syringes with vodka turned this training exercise into a social experience. We talked then and over the years about why Carmel chose to become a nurse rather than a physician. Her reasons focused on the ability to provide direct and meaningful care to those in medical need. Although she has practiced several forms of nursing, including public health and a range of hospital specialties, Carmel devoted a large part of her professional life to the urgent care of those in critical need. Her calm demeanor is legend among those who know her, as shown in the remarks shared by her nursing colleagues on her memorial website. That same calm presence permeated her private life. Carmel’s children have shared with me that “calm” is a quality that their friends have evoked repeatedly in condolence messages. As one said, “Many of my childhood friends have been writing to me and remembering my mom and almost every single one of them has told me of how calm Mom always was which in turn made them feel calm, even as one friend put it, ‘when were in some major crap’.” In almost 40 years, I have only seen Carmel loose her cool twice. The first was when that errant car came barreling over the curb, barely missing Carmel & sending me flying. She was not much use as a nurse for a few minutes there, but by the time we’d arrived by ambulance at the Vancouver General Hospital, Carmel was part of the transfer and prep team. The second time was during the last year that we were roomies and could be blamed on the hormonal madness of pregnancy. Carmel was trying to get her long and very thick hair dry in a hurry with a sub-par hairdryer and broke down crying in frustration. Gary rushed from the house with assurances that he would return immediately with a new and better model. As he left, Carmel turned to me and said with a laugh “Wow! This is great. I’m going to have to make better use of it.” Like the Laughing Buddha, Carmel’s sense of humor was deep and rich and sprang from the one sure and endless source: the ability to laugh at herself and at the ironies and absurdities of life. One memory that always made both of us laugh is when we went strawberry picking together one day – while she was six months pregnant and I was in a cast and on crutches. We looked absurd, plopping down and struggling back up from the strawberry rows. After a few hours of work, we had two respectable five-gallon buckets of strawberries. We hauled them home to make jam, all natural, no preservatives. We boiled those strawberries for hours, ending up with a grand total of two half-pint jars of jam for all of our labor. I will say that it was delicious. Carmel was endlessly curious about people, places, the diverse cultures and natural environments of this world. This curiosity fed a sense of adventure that she shared with friends and family members, travelling with them to places like China, Mexico and Spain. As her mother observed, Carmel’s sense of adventure took her parents and others to places they never would have gone on their own – in my case, that would include Sussex, New Brunswick. We know that she had hopes and dreams of travelling many other places still. The memorial fund for Doctors without Borders could not be more appropriate as a tribute to Carmel. In her travels as well as her life, Carmel’s calm and equanimity came across to others as a sense of self-sufficiency, even detachment. Her sister Carol noted that Carmel’s self-sufficiency made her a great travelling companion and I can attest that she was the easiest person to live with that I have ever known. Some close to her regret the reserve that kept Carmel from complaining about stresses and difficulties arising in her own life, including the health issues that led to her untimely death. In my view, Carmel’s self-sufficiency was rooted in a clear-eyed understanding of herself as just one person, no better or worse than any other. In this sense, Carmel had a very Zen spirit. In fact, in the literature on Zen Buddhism, there is a very fitting image of Carmel: the “Tea Lady.” As discussed by Laura Friedman in her book on women Buddhist teachers in America, a Tea Lady in the Japanese Zen tradition was a woman of great wisdom who lived quietly and obscurely, providing food and sustenance to travellers and when asked, revealing a deep wisdom about life that taught important lessons to even the masters of Zen. In the same book, Friedman shares some insights of a contemporary Tea Lady, Yvonne Rand, (who lives not far from here, in the Bay Area) that speak to Carmel’s unique blend of detachment and engagement. Yvonne describes herself as following the Buddhist tradition of being a “spiritual friend,” saying: "I can be on the path with another and offer what I have found in my practice. If my experience can be helpful to another, that is great. And if it is not useful or helpful, that os all right too. We can, in any event, walk this path together." Carmel walked the path of caring and adventure with many, many others, only a few of whom are able to be here today. She has left an enormous legacy in this world, though like a Zen Tea lady, most of it is quiet and unassuming. One of the things that I’ve found hardest to come to terms with about Carmel’s death is how it is that a person who has saved so many lives in her daily work could not herself be saved in her moment of medical need. Of course, Carmel would accept this fact with far more equanimity than I, knowing the fragility of the human body and the limits of medical science. What comforts me in this regard is knowing that Carmel saved hundreds of families from the moment that we are experiencing right now – mourning the too-early death of a loved one. Those hundreds of lives and the thousands of people who were able to benefit from their survival are a gift of Carmel’s own life to the world at large. And, of course, Carmel gave this world three children, two strong daughters and a gentle son. One of her greatest joys was living to see the birth of her two wonderful grandsons. We all wish that she had had more time to spend with them, and with us. I grieve with her parents for the loss of the beautiful woman that they created. To Mary and Maynard, I can only say, “Thank you for the gift of Carmel.” She enriched my life and those of other friends and untold numbers of strangers. To Carmel’s children, as hard as this moment is, you can rest certain that Carmel’s love is with you always and that her own comfort in death is knowing that she has made it possible for you to go on and live rich and fulfilling lives. In honor of Carmel’s children and of all of the people who live today because of her skill and devotion as a nurse, I would like to end with an excerpt from Maya Angelou’s poem entitled “Elegy,” which she dedicated to Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglas: I lay down in my grave and watch my children grow Proud blooms above the weeds of death. Their seeds must fall and press beneath this earth, And find me where I wait. My only need to fertilize their birth. I lay down in my grave and watch my children grow. Aloha, Carmel, until we can share our next cup of tea together.