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Post by Matthew on Dec 11, 2009 15:04:51 GMT -5
Jan was a caring, loving, sweet woman who always impressed me with her desire to live an examined and fulfilled life. She touched me deeply with her hard-fought-for wisdom, her giving, loving nature, her razor-sharp wit and her broad sense of humor. She was always a sympathetic ear, and when she called me on some silly-ass things I'd said or done, she'd do so in a way that showed she was speaking from silly-ass experience. She was full of wit and snark and love and joy and urbanity and earthiness and tranquility.
She held my hand when we were all watching Serenity in the theater, and I hope that it gave her as much comfort as it did me.
Rich, I know you know this, but you are a lucky, lucky man, and you have my most profound sympathies for this terrible loss.
She is one of the most beautiful people I've ever known, and knowing her has enriched me.
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Post by SpringSummers on Dec 13, 2009 23:05:59 GMT -5
Jan’s services and wakeA summary by Spring Summers 13-DEC-2009Jan’s services were on Friday, December 11, 2009, at Christ Community Church in Montpelier, VT. It was a place that she loved, and a place full of people that loved her. The church is beautiful, with high ceilings and stained glass. Jan’s friend Kathy gave the eulogy. It was surely one of the best that I have ever heard. It captured Jan beautifully, and also conveyed the strong love and understanding that had built between the two women over the many years of their friendship. Kathy mentioned all those things that we all came to know and love about Jan: Her intelligence, her genuineness, her honesty, her warmth, her mischievous playfulness, her wit, her unique and keen insightfulness, and her remarkable strength. Kathy also made memorable reference to a metaphor that she heard from Jan – when Jan realized that she didn’t have much time left, she made a request that there be “no sheet cake” at her services – i.e. nothing standard-issue, simplistic, and sugar-coated. And there was no sheet cake, either real or figurative. Because Jan was unique and complex, and though she could be gentle, she wasn’t one to bury truth under mounds of sweet confection. There was a luncheon at the church afterward, where I met some of the people who had been at the service. I don’t think any of you will be surprised when I tell you that there were all sorts of people there, from the well-dressed and educated to the not-so-much. Jan reached out to everyone, and touched people in all walks of life. The wake was later in the evening, at Kathy’s house. The best part of this was when we all gathered in the living room, for Jan’s son Jason to read The Song of Mehitabel by Don Marquis, a favorite poem of Jan’s, and the reason she named herself “Mehitabel S’cubie.” Jan’s favorite line from the poem: “There’s a dance in the old dame yet.”Perfect, no? Till the end, there was always a dance in Jan – literally, if she could manage it, and if not, then always, in her eyes. Everyone told stories of how Jan had touched their lives with her words and actions. A recurring theme was how sincere and deep her interest was, in the people she loved. Everyone seemed to think of her as a “soulmate.” There was laughter, and there were tears, as people recounted their times with Jan. Her former minister, David, told how Jan had decided to join his church after hearing him say that once, after his divorce and watching his ex drive away with his children, he had thought to himself, “How can I murder her, and get away with it?” A man of the cloth willing to admit to such thoughts apparently did the trick for Jan, and she told him that it had been a selling point. Rich read messages that he had received from some of Jan’s friends – writers Harvey Jacobs, and Terry Bisson. Both expressed their sorrow and sang Jan’s praises as a friend and a critic and an editor. Jan knew so many people, she had done so many things in her life – she was so talented and smart and loving and brave. All memories expressed reflected those simple truths. Rich also read Sara’s post from the S’cubie thread, and told how, when Jan decided to marry him, she had said, “I don’t want to argue about who burnt the roast beef.” And he came to understand what that meant: They weren’t to let irritations and angry feelings stay bottled up and reveal themselves in nonsensical arguments that seemed to be about roast beef, but were really about other things too deeply buried for retrieval. So together, they worked hard on building an open, honest relationship, and a process for airing doubts and grievances, that truly allowed them to be happy with one another. I guess Jan was big on the food metaphors, because Kathy also mentioned the time she made artichoke lasagna for Jan, after Jan had driven miles to see her . . . but Kathy became so consumed with making this “special treat for Jan,” that the time that they could have spent visiting with one another was instead spent on something much less important. So Jan, throughout their friendship, when she felt that Kathy was focusing on the wrong thing, would say “artichoke lasagna!” So though Jan isn’t with us anymore, I think we can all honor her memory by remembering these things: - Don’t serve sheetcake.
- Lasagna is always just lasagna.
- Never argue about who burnt the roast beef.
And don’t run out of dance.
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Post by Julia, wrought iron-y on Dec 13, 2009 23:50:46 GMT -5
toujours gai toujours gai
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Post by angelique on Dec 14, 2009 8:13:23 GMT -5
Spring, Thank you for that lovely summary. I thought I would post the homily Kathy wrote for Jan:
It’s not OK when your beloved friend dies with what feels like no warning. It’s not OK that she was overtaken by a rare cancer that went on a rampage everywhere throughout her body and left her wracked with pain. It’s not OK, and I could keep saying that over and over, but I don’t think that’s what I’m supposed to be doing standing here today. In our house we have a saying when things don’t go as planned or when we find ourselves sucked into the tar pit of a marital argument or on the horns of an impossible dilemma. “What would Jan say?” we say. I don’t need to explain to any of you who knew Jan how what she would say was usually the exact thing that needed to be said, even though sometimes it seemed to come from out of left field.
So: What would Jan say? I can tell you what she wouldn’t say, and that is, bring on the sheet cake. Make some artichoke lasagna. But for that to make sense I need to tell you a few things about Jan.
Jan’s father was a sharecropper and the family moved around a lot. By the time she left Kentucky at the age of nineteen the varieties of abuse she’d endured to body and psyche would have left most of us too broken to go anywhere, let alone New York City. But Jan picked herself up and headed straight for Greenwich Village, where she worked as a kitty girl at the now-famous Café Wha?, and where she found herself really home for the first time in her life.
Jan was never what I’d call upbeat; she was always beat, as in a member of the “beat generation,” which is to say she wore dark rather than rose-colored glasses, and to the day she died she craved the deep soulful sound of the blues, the jazz-inspired rhythms of beat poetry. Ferlingetti was a particular favorite of hers. Like Jan he was deep and soulful but also funny. “Don’t let that horse eat that violin cried Chagall’s mother,” one of his poems begins, “but he kept right on painting…”
I met Jan twenty-five years ago when she took a writing workshop with me at Goddard College. Why do we make the friends we do? Of course I found Jan’s life story fascinating. I had never met a kitty girl before (and for those of you who are wondering, a kitty girl passed the basket for donations at the Café Wha?, where musicians the likes of whom we all bow down in homage to these days were playing), and I’d longed to be a beat just at the moment when beats were being supplanted by hippies. But most of all I was drawn to Jan because I knew—even before I came to really know her, in that way we know something on a genuine, primitive level—that Jan’s refusal to entertain illusion was the perfect antidote to everything in me that was missing.
Once when Jan was still living in Hartford she came to visit me in Vermont. We planned to go to a play that evening at Goddard, and I decided it would be a great idea to make her artichoke lasagna as a special treat. To make artichoke lasagna correctly you first have to peel the leaves from and scoop the chokes out of a mountain of artichokes until you’re left with the hearts, which you then have to slice paper thin and poach and layer between sheets of lasagna you’ve rolled by hand along with béchamel sauce and grated cheese. It will come as no surprise that one of the Bible stories I’ve had the hardest time getting behind is the one where Jesus comes to visit Mary and Martha, and Martha drives herself crazy cooking and cleaning and making everything just perfect for Jesus, while Mary sits there talking with him, and Jesus actually says he prefers Mary’s behavior over Martha’s. By the time the lasagna came out of the oven we didn’t have time to enjoy eating it before leaving for the play, plus we were both exhausted, me from the turmoil of making the dish, Jan from having had to sit there watching. Did we have a chance to talk? No. I was too busy doing something insanely complicated as a special treat for her and couldn’t be distracted. “Artichoke lasagna,” Jan would say, whenever she saw me turning into Martha—and laugh, because no one could laugh like Jan.
When I first knew Jan she had vast stores of spirit but she wasn’t—to put it mildly—a churchgoer. She sort of backed into the church via a very skeptical, eyeball-rolling encounter with the idea of a higher power she came across in ACOA meetings. Maybe she would never have become a church-goer, as heretical a thought as this might be, if not for Christ Church and David Hall. I’m glad she did since she’s the one who brought me here. Because of the abuses of power in her childhood, Jan always remained skeptical about power, higher or otherwise. She knew how power could wear the right trappings and still be hollow underneath.
Despite all this, the faith Jan found here in the community of this church, as well as in her solitary spiritual exploration, was a very powerful one. It was as powerful and deep and soulful as the music she couldn’t get enough of, as sensitive to the least note of hypocrisy as the poetry she loved.
Mark Doty (whose poetry Jan also loved) wrote a series of poems about heaven. “Heaven for Paul,” “Heaven for Arden.” And I keep thinking, Heaven for Jan. Heaven for Jan. If I were writing a poem with that name, what would I say? In the hospital when she knew she was dying, Jan made some very specific requests. Chief among these was “no sheet cake,” by which she meant nothing cheap and easy and covered with sugar, no empty platitudes—the flip side of artichoke lasagna in other words. Needless to say, Jan’s way with a metaphor—and her sense of humor—never abandoned her.
As much as I think this is not OK, (that I’m up here, that Jan died, that I’m never going to see her again, that, let me repeat—this is NOT OK) I also know there’s no comfort to be had imagining Jan as she would never have wanted to be imagined. Certainly not sitting around in a gown on a cloud playing an instrument, not even a cello. A cloud? Jan never even liked being outdoors. No pie in the sky. No sheet cake.
The thing is, Jan shouldn’t ever have died this way. The thing is, she shouldn’t ever have experienced any of the pain and suffering she endured throughout her life. The thing is, Jan knew better than any of us how all these never-should-haves are like the never-should-have that put Jesus on the cross, and yet that’s the thing that happens, unbidden, that opens the door to redemption.
A person who grows up in a house with dirt floors and no indoor plumbing can go one of two ways. She can daydream the future, maybe even entertain the idea that she’s entitled to something better, sentimentalize the idea of what constitutes happiness. Or she can stare what it means to be alive in the face. And she can live the life Jan came to live, abundant, full, taking as much joy from her family and friends as she gave in return, going from strength to strength (a phrase Jan loved) right there in front of us, soulful and funny, bratty and wise, the most brilliant, beatest shining star.
No artichoke lasagna for Jan. No sheet cake. Or to use another of her Jan-like sayings, this time from some babe in a noir gangster movie, That’s just the kind of hairpin she was.
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Post by SpringSummers on Dec 14, 2009 17:41:08 GMT -5
Angelique! So glad you posted the homily. Sara had wondered about doing just that - wonderful!
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Post by S'ewing S'cubie on Dec 15, 2009 8:03:29 GMT -5
How do you classify someone who is neither a sheetcake nor an artichoke lasagna? You call her Jan.
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Post by Lola m on Dec 15, 2009 20:14:35 GMT -5
toujours gai toujours gai
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Post by Lola m on Dec 15, 2009 20:18:01 GMT -5
Thank you so much, Spring and Sara, for representing the s'cubies. Thank you so much, Spring, for your summary that helps us feel like we were there, just a bit. Thank you so much, Angelique, for posting the full text of what Kathy said, also helping us to feel like we were able to be there, in spirit.
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Post by Cal on Dec 16, 2009 14:12:48 GMT -5
So Jan became a regular player with Actor’s Attic. One night, a couple of years later we had cast party where I got very, very drunk. Jan was dismayed that my friends were going to let me drive home in that condition. (My friends weren’t necessarily uncaring, just a little too heavily self-medicating, as was I at the time.) Anyway Jan drove me to her place and let me sleep over on her couch. After that, I realized she was someone who really, truly cared about me. I began to pursue Jan romantically. Thus began the next ten years of our relationship. It was on again, off again, sometimes lovers, sometimes friends, but we always managed to stay in each others lives. In 1988, we moved to Vermont. In 1996 Jan and I bought a house together (which we still own). We supported ourselves by working as consultants. We lived and worked in that house until 2000 when Jan became an Oblate of The Convent of St. Mary in Peekskill, NY. For many years Jan had been immersing herself in spiritual studies and becoming an associate of a convent; a lay worker sharing the life of the sisters, (for that is what an Oblate is) seemed to her like the logical next step on her path. Over this period, we continued to stay in touch, me visiting her once a month. Jan was studying to be a spiritual counselor in Pecos, New Mexico when her mother, Ruth, passed away. Jan collapsed and could not drive home by herself. So I flew out to Pecos and drove Jan back to Owensboro, KY for her mother’s funeral. Then, after several days of driving all over town settling her mother’s affairs, I drove Jan back to the convent. It was during this long drive that we began to talk about getting married. What a couple of mad, impetuous kids eh? Only together 18 years and we jump right to tying the knot. Anyway we got married in 2003 and the last six years have been the best of our lives. We laughed every day. We made each other very happy. And now it’s done. What a long strange trip it's been. I sure do miss her. I never cared before about an afterlife, but now I really hope I see her again. Thank you so much for sharing, Rich. Such a beautiful story. My thoughts and prayers continue to be with you and your family.
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Post by SpringSummers on Jan 3, 2010 22:41:04 GMT -5
S’cubies:
In memory of Jan, we bought a water buffalo! See below:
Thanks to all who contributed.
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Post by Lola m on Jan 3, 2010 22:56:22 GMT -5
OMG! A water buffalo! I am truly delighted and proud of us all! We did Jan proud, I think. And thank you, Spring, for the coordinating work and all.
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Post by Michelle on Jan 4, 2010 8:10:32 GMT -5
OMG! A water buffalo! I am truly delighted and proud of us all! We did Jan proud, I think. And thank you, Spring, for the coordinating work and all. What should we call him?
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Post by angelique on Jan 4, 2010 8:37:16 GMT -5
OMG! A water buffalo! I am truly delighted and proud of us all! We did Jan proud, I think. And thank you, Spring, for the coordinating work and all. What should we call him? I think we should call him Archie.
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Post by Sue on Jan 4, 2010 8:56:54 GMT -5
What should we call him? I think we should call him Archie. I vote for Lorne-- the resemblance is in the horns. Thank you Spring. Uncertainties regarding the after-life aside I think Jan would be touched, pleased and highly amused. I hope the village that receives him also gets a large dose of Jan-ness to help them on their way in life!
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Post by Lola m on Jan 4, 2010 21:32:47 GMT -5
What should we call him? I think we should call him Archie. Oh, well suggested! ;D
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