Palm Sunday_ An Autobiographical Collage - Kurt Vonnegut [59]
I said this:
“Lavina asked me to be up here.
“This is the hardest thing Lavina ever asked me to do, but then she never asked anyone to do anything hard. Her only instructions were that I was to say good-bye to her as an old friend—as all old friends.
“I say it now. If I had to say it at the end, to build up to saying it, I would go all to pieces, I think. I would bark like a dog. So I say it now: ’Good-bye, darling Lavina.’
“There—that is behind me now. That is behind us, now.
“It is common at funerals for survivors to regret many things that were said and done to the departed—to think, ’I wish I had said this instead of this, I wish I had done that instead of that.’ This is not that sort of funeral. This is not a church filled with regrets.
“Why not? We always treated Lavina with love and decency. Why did we do that? It was Lavina’s particular genius to so behave that the only possible responses on our part were love and decency. That is her richest legacy to us, I think: Her lessons in how to treat others so that their only possible responses are, again, love and decency.
“There is at least one person here who does not need to learn what Lavina knew. He is Lavina’s spiritual equal, although he was so much in love with her that perhaps he never knew it. He is Ollie Morris Lyon.
“Ollie and Lavina are country people, by the way.
“I have seen them achieve success and happiness in the ugly factory city of Schenectady, New York, where I first met them. They were not much older than Mary and Philip then. Think of that. Yes, and when they lived in New York City, they had as much fun as any jazz-age babies ever did. Good for them! But they were always a farmer and his wife.
“Now the farmer’s wife has died. I’m glad they got back here before she died.
“The wife died first.
“It happens all the time—but it always seems like such a terrible violation of the natural order when the wife dies first. Is there anyone here, even a child, who did not believe that Lavina would survive us all? She was so healthy, so capable, so beautiful, so strong. She was supposed to come to our funerals—not the other way around.
“Well—she may come to them yet. She will, if she can. She will talk to God about it, I’m sure. If anybody can stretch the rules of heaven a little, Lavina can.
“I say she was strong. We all say she was strong. Yes, and in this bicentennial springtime we can say that she was like a legendary pioneer woman in her seeming strengths. We know now that she was only pretending to be strong—which is the best any of us can do. Of course, if you can pretend to be strong all your life, which is what Lavina did, then you can be very comforting to those around you. You can allow them to be childlike now and then.
“Good job, Lavina, darling. And remember, too, Lavina, the times we let you be a little girl.
“When she was a little girl in Palmyra, Illinois, being the youngest of a large family, she was expected to leave a note in the kitchen saying where she had gone after school. One day the note that was found said ’I have gone where I have decided.’
“We loved you.
“We love you.
“We will always love you.
“We will meet again.”
• • •
I now confess that the American poems which move me most are those which marvel most, simply and clearly, at the queer shapes which the massive indifference of America gives to lives. So The Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters seems a very great book to me.
That is a barbarous opinion. So I have nothing to lose by blurting moreover that I find much to celebrate in the shrewd innocence of many of the poems now being set to country music.
Pay attention, please, to the words of “The Class of ’57,” a big country hit of a few years ago:
Tommy’s sellin’ used cars,
Nancy’s fixin’ hair,
Harvey runs a groc’ry store
And Marg’ret doesn’t care,
Jerry drives a truck for Sears
And Charlotte’s on the make.
And Paul sells life insurance
And part-time