Good afternoon, I’m Eric Kleppinger;
Virginia’s granddaughter Mary is my wife, and the family have asked me to offer
a few remarks today on their behalf.
Although right up front I will ask your indulgence. You see, I had the
privilege of marrying into her family, and she always treated me as family, and
so after the 21 years I’ve known her, I can’t stand here and call her Virginia,
or Mrs Keenan; instead, allow me to share a few thoughts about the woman I came
to know as Grammie.
My job today is to offer a measure of
the woman we come together to honor here today. In ordinary circumstances that would be difficult enough:
after all—how can we truly measure a life? With one as long as hers, of course, we can certainly look
through the lens of time.
Grammie lived 95 years—really, almost
96. And in considering those years, they tell of a life lived in the
broad sweep of time—the arc of her impressive life spanned fully 40% of the
years since her ancestor, Josiah Bartlett, signed the Declaration of
Independence. She was born at the
end of WWI, lived as a teen through the Depression, endured the Cold War and
indeed outlived the entire Soviet Union by over 20 years. She grew up in Barnet, on the same land
on which she died peacefully 18 days ago; she completed studies at Peacham Academy,
Class of 1934, and went on to earn her RN certification three years later, and
one way or another had been working ever since she was a farm girl of 11. She truly loved her 52 years of
marriage to John, and was proud of her only baby girl.
Throughout her 95 years, her faith in
Christ was a constant, leading her to sing in the choir as a younger lady and
to be active in her day in the church; even in later years, I still remember
seeing fresh daily devotionals at arms’ reach by her rocking chair. And yet, if I would ever mention with
any admiration her long life, her humility would bring me right back to earth:
“Well,” she’d say, “all I did was to keep breathing.” I can still hear her solid Vermont accent; in Grammie’s
passing, I feel the loss of a connection to a simpler Vermont—an era where
schoolgirls would drive their horse and buggy to school—and I will miss hearing
those stories by her hearth.
Ninety-five years. It’s a long time. It gets even longer, and even more
impressive, when you look at her life in other ways. A life of 95 years is 1,150 months; and for the wife of a
farmer, attuned to the cycle of months that heralds the growing season in
northern Vermont, it bred certain other characteristics. As the wife of a farmer, she had a
no-nonsense approach to life: little tolerance for anything frivolous or
wasteful, and infused with a sense that there was a right way, and a wrong way,
to do something—there was little gray in her world. And as the wife of a farmer in these rocky hills, she
approached life with a stoicism that saw her through the darkest times without
allowing her ever to complain, about anything: even in her last days, she would
never acknowledge the pain she felt.
If she and John could coax a living out of the mountains of Vermont,
why, there wasn’t anything she couldn’t handle.
The months of growing seasons, and the
life of a farmer, went well with her own love of plants and flowers. I remember visiting her on the hill in
Barnet when each of her various flower beds were simply bursting in colour,
each in turn: delicate crocuses pushing through the snow, then the daffodils,
the primroses…everything has its season, she knew, and eventually, their
colours would fade and die. But as
she looked forward to the life eternal in Christ, she also looked forward each
year to the cycle of growing coming again, to new life beginning each spring
with those first tender shoots of the crocus; to new brilliance, month after
month. 1,150 months…
That’s also 59,800 weeks—the week, the
standard unit of time for taking a vacation. Except she and John never really did: their work on the farm
was always calling them. Once, in
the 1940s, she and John drove to Niagara Falls, but even then that was only a
couple of days—scarcely enough to get there, admire the fact that, yes, that
was a lot of water, and get in the car to drive home. They would visit the coast of Maine sometimes, too, but
always on day trips. She believed
firmly in being home, and especially being home by dark. Home base was her source of strength,
how she charged her batteries each day, and so she rarely left. 59,800 weeks…
Or if you like, 418,600 days: 418,600
sunrises from her perch looking east over the Connecticut River; 418,600 new
opportunities to work, to do, to make something special happen. And across those hundreds of thousands
of individual days, she built herself a web of friends and family that wrapped
her in love all the way up to her final
day last month. At the beginning
of the month she spent 12 of those days in the hospital—again, under
protest—but had each one brightened by multiple visits from friends and family
such as yourselves, people who loved her and cared about her and wanted to be a
part of her day.
Now the numbers really turn scary:
10,046,400 hours, give or take, in her extensive and impressive life. Each one of those ten million hours,
though, she would use: nothing ever went to waste in her house, certainly not
time. One of those hours she might
use teaching her granddaughter Amy how to make popovers—the right way, the
old-fashioned way, from scratch, warm and airy from the oven. Still more of her
hours she would spend working her beloved crossword puzzles, which paid off in
how incredibly sharp her mind remained to the very last.
Ten million hours…or 60.3 million
minutes: in a life of seriousness and hard work, Grammie still found time for a
few minutes of fun. As a young
girl of five or six, with her younger beloved sister Charlotte, they would
accompany their mother to the general store, where she was working. One day Grammie and Charlotte
discovered some orange-flavored chocolates in the store’s candy jars…and for a
few precious minutes, the girls had their own little picnic under the counter,
sharing those little treats. She
really did love her chocolate, even back then.
Ninety-five years, 1,150 months, 59,800
weeks, 418,600 days, 10 million hours, or 60.3 million minutes—no matter your
perspective, Grammie’s was a long, full, and fruitful life. But beyond those 60.3 million minutes
are the untold, the uncountable, moments—those instants we freeze in our
memories, those snapshots of human interaction and those moments of pure
Grammie. We think then of the
moment of the flash of a twinkle in her eye as she told a story about growing
up with Charlotte. We think of the
moment we saw the hard set of her eye, as well, when someone was doing
something of which she disapproved, a look that could bring you back to center
in a hurry. We think of the moment
of the warmth of her hug, on welcoming us to her door or in wishing us well on
our way out. And we think of the
moment, in the middle of the night, when she finally laid down her burdens of
nearly 96 years, and came to rest, in peace, free of pain and welcomed home
with the words she so longed to hear: “Well done, thou good and faithful
servant; enter into the joy of your master.”
How do you measure a life? In years, yes, but as we’ve seen, in so
much more. We measure it in
seasons, of fragrant daffodils, riotous autumn leaves, and howling Vermont
snowstorms. We measure it in
virtues lived and passed down, in words that may strike us as old-fashioned,
but yet we know in our hearts are missing from our modern lives: words like
duty, forbearance, sacrifice, temperance, fortitude. We measure it in service, to her church, her family, and her
community; we measure it in the literature, the poetry, the biography she
immersed herself in to broaden and strengthen her mind. And we very certainly measure it in the
hearts of friends she touched, and in the family she led and loved.
How do you measure a life? In the case of Grammie Keenan, we measure
it in all these ways, and by every one, the result is the same: a life full to
the brim, packed down, indeed overflowing with all that she valued: her home,
her friends, her family, and her God.
Her incredible time with us may have
passed. Her story here may have
ended—but her Story goes on, with a new chapter we’re not yet able to
read. Eye has not seen, nor ear
has heard, what God has prepared for those who love Him—in other words, we
can’t even imagine the beauty, the
glory she’s now able to behold, surrounded by all her ancestors, welcomed into
that great cloud of witnesses gathered before the Throne. But yet, I can imagine John, beaming at seeing his bride of 52 years once
again, then showing her around the fields brilliant with wildflowers, an old
stone fence and soft light shining through the massive old trees, and her, with
that twinkle in her eye and that wonderful Vermont accent, saying “this’ll do
just fine.”
“Don’t cry for
me when I’m gone,” she would say.
And yet I think she would understand when we do. It hurts. We will miss her.
When you think about it, most often a funeral is an occasion for
leaving: not only leaving the body of our loved one behind, but leaving here
our flowers, our tears, our grief; here our memories of the departed often will
end. But what Grammie wanted was
something different: for this to be a chance for us to take something away with
us, to gather here in a spirit of celebration, of joy at her being reunited
with God, of warmth and of remembering her fondly, and to carry those memories,
those lessons of a life fully lived, back into our own lives. Don’t cry for me, she seemed to be
saying; this is not the end. It’s
only the end of the beginning, the first act, and so much more is awaiting
me. In only the twinkling of an
eye, we will see her again, and be able to give her a hug and tell her thanks
for setting the example of how to measure a very rich life.
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