Appreciation of a Sister: A Funeral Address

I WISH I could assure you, friends of my sister and of this family, that you have not come to a funeral. You have come to say good-bye to an old and dear friend, a kindly personality, an unselfish soul.

This is a world of good-byes. Every morning bids good-bye to the night from which it springs. Every evening bids good-bye to the sunlight. Every day some ship sets sail. Every day a friend departs. Whether these goodbyes are final, or whether they are just the preludes to another day, who is there of us wise enough to answer?

There is a custom among us that those who say good-bye through that physical dissolution which we call death are entitled, in the after moment, to some small summing up of their efforts and accomplishments, to some meed of praise for their trials and triumphs, or even for their failures. There is also a feeling that a sort of official solace must be tendered to those who are left behind, and that this praise and this solace are most fittingly tendered by some representative of church or of religion.

I have long felt that this is a mistake, and that it has necessarily resulted in a funereal formalism, a crystallization of ceremony, which fails to echo, or respond to, our real emotions and contemplations of the occasion, and surely a time of death is one which arouses our starkest contemplations of life.

Now it well may be that this is only a personal reaction, based upon a heterodoxy which is tone-deaf to the spiritual values of the repetitious texts and assertions of faith which pass current on occasions similar to this. I am far from reflecting in any way upon those people who cling to a formalistic expression and to whom the time-tried prayers and protestations may be the sign and symbol of the deepest faith and the purest sincerity.

But for those of us who have long since lost touch with formal religion, it is more or less of a mockery when we call in the man of religion to make an outcry of faith for us who have no faith and to offer a solace to us who have no sympathy with the solace which he offers.

It is also often outrageously unjust to the man of religion to ask him to utter an appreciation of a human being whom he hardly knew was in the world before he was requested to usher him out of it.

It has, therefore, seemed to me as if it were my own duty and my own privilege to speak these words of appreciation to-day, because no one else could possibly know my sister as I have known her. As a matter of fact, I think I knew her better even than her mother knew her, for not only were we in closer sympathy with each other, but we have been in intimate companionship for a dozen years longer than her mother knew her. And she, on the other hand, knew me better than anyone else, better than my wife, perhaps, for my sister knew me for thirty years before I had a wife.

In a way, the world has overlooked, or at least has not sufficiently celebrated, the understanding of brothers and sisters. Parental love has been sufficiently acclaimed, conjugal love has been exalted, and romantic love — the most evanescent of all — is the constant theme of song and story, of drama and of daily headlines. But the love of sister and brother, which covers a lifetime, has been oddly neglected. I have a personal recollection of companionship with this sister of mine for sixty years, and I do not think that ever brother had a better or more devoted sister.

This sister of mine, along with other qualities, had amiability, dependability, durability. She was light-hearted, she was good-humored. You could count absolutely on her doing anything which was to be done, and not only for to-day and to-morrow, but forever, as far as her human endurance lasted.

For example, she gave years, not just one year or two, but many, to the care of her mother, my mother. During the last years of our mother’s life she was practically invalided, and my sister carried the responsibility of her night and day, and earned her own living besides. This was the more commendable because there was not always the closest sympathy between them. I think that our mother was always kinder to her man-child than to her woman-chihl (which fact needs no Sigmund Freud to explain), but it was her woman-child who gave her the greater devotion. Without stinting her mother, my sister was equally devoted to me, and when the Cooke children arrived she was a second mother to each of them.

After all, I wonder whether spinsters are not the real mothers of the race. They have so much unexpressed love upon which to draw. Certainly, in the case of my spinster sister, she mothered everybody, from her own mother down even to casual acquaintances. There was scarcely a day of her life, during her later years, when she was not doing something for somebody, preparing some special dish, purchasing or fixing some little contrivance which she thought someone could use, sending a gift or a packet of goodies to someone whose taste she knew, writing a letter or sending a greeting card — oh, a hundred things in a hundred ways. There must have been a constant exclamation of surprise from the recipients of undeserved and uncalled-for favors from the hands of my sister Lillian. If each recipient had uttered a single exclamatory ‘Ha!’ a wave of laughter would have encircled the world.

Now the thing which makes this generous spirit particularly significant is that it was a self-made character. She created it herself. As a child, as a girl, as a young woman, she had no easy time with herself. She had a hot temper and a temperament, and she had moody streaks which boded no good for her or for anyone else. But she learned from the years. She was not an educated woman, but she had a capacity for learning the lessons of life which a Shaw or an Einstein might envy.

Understand me, I am not eulogizing. I am not painting in glowing colors. I am not trying to exalt her. I want to keep her distinctly in her place as one of the humbler heroines of life, one of the so-called ‘ common people ’ beloved of Lincoln, one of the plain, simple characters whom we note every day of our lives and pass by without acknowledgment. It is exactly that simpler quality and that humbler station which make her example of value to us.

How did she accomplish the forging of so finely tempered a character from the commonplace ore of everyday living? I cannot tell you. If we had followed precedent and had brought some savant, some cleric, here to-day, he might have worded an answer for you, but it would be none the less a mystery still.

What, then, becomes of the personality or the character builded of so many countless electrons and molecules of life and action? It seems monstrous that it should be wasted — but it may be. And yet, even if its existence has come to an absolute end, has it been wasted — upon you and me?

Ordinarily, we have some sort of spiritual mediator at a time like this because we are unwilling to face the realities of life and death; we prefer to have them glossed over by some form of words. To what end, I wonder?

What, then, was my sister’s religion? I do not know. She did not know. I doubt whether anyone knows what his religion really is. All he knows is the label which someone has attached to it.

I think my sister believed in God in a vague sort of way, but it would have puzzled her, as it puzzles you, to give any definition of God. I think she believed in immortality, but why she believed in it she could not have told you. Probably you cannot either, beyond a quotation and an assertion. She was affiliated with no church, not even with a club or society. She was distinctly an unlabelized individualist, so it seems reasonable to suppose that her character was not the result of anything which we ordinarily consider as religious beliefs.

But she believed in people. She was a human being among human beings. She affected them as they affected her. Hers was the religion of humanity. As I see it, it was enough.

Can that religion go further? Does it carry her and carry us beyond this room and beyond that scar in the earth, with the hope that we may meet her again? I do not know, and I am bound to add that I see no benefit in asserting that we know, unless we do know. As Lowell well says: —

And when we stand in the presence of this darker twin of the twin mysteries — life and death — I know of no words to excel those of Socrates to this effect: ‘Death cannot be an evil, for if we wake again we visit with the great ones gone before us, and if we never wake again, what more grateful than a never-ending slumber?’

So, to-day, I ask the eternal question: ‘Whither?’

Does that God which is Nature and that Nature which is God reward her, or does it forget her, as one who has served the Eternal Purpose? I do not know. I do not know what her future is, but this much I do know — that God himself cannot destroy that which she has been.