Tribute
~ by Kristin Westlake
We are here tonight to honour Eli the man. A man we all loved, in our different ways, who touched our hearts and lives such that now, what seems an eternity but is, I suppose, just a short time after his death, we gather again to remember how we loved him.
Some of us knew Eli mostly as that man. A man of deep compassion and ocean-wide acceptance, with an evergreen spring of sweetness in his character that, even in the darkest of times, shone through those gorgeous turquoise eyes. At the end of his life it did more – it suffused the air around him and enveloped everyone around him.
Some of us were blessed enough to know the child from whom that man was born. Eli the child was the dearest of darlings, sleek and brown and round as a polished teak Buddha, with a beatific smile and contemplative soul that befitted the comparison. Committed to doing things in his own time, Eli bestowed the most mundane of tasks with an attention some devote only to prayer.. Long before he could read, Eli was famous in the family for taking a considered collection of reading material to the bathroom, bestowing even this most mundane of all human tasks with a dignified consideration that would become a hallmark of his character.
Eli the child has been most at the surface of my thoughts of late, and just three nights ago I had a dream. I have a little son of my own now, and he joins me on the kitchen bench in the evenings while I cook. In my dream, Eli the child was sitting in this place on the kitchen bench, in his childhood garb of short stubbies and a t-shirt, bestowing my kitchen with that calm turquoise gaze and giving it his blessing with his Buddha smile. I looked up from my stove and saw him, and my delight was just awesome – “I thought you were dead!!” I cried.”
“I’m not dead.” He said, and simply sat calmly on the bench as I buried my face in his tiny lap and sobbed and sobbed… “Oh, thank god. I love you.”
And then I woke up. You will all no doubt know what it is to wake into the knowledge that something is wrong and then to have the wrongness crash upon you as the world grinds into movement for another day. And from the love and relief of my dream came the sorrow – for myself, for Jan and Nigel and Joel whose grief is unknowably deep, and for the world bereft of this little soul and the man he became.
In the three days since then I have thought a lot about my dream, and all that I can think to take from it is the love I felt. The relief can never come, but I think that none the beloved ones, who look over at us from the other side of death, would want their passing to make us hate more, or fear more, because they were taken away. The world is still beautiful – it must be, because it gave us Eli. And all that love that Eli gave us, the love that’s brought us here tonight, maybe it’s now our job to pass it on. To make sure the world can still benefit from that evergreen sweetness. As the world grinds on and we, however reluctantly, get on with the rest of our lives, I think Eli will be pleased to see us acting in the light of our love for him. Because of if I’ve learned anything from all this, it’s that love is all we have.