My Eulogy

Alice's funeral was last Wednesday, September 27, 2006. After the priest started the ceremony with his prayers, it was about 11:35 a.m. when I spoke. It went something like this:

"It's hard to organize my thoughts in a time like this.

I've been looking for Alice ever since I got the news from my dad that she had been in a car wreck -- and I found her this morning, in the phone book. Not in the white pages, in the ads section in the middle of the book. I was thumbing through, and a little roller coaster caught my eye on the page, so I took a closer look. It said "You: lightly roasted in a sea salt and cocoa butter stress reduction. Anxiety, pain, leave them at home. Book your next vacation at sandiego.org" Alice didn't need to book her vacation in San Diego, because she lived there. My mom, dad, Sophie and I went to her apartment to clean it out, and we found her snowboard, her hula hoop, bubbles. It wasn't all play, she just knew how to balance her work and life. She had just moved four weeks ago to complete an internship at San Diego City College, teaching health and exercise science as part of her master's degree from Cal State Long Beach.

So this was the context in which I got a phone call from my dad last Wednesday morning at 2:45 a.m. He spoke to Peter -- well, when L was younger, Peter was better at waking up in the middle of the night, and I was better at sleeping. So Peter answered the phone, and very soon sounded serious, he repeated "Alice has been in a car accident." and I thought, "Oh no. OK, well, what do we have to do? Where is she? What kind of wounds does she have on her body? Should be go to the hospital and help her recover? How long will her recovery be? Soon, right?" Then Peter echoed "And she died." I didn't believe it. I got out of bed, and stood there, taking steps away from the phone. Peter asked if I would talk to my dad, so I took the phone, yet all I could tell him was "I don't have anything to say." I was in shock.

For those of you who don't know, I should tell you what happened. Alice was driving eastbound on the 8 Freeway in San Diego in her Jeep. She loved that Jeep, and how she was a woman driving a Jeep, typically a man's car. We don't know, yet we think she was coming from the beach. I think it's OK for us to fill in the blanks as we would like to here, so she was coming from the beach, because she loved the beach. She was feeling really good, dusk was approaching, and she had her stereo on really loud. She was going fast when she met the junction to the 5 Freeway south. She couldn't negotiate the curve, according to the investigator at the California Highway Patrol. Her car hit the center divider, and she tried to overcorrect by turning her steering wheel to the right, causing the vehicle to roll, two or three times. She died instantly.

The thing is, I've been working on my relationship with Alice for all of my life, really. Maybe most of us here today know that it wasn't easy to have a relationship with Alice. Alice was intense. She loved intensely, and she was angry, too. I'm angry, as well. We got alot of anger from growing up in our family.

Now it feels like I was in the middle of a sentence with Alice, that has been interrupted, forever. I will continue to work on my relationship with her, just now it will be different. I will work with my mom, and my dad, and my sister, and with her friends. I hope and pray that Alice can hear me talking with her as I move forward in my life."

The photo at the top is of Alice, of course with L, and my mom on the swing in my mom's backyard. They're looking so intently at L in the middle.