EULOGY for BARB DUKEMAN in the EVENT SHE DIES FROM COVID BECAUSE SHE WAS FORCED TO GO BACK TO SCHOOL July 11, 2020

You might as well get comfortable because she wrote her own Eulogy. SHE. WAS. AN. ENGLISH. TEACHER. That means you’re getting her last lesson, and those typically ran 45 minutes. Listen carefully because there will be a quiz at the end. She starts off with a super silly ditty she remembered as the first poem she ever memorized:

LADLES AND JELLYSPOONS

“Ladles and Jellyspoons, hobos and tramps,

cross-eyed mosquitoes and bow-legged ants,

I kneel before you to sit behind you

to tell you something I know nothing about.

This Thursday, which is Good Friday,

there's a Mother's Day meeting for fathers only;

please wear your best clothes even if you haven't got any.

Please come if you can't;

but if you can, then please stay at home.

Admission is free, please pay at the door;

Then pull up a chair and sit on the floor.

It makes no difference where you sit,

'Cause the man in the balcony is sure to spit.

I have nothing to say, but before you go,

let me tell you a story I don't really know.”

It is fitting that Barb wrote her own eulogy. It’s chock-filled with literature and quotes that befit an English teacher, and she purposefully chose the words she wanted said at her own memorial service. Although her last year of teaching involved pre-planned pablum curriculum from FLVS and curtailed her creativity, she never stopped writing. She’d attended enough funerals to hear the pain of those left behind, trying to capture of the life of the person in the casket or urn, and she wanted none of that. Her sense of humor, as you think back, is something we can never forget, so I’d like to remind you again – she wrote this.

Shakespeare reminds us not to cry when a loved one is gone; he refers to this in many of his plays including Romeo and Juliet. She taught that for about 15 years starting back in 1989, and she remembered much of the dialogue and enjoyed freaking the kids out when she recited the next line from memory. Fifteen years times 5 classes a day plus the movie – she knew the story well enough (that’s at least 150 times she heard the story). Friar Laurence gives the Capulet family these words when they found Juliet dead:

“Heaven and yourself

Had part in this fair maid; now heaven hath all,

And all the better is it for the maid:

Your part in her you could not keep from death,

But heaven keeps his part in eternal life.

The most you sought was her promotion;

For 'twas your heaven she should be advanced:

And weep ye now, seeing she is advanced

Above the clouds, as high as heaven itself?”

In other words, quit crying. She ain’t coming back. She watched enough Supernatural to know Sam and Dean Winchester can’t save her now. She knew that life doesn’t end; it changes. It becomes something else – a new adventure, a new journey. John Donne writes about death in his Meditation 17, the famous sermon where he asks not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee and no man is an island. Donne reminds us:

“All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.”

WE ARE ALL PAGES OF A GIANT BOOK. Barb loved her metaphors. She loved to read and write as much as she loved music. She started reading at a very young age and had read through a dictionary before the age of 8. She didn’t like the plot. Her collection of writing includes poems about horses, socks, computer programming, beaches, dandelions, broken dishes, shells, drinking tea, love, growing up, cars, school, all the mundane things that make up life. She added many longer pieces of fiction and non-fiction after taking two creative writing courses. She believed we spend too much time focused on the ends of things; funerals, graduations, retirements, birthdays with zeroes in them. She was concerned that we’d become more attached to phones and computers than the real people around us. The stupid microscopic sandspur on steroids certainly didn’t help anything. She’d like you to remember a poem by Linda Ellis called “The Dash”:

"I read of a man who stood to speak at a funeral of a friend.

He referred to the dates on the tombstone from the beginning…to the end.

He noted that first came the date of birth & spoke of the following date with tears

but said what mattered most of all was the dash between those years.

For that dash represents all the time they spent alive on earth

and now only those who loved them know what that little line is worth.

For it matters not, how much we own, the cars…the house…the cash

What matters is how we lived and loved and how we spend our dash."

Her dash. Let’s see – born in 1965 up north, moved to Florida in 1974, graduated high school in 1983, graduated from USF in 1989. Got married in 1992. Baby David came in 1995, and Thomas followed in 1998. There’s a million other things in that timespan: friends made, parties attended, goals set and met, vacations taken, losses suffered, recognition given, alcohol consumed. She loved her family, her classes, going to the beach, music, singing, reading, writing, comedy; she collected pandas, keys, memes, and books. We should focus on those millions of things that are important to us and never take them for granted.

Another poem that inspired her is by Dylan Thomas who urged his father to not fade away at the end of his life, but to go out in a Blaze of Glory as Bon Jovi sings it. We shouldn’t give up when life gives us challenges; they test us, they burn us, they make us strong like steel forged from the weakest metal. Instead of obstacles or setbacks, she preferred to call them speed bumps. We should focus on the things that make our lives meaningful: family, friends, faith, forgiving others, and finding the good around us. Here is that villanelle in its entirety:

"Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night"

“Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

We have been the wise men, the old men, the good men, grave men; and as a parent it is part of the natural order of things to precede our children in death.

With this poem, the last thing she’d teach during the year, she assigned her students to write a bucket list of 15 things or more things they’d like to accomplish before they kick the bucket, a mix of things they could accomplish in a week, a year, and over a lifetime. She would share her list of 50 items and tell them which ones she’d accomplished so far. Light bulbs lit up over the students’ heads when they realized the endless possibilities and dreams that lay ahead of them. She told them to keep that list and tuck it in into their yearbooks for safekeeping or she'd sneak them into their diploma packets.

The other classical play she enjoyed involved fate, witches, cauldrons, and blood, lots of blood. Shakespeare’s character Macbeth has been to hell and back in a handbasket; he regrets some of his actions and their consequences, but he realizes that life is short, and no one gets out of it alive:

“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

To the last syllable of recorded time,

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.”

Don’t allow your life to be a tale that signifies nothing. Change is possible this late in the game. Who would have thought Tom Brady and Rob Gronkowski would become Buccaneers? We should reach out, set some goals, and get on our way. Do some good in this world. Read some good books. Mr. Rogers told us that in any crisis, look for the helpers. Become a helper.

How would she want you to remember her? Tell stories, remember the goofy things she did or said, the weird posts and memes on late night Facebook; let her live on in your memories. She was especially proud that she snuck some of her own sonnets into her curriculum and said they were by a “contemporary author.” Let her legacy echo in all that you do. Stories live in different forms: literature, music, theater, movies, sculptures – it’s all around you. Breathe it in. If you haven’t seen the animated movie Coco (which she highly recommends), dead Hector is explaining to poor little Miguel about what happens when you’re forgotten after death:

“When there’s no one left in the living world who remembers you…you disappear from this world, this afterlife. We call it “The Final Death.” Our memories have to be passed down by those who knew us in life. In the stories they tell about us. When those people are gone…well, it happens to everyone eventually.”

Dead Hector tries to get his now-very old daughter, Coco, to remember him during Dia de los Muertos. He plays the guitar and sings for Miguel the song he used to sing for his daughter:

“Remember me, though I have to say goodbye

remember me. Don’t let it make you cry.

For even if I’m far away – Look! I hold you in my heart.

I sing a secret song to you each night we are apart.

Remember me though I have to travel far.

Remember me each time you hear a sad guitar.

Know that I’m with you the only way that I can be until you’re in my arms again.”

The story has a happy and cathartic ending, so don’t worry. Watch the movie. But have the tissues handy.

Storytelling is important part of our culture, whether it’s written, sung, painted, or acted. The humanities have been passed down for thousands of years; it’s what makes us human (SUPPORT THE ARTS!). In the first English epic Beowulf, the narrator tells Beowulf’s followers what they should be doing for their king after the final battle. Here it is, loosely transliterated by Barb:

“You should ride your horses around the tower

Telling your sorrow, telling stories

Of your dead friend and her life, her legacies,

Praising her for meaningful deeds, for a life

As noble as her name. So should all men

Raise up words for their family, warm

With love, when their dear mother and wife leaves

Her body behind, sends her soul

On high…who once was so open to everyone,

So deserving of praise.”

This part of Beowulf was a crowd favorite in her class. She wrote scripts of the final battle and the students had to act it out. There were swords, armor, Viking helmets, a dragon’s head, red claws, fire hanging from the ceiling, the works. Excessive overacting was encouraged. She nearly laughed to death one year when Beowulf all of a sudden developed a Scottish accent.

The last Shakespeare play she taught is the most produced and longest of Shakespeare’s plays. If you recall, Hamlet, because of some serious step-dad/uncle problems, ends up dead with practically everyone else at the end. As Hamlet lay dying, he asks his BFF Horatio to tell his story, as Barb asks of you:

“Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me!

If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart

Absent thee from felicity awhile,

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,

To tell my story.”

Mark Antony says in Julius Caesar,

“The evil that men do lives after them; / The good is oft interred with their bones.”

Barb’s made mistakes-we all have; let those be interred with her bones. Let the good she did in life be remembered and shared.

This is her last quote and request, lyrics from her favorite band:

“Sleep, sleep tonight

And may your dreams be realized

If the thunder cloud passes rain

So let it rain, let it rain

Rain on me.”

And this concludes her TED talk.

And now for the quiz. Raise your hand if you have the answer. Candy is involved.

1. What is the main idea of this eulogy? [Storytelling/literature is important]

2. Name one author or piece of literature mentioned in this eulogy. [See above]

3. Where did the last quote come from? [MLK by U2]

4. Why is literature important? [Culture and history are passed down]

5. After the service where you go and get snacks and chat, what will you talk about? [various answers]

Extra credit: How will you fill in your Dash? Start today.