8 October 2004

During the long interval between the last entry and this, the unthinkable has happened: FSG has died. He died 21 September; the cause of his death is still elusive. What it was that assaulted his body and made it unable to counter infections doctors have still not been able to discover. How can we not wonder if it was--is--the same weakness or ailment that took his elder sister's life years ago?
It is scarcely possible for me to relay, in the course of a single entry, the weeks of anxiety, the terrible decisions, the many accommodations, the exhausting news-bearing, the crowds of stunned mourners--certainly it is beyond my strength. Episodes from that time recur to my mind over and over; they will rise to the top of these meditations according to their own calendar; Night Thoughts will be less than ever a chronicle of my days, and more than ever a tangle of dateless ideas and memories--but is this not suitable for a time in which the notion of time itself seems to have lost meaning?
I was asked to deliver the principal eulogy for the dead, and I did not hesitate to accept. I quote it entire here, as a continuation of my tributes to him. For the first and last time, he will appear in this nocturnal in propria persona, under his own name.

"Yesterday, a small handful of friends and relations gently lowered the body of Daniel Eaton Pentlarge into a grave at the family's summer house in Maine, where he will lie flanked by his sister Sarah and his mother. It was the very last embrace we shall ever give him, except in recollection or dream.

I met Daniel in December of 1988. He had the full measure of that dangerous Pentlarge charisma, and I made no effort to resist. We exchanged mash notes in Latin, and we had traded vows of love before a week was out. Our love was of the deeply engrossing kind that is so nauseating for outsiders to behold, complete with its special favors, pet names, and shared idiosyncrasies. Behind and beneath all of that lay the deep, considered mutual approval that persisted through many small differences and great changes in fortune. I adored him and he me; we built a smoothly-operating partnership that survived both our marriage and our divorce, founded on common agreements about the right treatment of people, the primacy of learning, and a laughing realism about human existence in the world. We supported each other's vocations and avocations and little whims in word and deed. When asked to describe our relationship, he liked to say, 'Partners...' and if a puzzled eyebrow shot up, he would say, '...in crime,' with a wicked gleam.

He grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts, at a house he always referred to simply as 9 Germaine Street. He always felt a deep nostalgia for that place and his childhood and young adulthood there. He was under no illusion about his life there, which had its share of misadventures, but every year and incident there possessed a peculiar vividness that made much that happened later pale by contrast.

He was deeply rooted in places, even after the family's departure from Worcester. Each loved place came with its share of anecdotes that had the quality of romantic legend: solitary early walks near his apartment on Queensberry; the roses that grew on the fence when he and his sister Rachel took the apartment in Somerville into which I later moved; the first sight of the grand staircase at his last house in Wakefield, and with it the realization that he might at last be the grand seigneur of a house equal to 9 Germaine. Most of all, his memory and imagination fixed themselves upon 'the camp,' the astonishing—his favorite adjective—summer house in Maine. Grandfather, he told me, wanted a hunting lodge, while Grandmother wanted an Italian villa, and this was the result, with its mixture of rustic make-do and luxurious domestic appointments, a grand piano in the soaring living-room, and stuffed game around the walls. He was very careful, he said, to ask me to marry him before I had seen the house, to be certain I wasn't marrying him for his real estate.

Daniel's identity was deeply centered in his family, both the near and the distant: he displayed photographs of his ancestors Fredrik and Ulrica as proudly as he did photographs of his mother and sisters. His heart was the treasury of the family stories, both Eaton and Pentlarge. He loved his parents and siblings deeply, even when they puzzled or distressed him; no holiday or high occasion seemed quite right without a quorum of his family present. When his sister Sarah fell ill, they united effortlessly to give her comfort, company, and advocacy in the hospital. His intense loyalty to them was repaid in his time of need: his family and friends showed him the same loving attention he had shown to Sarah.

As many of you know, Daniel felt himself destined for the Unitarian Universalist ministry, a profession toward which his mother—and his own inner urgings—guided him. He loved the denomination's operations and principles; he bathed in its history. He worked for its central organization in more than one capacity, and knew many, perhaps all, of its secrets. Yet he was frustrated in his dream: he met the Ministerial Fellowship Committee not once but twice, and at times when they honored due diligence above his obvious charm. I liked to say to him that his gifts in ministry lay not in his words, but what seemed to be happening between the words. Despite the superb qualities of his mind and his strong competence at anything to which he seriously turned his hand, he was always averse to long and ugly efforts: He was a strong starter, but slow in the last laps. If ministry was not to be, I always wished for him that he could find a place and a profession in which first gestures meant most, so that he would be loved for his true strengths, but it does not seem to me that that ever quite happened.

I am very pleased that I introduced him to social dance—contra dance and English Country dance. I remember well that after my second dance weekend, I implored him to come with me to the next, and he said, 'You would have to pay me to go.' But he soon saw sweet reason. He perceived the possibilities for the building of community through dance. He loved the inclusivity of social dance, and strove to bring even the less able and less bold along to the pleasures of the dance. He was a kind of ambassador, as Jacqueline Schwab wisely said to me the other day, between our dances and dance communities, and had patience for the unglamorous committee work that made such diplomacy possible. He loved and supported my growing work in dance, and my approach to dance now owes a great deal to our shared vision. He loved the dance 'Angels Unawares,' which I wrote for a same-sex union in our home community—the tune for which we will hear in a moment—in part because it leveled the field for all dancers. 'At first,' he said, 'the experienced dancers are puzzled, but the beginners catch on right away, which is just wonderful to watch.'

What manner of man was Daniel to me? You all perhaps know him as the smiling extrovert, ready with a friendly greeting; open-hearted and –handed; bold in outlook and opinion. He was as gifted a listener as he was a conversationalist; human, indeed humane, interaction came easily to him. I admired all this, but I think that the excellence of his mind was not always recognized. While he was not a deep scholar in many fields, there was a deftness, a quickness, to his intelligence of which I have never seen the like. He loved the big gesture, in life or in art. He had a refined taste in architecture, which he once studied with the idea of professing himself. And there was that quality of complete attention, that sensation that while he listened to you, you were the only person of account in the world. You all perhaps know what a strong flame his love could be, and what it was like to be surrounded by that heat. I was fortunate enough to receive his unconditional love for many years, even to the end of his life. I am certain it was more than I could have deserved; I am still warmed by that love.

Yet in all this, I do not want any of us to do him the unkindness of a posthumous canonization, making of him the saint or angel he was not, and would never have wished to be. He had all the failings of his virtues: he could be hasty, proud to the point of arrogance, intolerant—especially of religious or political conservatism--, brisk, even careless. He lacked a quality that many employers and congregations value: follow-through. He was not above the occasional snobbery; he could be grandiose.

Then too, he was earthy and real. He never quite managed to be the nice big six-footer he had hoped to be, but he loved being a physical body, and human bodies; there was nothing he liked better than the feeling of a tummy full of comforting food, an afternoon's sail on Great Pond, or the taste of rich kisses. He loved gossip and bawdy or outright silly humor. He was in no sense too good for simple pleasures. He and I shared a love of children's literature, and he introduced me to Barbara Cooney's Miss Rumphius, the refrain of which we often recited to each other: 'That is all very well, little Alice...but you must do something to make the world more beautiful.' Miss Rumphius planted lupines; he planted lupines in her honor.

The last several years were remarkably difficult for Daniel. His failure to make his way into the ordained ministry was a long heartbreak. The death of his sister Sarah was terribly hard for him, as were the trials of his brother Joel; his mother's death—although their relationship was at its strongest when she died—was also a great loss to him. His health was also poorer than he generally permitted others to know—his body gave him more pain, and let him down, more and more over the last ten years. He had a talent for projecting a kind of brash persistence and vigor despite all his disappointments, but inwardly he was sensitive, fragile, and susceptible to hurt. It is easy to say that Daniel's death proves the adage that the good die young, but with his style of goodness comes a certain delicacy.

How can we go on without him? I feel, at this moment, like many of you, perhaps all of you, that my anchor, my column, my compass, my strong oak, is gone. After his mother's death, several friends remarked to us how well we had worked together in that week, moving in concert to do what needed to be done. But I remember—and he did too—that we saw very little of each other that week, and even at night spoke very little. We had learned what to do: no discussion necessary. In a sense, even in his absence, his love has trained me for this day, giving me the strength to stand here.

He was always allergic to any strict theology, and would have greeted any speculations on our part about Heaven or a conscious afterlife with uncertainty. What he loved about Unitarian Universalism was the idea of embracing the questions together. And here we find ourselves, sharing his vision and values again.

I look for help to two outside sources. First, a passage from Walt Whitman. Daniel read part of this at our wedding: later lines show Whitman to have been, for Daniel, irritatingly prophetic:

'Listen! I will be honest with you, I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes, These are the days that must happen to you: You shall not heap up what is call'd riches, You shall scatter with lavish hand all that you earn or achieve, You but arrive at the city to which you were destin'd, you hardly settle yourself to satisfaction before you are call'd by an irresistible call to depart, What beckonings of love you receive you shall only answer with passionate kisses of parting, You shall not allow the hold of those who spread their reach'd hands toward you.'
--Song of the Open Road, Sec. 11

I was reading outdoors once—when am I not reading?—when Daniel said to me suddenly, 'Look, it's a flutter-by.' 'What?' I said. 'It's a flutter-by,' he said, pointing to a butterfly. 'It just flutters by.' When we say that someone has died untimely, we mean that he has died before our time for him; Daniel fluttered by in his own time—not in ours. To have known him for such a short time—there is a rough prize. But his courage always gave me heart, and his death shall not change that.

At the end of a long novel I never quite persuaded Daniel to finish, George Eliot's Middlemarch, the narrator says:
'...the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.'

Whose life exemplifies this idea more than Daniel's? What, materially, has Daniel left behind? A few sermons; a few cherished recipes; a few hand-made neckties. Yet look how his influence surpasses calculation: all of us here transformed and united; his brightest qualities moving forward and outward through us into eternity."