Lisa, and Margo both, are like the big sisters I never had… when Lisa passed, Margot asked that I write something to honor her, similar to tributes I’d written for other friends and family who had passed in the last year. Easy, it seemed - I write, it's what I do, it's who I am, a gift I could give, a friendship and a service I could offer.
Except this was different.
Margot didn't ask for an obituary notice, a brief but detailed sketch of a life, to be posted in the newspaper, to be read by friends or strangers who may have known one small aspect of our love-one’s life, but not the whole picture. I knew that Margot needed more. She did not actually ask, but what Margot needed was a public love letter, from her to her partner and lover and friend; she needed all those feelings for Lisa, looped and knitted inexorably into the very fabric of the person she is, to be laundered, pressed and ironed, lovingly mounted and framed and preserved, in such a way as they’d be forever real; as though a proper recounting of those feeling might, in some tangible way, bring Lisa back. Margot asked that I describe, to her absent Lisa, the day-to-day realities of life without her, and to communicate to Lisa, in memorium, in requiem, just how much she was and is loved, and missed.
She asked that I paint a chronological picture of the whole person Lisa was; descriptions of Lisa, the girl who threw her little tricycle over a wall because she wanted a proper bike like her brothers. Of Lisa the child who broke her arm and didn't tell anyone for two days, of Lisa the competitor who excelled, academically, athletically, as student and coworker and supervisor, as manager and partner and friend. Of the passionate Lisa, exhibition waterskiing, and playing basketball on scholarship for the U of M; of the driven Lisa, making her living delivering pizzas and hiking herself to exhilarated exhaustion in the backcountry of the Bob Marshall wilderness; the Lisa fighting fires and earning a Marine Corps challenge coin and the respect of the Jarheads who presented it to her; Lisa fishing the Everglades, and finishing top of her class at FLETC, and camping and cutting cordwood, and crabbing off the Oregon coast… ultimately, the Lisa with whom she had stood under a sacred tree, and promised herself to, for life…
…And it was too much for me. I knew Lisa a short time - her energy, her confidence and presence, her leadership and service, her laughter and comically yet fittingly innocent way of swearing, and so each time I sat down to write this tribute, I confess that I balked, and hesitated; I procrastinated, because I felt that anything I wrote, short of an exhaustive biography, couldn’t possibly convey about Lisa the true, full, depth of feeling and longing and loss that she, and Margot, deserve. Anything I wrote would be simply a long, ever-growing list of facts, that would fall far short of communicating to the world what our friend Lisa is, and was, and what my friend Margot needed and wanted and deserved to hear, about her partner in life.
So this is what I was able to come up with; this is my tribute. Friends and family who knew and loved Lisa more, and longer, than I, have been writing on the Forever Missed website for weeks now, and the stories they tell, the memories they share, they are what paints the faint and impressionistic picture of Lisa; they are the broken, pointilized tiles that viewed together, and from a distance, make up the mosaic of who she was, for us, to each other, and to the world, who knew her only a little or not at all. Helen Keller once wrote of loss, “I do not want the peace which passeth understanding, I want the understanding which bringeth peace”. While that sentiment may, under less trying circumstances, seem not a little sacreligious, I think under these circumstances, God is big enough to allow our questions, and our puzzled efforts to make sense of this loss. Everything I or anyone else writes is exactly that; trying to find peace, and trying to understand why our friend, our sister, our daughter, our lover, our partner, had to leave. And so instead, I close with this; I am thankful, for Lisa's friendship, and for having known her, for as Thornton Wilder said, "The greatest tribute to the dead is not grief, but gratitude."
So thank you, Lisa.
Glenville Kedie
September 2015.