Bevian

EULOGY FOR VIVIAN WALL

Jason, Hudson, Mr. Groening, Ron and Kim, Pearl and Frank – family and friends.

I was Vivian's friend – she was mine. Many years ago I had the great honour of standing up for her at her wedding to Jason. I am very sad, and so very honoured and grateful that Jason asked me to stand up for her once more today – to pay tribute, as her friend, to the woman that I knew her to be. The loss of her in my life is like the naked space that is left in the skyline when a giant tree is felled to the ground. I feel sorrow – for how beautiful of a soul she was, and for how empty and wrong it feels that she is gone. She was a really good friend. She was funny and thoughtful. She was loyal. If she had your trust, she did not betray it. She didn't judge your feelings. She loved with a love that did not let go. She was my soul sister.

It's been 30 years since she first became my friend. Back in high school – in the days before cell phones and text messages – I would call her house and her dad would answer. I would ask if Viv was there, and every time her dad would say the same thing, “Who? Bev? There's no Bev here.” Eventually I got wiser, and I would ask for Vivian. And her dad would say, “Bevian? There's no Bevian here”. Every. Time. There is no way we could have known all the ways that life would challenge us, and what our friendship would come to mean to each of us – but she will always be my double-jointed friend, Bevian, who could drive a car sitting with one leg on the gas pedal and the other bent straight up over her head with her foot flat on the roof of the car.

I looked up the word eulogy - according to the internet, my task this evening is to “praise the dead”, to make Vivian Wall sound saintly and obnoxiously more impressive than she actually was. I intend to do her justice. After 30 years of friendship, I promise that I do know she was flawed. As a point of fact, she could be a little bossy. There were times when she hurt my feelings. If you wanted someone to flatter you, she was probably not the friend you wanted to call. You called her if you wanted the unvarnished truth, because she told the truth, and she would say what she thought. She was good to take shopping.

Viv was a practised shopper with an eye for beautiful things and a good deal. She also happened to love thrift stores. We were shopping, and I was trying on a pair of jeans – I was very excited because finding a great fitting pair of jeans in a thrift store is no small feat. I came out of the change room, did my little fashion spin for her and asked her what she thought. She looked at my shirt – the shirt that I had been wearing all day – she scrunched up her nose with disapproval and shook her head, “No”.

There are so many things to say about Viv. Because she did not believe in flattery, it is my intention to honour her this evening by saying only what I believe to be true about her, without embellishment or exaggeration.

If I were to ask anyone in this room who knew her to describe Viv's personality in five words or less, the two most frequent words we would hear would likely be, 'Type A'. Viv was a classic Type A personality. She was competitive, enthusiastic, ambitious, and outgoing. She loved her work. She took great pride in always being punctual. She was highly responsible and organized. She was accessorized. She always wore beautiful shoes. She was a great sales person.

Early in her career she worked for a little establishment called 'Lady Footlocker'. She was very good at her job, and she was promoted quickly to manager. I went to visit her one afternoon at Portage Place Mall, thinking I would harass her and make life awkward for her in front of her employees – because that's what good friends do – and before I left she had sold me a stack of clothes I didn't know I needed, with hair scrunchies to match.

She was a clear, quick thinker but she didn't necessarily choose to do things the easy way. She knew how to take the big things in stride, and she knew when the little things were actually big things. This past December/January she planned a birthday party for Jason – she knew how difficult the last year had been, and it was really important to her that he felt loved and valued. She wanted it to be great – but she couldn't pull it together on her own. So she asked me if I would help her by baking Jason a birthday cake – a simple dark chocolate cake with real whipped cream. So she hauled out a recipe from her binder, and that cake must have had 50 ingredients and 12,000 steps. It was not a “simple chocolate cake” – and it was called, 'The Best Chocolate Cake in the World'. Things had to be sifted and separated and beaten and folded and coddled. Many bowls and several appliances were used. I had to read and re-read and re-read those instructions because they were not written for an A.D.D. brain. She just watched me and laughed – and I am sure that she and her Type-A personality wished more than anything that she could make that cake herself – it would have taken her maybe 20 minutes, while it took me a solid hour. But she was patient. Type A people aren't supposed to be patient, but she was patient. It was not easy for her to slow down, to have to let people help her when her body would not let her do what her mind wanted to do – when she could have done it better and faster herself – but she learned how to do that, too. Viv was always learning.

If it weren't for her love of corporate life, she would have made a great pioneer woman. She loved to do things from scratch. She loved to garden – she grew her own food from her own seeds. She sewed her own wallet. She made her own art. She went a very long time without using shampoo. She was not afraid of hard work. She was quite possibly the strongest woman that I have ever known. I do not want to embellish here, but she had a strength of mind and heart and spirit that were exceptional. She had the courage of her convictions. She had the courage to live and act and respond to life's challenges out of what she believed. She did not alter her convictions when her circumstances changed. I am going to steal from Bill Clinton here – in his eulogy of Muhammad Ali – because I think he phrased my sentiments exactly. He began by asking this really provocative question, “How do some people refuse to become victims and rise from every defeat? [Viv] decided very young to write [her] own life story – before fate and time could work their will on her – she decided that she would never be ever DIS-empowered. She decided that not her grace nor her place nor the expectations of others – positive, negative or otherwise – would strip her of the power to write her own story. She decided to use her gifts – her mind and heart – to figure out who she was, what she believed and how to live with the consequences of acting on what she believed. ... She was a free woman of faith. Being a woman of faith, she realized she would never be in full control of her life... but being free she realized that life was still open to choices.”

Viv believed in the power of thought and the power of words. From as far back as her Lady Footlocker days, she was writing motivational words on the walls. She CHOSE her thoughts – she took them captive – and she set her heart and mind on the things that fed her spirit with life. She CHOSE her words – with her mouth she spoke peace over her relationships, over the cells in her body and over her circumstance. She regularly spoke to herself, and it would be strange if you didn't know that was what she was doing. I was visiting her – maybe the last time I was visiting her – and she was really struggling with anxiety. She was sitting quietly... and I told you that she spoke to the cells in her body, and she spoke to her anxiety to take authority over it... and so she was sitting quietly while Jason and I were talking, and suddenly she just blurted out, “STOP! .... it's Hammer time”. She was funny.

She took particularly great care with the words that she used to talk about her health over the last few years. She didn't talk about a “battle” or a “fight”. She never said that she HAD cancer – she never 'owned it'. She blessed her body – even the struggling cells. She blessed her body with “Shalom” - peace – a peace defined as “nothing missing – nothing broken”. She paid attention to what language people used to describe her journey, and she was not hesitant about educating you if you used words that did not resonate with the spirit of life, of blessing and of peace.

She believed in the power of prayer. She did not “vent” - she prayed. And she did not vent when she prayed – she was discerning and intentional in everything she prayed. If she shared something with me, it was not because she necessarily needed an ear, or because she was looking for empathy – it was because she had already determined a course of action, and she was inviting me to join her in prayer. She might even send me a copy of exactly what she was praying, and ask me to join her in praying that.

Viv believed in re-purposing. She believed in a God who does not throw things away when they have outlived their obvious purposes – she believed in a God who does not waste anything. She believed this and she lived this – these were the choices that she made. She redeemed things, made them new, found new purposes for them, gave them new life. She redeemed experiences – she did not waste the lessons that she learned or the opportunities that she was given to approach life in a new way. She looked for the good in things – in objects and in people and in circumstances. These are her words from a text that she sent me in 2014, after she had received her original diagnosis – She wrote: “As much as you may think, I am really not living with fear over this... that is a God thing. Cancer will not own any part of my day, my attitudes or my words. In fact today as I was out working in the garden, I heard the verse, “When trials come consider it as a sheer gift...” Really God? A GIFT? So that is what I want you to pray about... WHAT in this is a gift for me? I'm going to watch for it, and I know He will deliver that revelation to me.”

She told me this last year what one of the gifts had been. She said that she had been praying to have something that she and Jason could do together. The way that he supported her and believed in her and stepped up for her meant the world to her. And I really don't want to define her life by the cancer that took her – it did not define her and it is not her story. That is not who she was. She would not want to be remembered for the story of cancer. And yet, I don't know how else to prove how rare and beautiful she was, except through the lens of how she dealt with that diagnosis. What came out of her when she was squeezed, was what ALWAYS came out of her when she was squeezed. Courage. Faith. Truth. Grit.

The last time that I saw her before she left for Mexico, we spent some time driving around Birds Hill Park. We tried really hard to find some sunshine to sit in. It seemed like it was never going to be spring – the sun just would not come out for her. She was determined to be in the sun. At some point we came back and sat out on her back deck. We had been talking a lot about obeying the Spirit and not worrying about outcome, something Oswald Chambers talks about – obeying God, and leaving Him to deal with the consequences of your obedience to Him – and she had grown so sensitive to the voice of God – she stood up and said, “I'm supposed to dance”. And out of all the years and all the memories, it is this image of her that is emblazoned in my mind – she lifted up her arms, like in her Facebook photo – and she danced before the Lord, swaying and moving in a slow circle – and out of her mouth came words of praise and thanksgiving. And she was just open to receiving whatever it was that God had for her – because she knew that He is good, and that all His plans for her were for good.

That is who she was – that is how she lived her life, in and out of season – that is how she died – with her heart open to life, with her lips filled with praise, with her trust and her hope staked on the promises of God.

She chose not to follow the path of conventional medicine for her healing – because when struggle came to her, she did not bend in her belief that our bodies were created to be well – that if we put into our bodies what is healthy, we will reap health. She did not alter her convictions, or compromise who she was, or change how she responded to life simply because conventional wisdom had a ready-made plan for what she should do. She chose instead to walk boldly in what she believed was the better path to health, and to face the consequences for living according to what she believed. She was not wrong. I promise you, she was not wrong. I have never known anyone more fully invested and committed to living, more determined and focused and driven to be well than Viv was. She walked every day in wholeness – body, mind, soul, spirit – she walked in health, in truth, in peace – until one day she was just gone.

She is gone, and it is very difficult, and our lives will never be the same – there will always FEEL like something is missing, and our hearts will always FEEL broken when we think about how much we wish she were still here – but that is not TRUTH. I knew it the moment that she died – that peace that passes understanding, that knowing – that despite the pain, despite the fear, despite the emptiness of knowing that she is just not coming back – nothing is truly missing, nothing is truly broken. It doesn't seem possible. But, you know, death is completely powerless over love. It cannot touch it. Death cannot touch the love that is here in this room for her, the love that is in my heart.

The last word I remember her saying as she was physically dying was, “Peace” – Peace. She was speaking it with authority – she was speaking it over her body, over her mind, over her spirit – she blessed us with love, she blessed herself with peace.

Shalom, Bevian – rest in peace. The love you gave us – the love we have for you – it is all still here. Nothing is missing. Nothing is broken.