Jenny’s Purple Meadow

During a memorial service for my childhood friend, Jenny Smith Carr (1969-2010), I gave her eulogy with this meadow image projected on a screen behind me. I found the Swiss meadow photo in the Picture Collection of the Toronto Public Library, but there wasn’t any reference to the photographer who took this calendar picture.

Eulogy for Jenny Smith Carr: Jenny’s Purple Meadow

Several months before she died, Jenny asked me if her cancer made me think about my own mortality. “Sure it does,” I replied. “You’re a part of me.” She will always be a part of me, a precious patch of Jenny-ness that inspires and sustains me.

When I visualize the color and texture of this Jenny-patch in my soul, I see three translucent paddles in primary colors. Jenny is the red paddle. I’m the blue paddle. And the purple place where we overlap is the part of Jenny I get to keep, a purple meadow of shared memories, experiences, values, and giggles. Jenny’s meadow is a clearing in my mind, a sunny expanse of wildflowers surrounded by an ancient forest.

My hope for all of us who were blessed to love Jenny is to visit our clearings often, for they are sacred sites of Jenny’s spirit that death cannot destroy. This afternoon, I’m taking you with me to Jenny’s purple meadow, where stories flower beside a purple stream, among irises and daisies, and in the hollows of warm stones.

Take this wildflower over here. It’s a story set in the late nineteen seventies. Jenny and I are trick-or-treating along Mill Street in Liberty, Missouri. As radical young questioners of gender roles, we have disguised ourselves as housewives. We have put pink curlers in our hair and wrapped ourselves in padded polyester bathrobes. Fuzzy slippers pull the satirical outfit together. At one fateful house on Mill Street, the woman who answers our knock is dressed exactly like us, down to the last curler. She gives us a few pieces of candy but no compliments on our cute costumes.

More Jenny memories come from Camp Oakledge in Warsaw, Missouri, where I spent two summers sharing a canvas tent on a wooden platform with Jenny and other Girl Scouts. One afternoon, Jenny and I canoed for three miles across the Lake of the Ozarks to a hamburger shack perched on a dock. I still remember how good that burger tasted because we had powered ourselves across the waters, earning our lunch with our oars.

On February weekend in 1982, Jenny and I went camping in Dearborn, Missouri. We shivered together in a tent that we had placed on the slope of a hill. When camp leaders organized a midnight hike, Jenny opted to stay in the tent, but I walked to the edge of a clearing in the woods and drank in the vast bowl-shaped meadow all blanketed in deep snow. The dark ring of trees circling all that open space was a visual prayer. When I think of Jenny, I remember this winter meadow. Like her, it is spiritually refreshing and elegant.

The starry sky of the night hike also calls to mind a special star-gazing event that Jenny’s close friends planned for the purpose of sending out beams of love to our dying friend. At exactly 10 pm (EST), wind chimes, lightning, singing locusts, clear skies and cloudy ones greeted us from Arizona, Missouri, Ohio, Connecticut, and Ontario. As I studied the opaque heavens, I thought of my love for Jenny, and the memory of her telling me how much the biopsy needles hurt her made me cry.

Jenny is beyond the needles now, beyond pain, beyond fear. She’s a gorgeous bird of paradise that flies between drops of rain that bless us. And she’s in every compassionate thing we do. Her purple meadow is alive with sensitivity, laughter, and thousands of witty words. We protect it when we share stories of our beautiful Jenny.