I want to share some memories of Casey. Not a eulogy, which is all too often just the final draft of a curriculum vitae, but memories to paint a picture of what it was like to be part of her life, a picture I hope will resonate with all of you who knew her.
Casey and I would have been married forty years this September. And with all respect to the church and her sacraments, in my heart our lifetime committed relationship started almost 42 years ago, when we adopted our first cat together. The first of many cats.
I had never lived with a cat; Casey was the experienced cat person. Nevertheless, she sent me to find the cat. “How will I know which one” I asked. “The lively one is the one for us” she answered. Those who knew our first cat, Louisa Trotter, will tell you I perhaps over-achieved on finding a “lively” kitty. I knew then that we’d have a partnership in making commitments, and that Casey trusted me in a profound way.
Not all that many months before bringing Louisa into our lives, on what I guess would pass as our first date, we sat up all night on the floor of my apartment, talking about everything. At some point I asked “So what did you do today?”. She answered “I was baptized”. I was awed and fascinated by this; I am almost the cardboard stereotype of the Cradle Christian From A Liturgical Denomination, and meeting an adult being baptized into the Episcopal church was amazing. At the same time I acquired my first regret in the relationship, because if I’d asked the day before, I could have been there.
Casey was many things: an artist, an attorney, a bookworm, a cat lady, a gardener, a journalist, a judge, and a tutor. A fiercely devoted mother and grandmother. A lover of truly terrible puns; a groan and eye roll from me at breakfast would brighten her whole day. Many of these things I experienced in our life together. I was tempted to find someone to talk about each of these aspects of her life, but I remember very clearly her feelings about long church services.
She didn’t talk all that much about her life before me. Casey was about today and tomorrow, not yesterday. I discovered her box of clippings from her newspaper days while going through her papers, and it was a revelation: she was a prolific writer who covered a wide range of things with care and compassion.
Casey was good at many things, but she didn’t limit her enthusiasms to her natural talents, and she was willing to work hard on things that didn’t come easy to her. She was not at all a natural athlete, but she studied aikido, and eventually earned a black belt. It was not easy for her, but she stuck with it. In an article she wrote for Aikido Today, she said “I have always dreaded falling down; I still do. Yet, I take uke (the attacker) each week … I do not like to be reminded of my own fears, discomforts, and reluctances. However, ignoring them gives them greater power over me than they deserve”.
A friend told me that if he was to describe Casey in one word, it would be “businesslike”. I think this is accurate, and I think it came from a place of respect and an impulse toward cooperation. Working together in a businesslike way takes the focus away from the individual, and puts the focus on the task - and makes room for everyone to contribute in their own way. It allows everyone, including the introverts, to engage in a way that’s not self-conscious. I’m sure it was easier for her, as an introvert, but it also made space for everyone else.
Our relationship was very “businesslike” in many ways. Every decision was a negotiation. What to watch on TV after the dishes were done was considered as seriously as which house to buy. Some of these negotiations, like planning menus for the next week, I looked forward to; others I wished I could have skipped. I’m sure other lifetime partnerships of two people with forceful personalities have figured out other ways of being together, but, after so many years with her, I have a hard time imagining how that would work.
Casey was, on the surface, an unlikely Christian. She did not believe in a white-bearded male God with a big rulebook and a short temper, which back in the 1980’s when she was baptized was still grounds for having one’s Christianity questioned. Many of us nowadays are rediscovering writers like Julian of Norwich, and voraciously reading writers such as Marcus Borg, Matthew Fox, Rachael Held Evans, Marshall Davis, and Richard Rohr; in many ways Casey was already there, waiting for us to catch up. She was extremely impatient with received truth and facile answers; Christianity for her was always about experience over dogma, doing concrete things to nudge along the Kindom of God, and more than anything, a community where questioning, uncertainty, unknowing is welcomed as a path into the eternal. She found this in the Episcopal church.
Those who knew her well knew Casey was an intensely private person. She was extremely careful, often sparing, in what she shared of herself, and with whom. Sometimes to her detriment, I think. She abhorred being spoken of in the third person, and perhaps would have hated what I’m saying today. I seriously considered that a legitimate way of honoring her would be to have no one speak of her in the third person, but the overwhelming outpouring of respect and affection from so many people who have contacted me since her illness and death changed my mind. Casey is now with the eternal, whatever that means; we the living are better off sharing our memories and love, because Casey touched us, perhaps more than she would have been able to appreciate. So perhaps, when we remember Casey, we can talk about, rejoice in, our lives, and how they are better for her having been part of them.
Stephen Linam May, 2022