May His Memory Be a Blessing

In Remembrance of a Life Well Lived

Last weekend, we celebrated the life of my father-in-law Will Cabell after seven long and difficult months of struggle with an incurable disease. While his departure leaves us with little but grief, I am am striving to embrace the blessing of his memory.

William D. Cabell Jr. was born in White Plains, NY on November 30, 1946 and died on the morning of January 11, 2025. Will never cared much for his suffix, or his full name. He preferred to simply be known as Will.

Like most people, he had many former lives. As a child and adolescent, he was known as “Buzzie,” a nickname bestowed on him by his older sister Kathleen, who was unable to properly say the word “brother.” He was always easy going, ready for anything.

From an early age, he was an emphatic free spirit. He met his wife, Susan, as an undergraduate in philosophy at St. Anselm College, where she was an early career professor. It would be many years until they were officially together, but I have to imagine that, even then, Susan was intrigued by Will’s drive to explore his own whimsy.

Last Saturday (February 1), nearly 200 people gathered at Trinity Church in Meredith, NH to celebrate Will’s life. He was eulogized by not one but four people — both his children, his nephew, and a dear friend and fellow puppeteer. Will lived his life broadly and boldly, his son, Andy, said. He was a professional actor, who performed in dozens of summer stock productions with the Barnstormers. He both formed and joined a number of puppet theaters, for which he designed complete shows and their sets, and created the puppets with which they were rendered. In his 50s, he went back to school to earn his MFA in arts education, an entrée to his last professional chapter as a Montessori teacher.

Each eulogy shed a different light on Will’s life accomplishments. His friend Debra remembered his performance as the March hare in Alice in Wonderland, running around the stage in a straight jacket and rabbit mask with wild abandon despite his inability to see or steady himself with his arms. Andy shared a story we had heard at his bedside as he lay dying, of Will’s plan to build a hang glider from bamboo and canvas. No sooner had it become airborne, it crashed, but his nephew, Rowdy, remembered how the bamboo remnants of the hang glider had been reclaimed by Will the following summer to create a suspension bridge across a precarious area of swamp along the edge of Squam Lake. It had only lasted the summer, but it was a memorable example of Will’s unwillingness to accept anyone’s limitations as his own, and his persistent insistence that everything that someone might call trash could be rendered into a future life. He often wore a T-shirt that said on the back, “It’s waste that makes people poor.”

By the time I met Will, these exploits were well behind him. I knew him as a church leader, a musician, a visual artist, a handyman, and a grandfather to my two stepdaughters and my two-year-old son. He showed great care and tenderness for all people — he often gave food and money to a homeless man named Steve, whom he allowed to camp in his backyard. But he showed special care and thoughtfulness towards his grandchildren. I will always remember the joy he found in taking his granddaughters on outings and playing with my son on the floor.

Over the last seven months, Will wrestled with a rare and incurable herpes simplex infection that infested his central nervous system and brain. Within weeks of being hospitalized in late May, he lost his ability to walk and soon after, his vision. Blind and bedbound, in the last few months of his life, he also lost his cognitive clarity, often living inside of hallucinations caused by either the virus or his sudden blindness and prolonged hospitalization. In her eulogy, his daughter, Hannah — a professional actor herself — remembered her dad’s last words to her before he dropped fully into the semi-conscious state that preceded his death:

“I’m so glad we’re doing this Jewish movie together,” he said. “Are we running Act I tomorrow?”

In his persistent state of cognitive delusion, he almost always found himself in a creative fantasy — making a movie, staging a play, and once, on a layover in New York after taking part in an immersive cooking class in Italy. If he couldn’t be in his “right” mind, at least he was having fun.

In her homily, the priest, who had known Will for many years as an interim priest at Trinity Church, spoke to the indignation we all felt for so many months as modern medicine failed to diagnose and treat his illness. What cruelty could remove such a kind and generous soul from the world so soon? Alas— we are as blind to the reasons for our coming as we are to the nature of our departure. Who can say? In the end, Will made philosophers of us all.

As I try to reconcile the life I still have to live with the years he will never have, I am thinking a great deal about memories. What can I do except try to remember the lives of those who have died in hopes that their memory might be a blessing to our families, our communities, and our ancestors.

For most of my life, I’ve prided myself on having a keen and lasting memory for minute details — names, places, family milestones, and the circumstances of my first meeting with friends. But in becoming a mother, I’ve lost part of this ability to who-knows-what physiological process that overwhelms my neurocircuitry with the cognitive load that comes with the care and feeding of a small human. While I still do remember a great many things, I am often terrified by the length of my recall time. There is certain information I know is located somewhere in my memory bank, but the metadata file has somehow been corrupted, leaving it unretrievable.

Every day for the last ten years, I’ve written at least a page or two — sometimes three — in a journal, a dual-use format of personal reflection that serves to both offload unhelpful “noise” that might be clouding my mental landscape and also generating a written record of my life history. Sometimes that too is noise (“Yesterday, I did X. Today, I will do Y.). Except when it’s not. During the 2016 campaign, I maintained a page-a-day journal with great effort, which afterward helped me remember the specific events of a 70-day sprint that blew by in an instant.

The point is not a lesson in morning pages (though please God, don’t diss it till you’ve tried it — it will change your life) but to assert that remembering anything requires an unmistakable amount of effort. As the Chinese proverb says, “although the ink is faint, it’s better than memory.”

When a person is alive, our memories of that person weave together into a kind of sustained web of consciousness. We project the person’s life into their piece of the world, even when we are not with them. But when they die, that web of memory reaches a point of rapid crystallization. I still remember my grandparents, my Aunt Linda, and of course, Will, but the knowledge that their life is over adds additional weight to the punctuation of our last interaction. That person is no longer wandering around the planet making memories of their own. Instead, they are survived only by the memories they have left with us. What responsibilities do I have to those memories? Where will I store them in my frayed and compromised neural net?

Over the last few months as I’ve written a surprising amount about death and its fallout, I’ve realized that this newsletter is itself a kind of neural net of personal memory. Free from the detritus of my daily journal pages, my weekly and monthly posts invite me to remember and reflect on what’s happened in my life and the world, so that someday someone somewhere might know what transpired.

Transpire — trans-spire, Latin for breathe through, or “emit as vapor.”

Isn’t that essentially what we’re doing here? Emitting as vapor until we can emit no more?

This weekend, Andy and I planned a rescheduled birthday weekend in New York to make up for the one I’d lost. Instead of Sleep No More, we went to see Life and Trust, a literally breath-taking spectacle that I will write more about soon. We also went to see the Luna Luna exhibition at the Shed, a restaging of a Hamburg amusement park from 1987.

André Heller along with more than a dozen other notable American and European artists of the period rendered art installations and rides that graced Moorweide Park that epic summer.

After that summer, the amusement park closed, and while Heller hoped to restage it elsewhere, the funding never materialized. So the amusements sat crated in shipping containers for decades waiting to be reclaimed.

Finally, Drake (of all people) underwrote a modern anthropological effort to reconstruct the park as a curatorial fascination, which began in 2019 and was finally opened to the public in New York last fall.

As I walked around the installation, I couldn’t help thinking of Will, how much he would have enjoyed the raw artistry of Dali’s dome and the awe-inspiring light show that accompanies the swing carousel. Activators moved puppets around the space to captivate young children who might be frustrated not to be able to ride the swings. He would have loved the fact that such a profound compilation of art was rescued from obscurity and destruction.

As I watched the swing carousel spin, I started to weep, thinking what a fitting metaphor it was for life. We get one shot, one ride to make what we will. Whether it is good or not depends on us. Whether it is remembered is something else entirely.

The tragedy and the beauty of human life and memory is that because Will no longer gets to make his own memories, I and all those who loved him will have to make do creating them for him. His free and curious spirit will sit on our shoulders and in our hearts whispering his enduring whimsy to us.

I’m so grateful to have had the good fortune to know Will, even for the short time I did. It was his invitation to a family vacation in Spain that prompted me to even consider walking the Camino in 2022. I am still struggling to comprehend fully all that experience did and will mean for me, but I know it was a dramatic revelation of a major facet of my life’s DNA, one I may have taken a lot longer to realize without his generous invitation that opened the door. And while it may have felt somewhat indulgent and unnecessary to take that 10-day vacation with my in-laws on top of a 42-day Camino that preceded the birth of my son, I remain forever grateful that Andy, Susan, Will, and I were so fortunate to have that extended time traveling together, making so many memories in such a short period of time.

I think often of my son, who at under three, will not have living memory of his grandfather. Coincidentally or ironically (you pick), my paternal grandfather died when I was a similar age. And yet my father, a diligent storyteller, never failed to find an opportunity to bring Pop-Pop into view. Somehow he managed to convert the heartache of his loss into a beautifully sweet nostalgia that made every memory of his father a beautiful treasure. Though I didn’t ever know the man, I will always cherish the memories I hold because my father was strong enough to spin them into a shape I too could carry.

This is the challenge that lies before us: to let the grief that might become a burden alchemize into joy, to ensure that the incredible life he lived is one we remember, not just in our minds but in the telling. WRITE IT DOWN, I think as I type, so that his memory may be a blessing, not just to those who knew him, but to those who didn’t have the chance.

I hope that this will be my last missive on death, grief, loss, and birthdays for a while, although I expect at some point before my 40th birthday to draw up and publish my wishes for my own funeral, should I die too young. Stay tuned…

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