Eulogy for Janet M.
January 2, 2016

Rutland Unitarian Universalist Church

(*At the request of the family last names have been removed from this document.)

I am a believer that everyone, good or ill deserves a eulogy; an accounting if you will, of the way that they met the circumstances they encountered, and led to what we might call their destiny.

I suppose if I were pushed, I believe that everyone should use the idea that someone at the end of their life is going to tell their story as motivation to live well. It might be the most traditionally religious instinct I harbor.

Many people would prefer to live as if they were not going to summarized, that there would not a telling-an accounting if you will, of what they did between the bookends of their birth and their death.

More than most, maybe more than anyone I know, Janet is not a person that needed to worry about what revealed skeleton’s or judgment she might get at this, her moment. More than most, maybe more than anyone, she used the rearing she got to step out into the world, have some adventures, return home to be an impressive service woman that did a wealth of good things right in her own home town. We Ministers at the start of our time in a settled Ministry have an Installation service.

Well Janet deserved one too.

Here is my version of her story.

Janet was born, as you see on the bulletin cover in 1924. The generation before telephones, televisions, and radios were in every home, never mind every one of our pockets. She was born on the edge of the world most of us in this room would describe as modern.

She lived as a young girl not far from where we stand in this building. She is the last generation of those still alive who a child would have experienced the great depression. Or at least as much as a young child with enough privilege to have a cleaning lady in her home likely would.

Janet in a statement of belief that she wrote years-ago accounted that out on street one morning she, as a young girl did not say hello to her families “cleaning lady.” The woman reported to her parents Cleon and Shirley, that their daughter was presumably too proud or haughty for that.  That did not go un-noticed.

And if early in a eulogy we are noting as memorable that 80 years ago a little girl was too proud to greet what amounted in that day to her family’s servant, it is memorable probably only because it might have been her last indignant and pompous act of her life.

It is remembered by her because an adult she became such a tireless supporter of the rights of, well, … everyone. Little Janet P____ became a person who advocated for racial civil rights, advocated for marriage equality for gays and lesbians, invited immigrants to live in her own home, and invited vagrant clergy like me to spend many a night. She learned a lot of those values right here. But I am getting ahead of our story.

After graduating from Rutland High, Janet went south to Duke to study physics. This is the moment when you might pause to ask yourself how many women born before the great depression went to college to study physics? The answer is an obvious, “not many.”

Pause for a second on the idea of Janet pursuing physics at Duke for a while when you think about women you might more naturally think of as cutting trails, making home-made toys, or adding drawings of flowers to “The Long Trail Guide” was studying physics at one of America’s premier universities. Pause long enough and you experience a bit of the complexity that is us each of us as humans, and that is and was Janet.

Being down south, in a culture where blacks and whites could not sit together on the bus, informed her.

After college and in her early twenties she moved north to work in Stratford Connecticut at the Sikorsky Helicopter plant. As a young woman she worked alongside guys designing and engineering heavy equipment in a world she described “as a man’s world.” It wouldn’t last. Connecticut would not be home for long.  She probably missed the hills and her family. She and came further north again to earn an art degree from UVM.  She happened, as history tells us overlapped at UVM with a man named John M. happened to doing his Masters in Education.

It was not on UVM’s campus that she first met John. She would meet him more fittingly on the top of a mountain in the Adirondacks. They would, as it turns out going to be inseparable for the next 64 years. 64 years.

In 1951 within a small window of days between the time they both finished their degrees and John was headed off to Oklahoma for Officer Candidate School, they married. Their brief honeymoon, spent mostly camping of course, nearly cost them their lives. See, the car they had parked on the top of a mountain had its brake line eaten through by a porcupine intrigued by its salty taste.

How many people might not have been born had they not made it down the mountain. Many I suspect. Certainly, we would not be in this room right now had they not made it.

I’m glad they did, cause Janet used her life.

Surviving their first trial, the newlyweds spent their first summer together in “blazingly hot” Oklahoma where John was in officer candidate school. The home town girl, we all know Janet would eventually again become was not done traveling. She would go to Germany with her new husband as part of “The Marshall Plan.” It would be their greatest and longest time away from home, and they saw a fair bit of Europe in their couple years there.

In Europe, Janet got pregnant just as they were about to head home. Well not exactly quite home yet, but closer. Before they returned to Rutland, John and Janet lived in Ludlow for a year where John would work as a teacher before he began his decades long career as a Rutland science teacher. During some of the middle of their lives, when they were raising their five kids Janet was a substitute art teacher.

During that long stretch, and buckle up, cause the list is going to demand you ask yourself what you are doing with your time,

While raised her five kids, Janet became a leader in Girl Scouts; worked at many summer camps, and for about a decade acted as the director of Tammarek Camp. While Janet was a daughter to her parents, active sister, and eventually became the grandmother to a dozen, she was a leader of local hiking club, and regularly designed stage sets for the local schools variety show.

While an engaged daughter, mother, wife and sister, she fought against the proliferation of nuclear weapons, was a good friend to many in this room, and perhaps the best friend this church ever had.

While Janet was perfecting her craft of making dolls, toy horses, and fairy houses, she stepped up to be a local leader helping settle refugees from South East Asia. Not everybody has that capacity. That’s fine. Janet did.

In between cutting bolts of cloth for her many quilts, Janet maintained many of the local hiking trails.

Did I mention she was civil rights advocate, or that she took over the seat her father held on the board of directors of the Rutland Fire Clay Co, when he was unable to be a leader in the family business, or that she held nearly all the positions one can hold in a church.

Let’s try this again; she was a wife, mother, dutiful daughter, substitute art teacher, compiled the history of her beloved home church, in boxes of binders, monitored the local wildlife at the top of her little hill, and essentially stepped up to mother two Hmong refugee kids whose families she helped integrate into American culture.

That little lady of not much more or less than a hundred pounds leaves us all a legacy of giving that if your paying attention either makes you sit up straight in your pew, or slump. Maybe both. All I know in writing and re-writing this, I had to ask myself what I was really doing with my time. Janet taught by example this Pastor a thing or two about dedication.

Janet did not by definition have a traditional career, she appears to have been way too busy and productive for that.

Let’s try a new list. While Janet, who is old enough to remember striding across what are now the suburban homes and lawns of Rutland when they were fields on her favorite short-cut to the long trail, had enough moral fiber and flexibility to advocate for civil rights, and essentially as an old woman testify before the state legislature for marriage equality. Today we remember a not very cool, very cool lady.

To list the simple varied ways she served her community is to risk expressing what she did with her life, to a series of scattered, egotistical sounding “Face-book” posts, except that it’s not. It’s just the opposite.

You simply can’t, and won’t do all off the little things Janet did unless you get your ego out of the way enough to act. And Janet seemed to me to have an almost egoless personality. Everything we talked about was about the cause, or task, or project.

Janet was the ultimate poster child for what a girl scout might grow up to look like. Janet was involved with and contributed to so many of the unpaid groups that make a community strong.

For that reason she was in 1984 -while caring for the Hmong kids- nominated to be Vermont’s mother of the year. I don’t know about you, but I have never even been nominated for that. Good for that committee.

In the great kickball game of church, and local community life, Janet Martin might be the first pick you would make. In the lingo of fantasy football, she would be a keeper.

Janet walks in a legacy of care for the local environment and for her community that she inherited from her father and grandfather. Probably more importantly, she passed down those same fundamentally, deeply, conservative values we often now deem “liberal” down to and through her kids.

Janet teaches all of us the simple lesson that the most important thing we do with our lives, is live them. That is the gospel she leaves.

As I said, Janet in her own silent way asks us what we are doing with our time.

I never knew her at the peak of her powers, but I felt her influence and humble welcoming nature immediately. When I was the Minister here, I think I spent about 15 nights up in the small bedroom at the end of the second floor. The two of them, John and Janet both always beat me up in the morning to go swimming. Janet was in her early 80’s. That is who she and they are.

Nowhere more than here in this beautiful upside down spiritual ship of stone and beam is her contribution more evident. She was a lifelong member of this church, and until a little more than a week ago, the longest active member.

Given that she was born into this church when it was still St. Paul’s and lived to 91, I suspect that that probably crushes any competition for that title. Ever. Think about that.

But, Janet was no mere member who just hung around. Janet, and alongside her John were perhaps the most important voices this fine community has known for 50 years. Back in the 1970’s when dissent about the Vietnam War and uncomfortable feelings about the merger with the Unitarians had dwindled the average attendance here to a dozen, Janet was among the strongest voices that the church not fold.

She is probably the most important member this church ever had.
Today we memorialize this churches unquestioned matron, hardly more than a week gone.

This time, we more than even Janet’s generation might be the people called to save the planet from our habits.

We might, as I pray we will be the generation that learns to control our population, pollution, consumption.

But we would all do well, and serve Janet’s legacy well to never forget that she and the slice of her generation of people that built the Audubon Society, recycled during the war, and have forgotten more about the patterns of living simply than I ever will driving a hundred miles to go deliver another earth day sermon.

It is, for me to the likes of Janet and John, and my grandparents that I aspire.

Sit up straight, as long as you can. Do your best, as long as you can. Don’t waste the time you are given. What great UU’s those two are.

Sure, her spirit and raw pragmatic Yankee drive wore out her body. You’re lucky if that happens to you.

And yes, it is often hard to retain your dignity when you are shuffling around your home increasingly needing assistance for every step, but one way you can do that, is to build up such a history of competency that those who see you, see through the limitations of what you are, to define you for what you were and did.

Forever is a long time, but Janet and with her John are among those church people who get remember and noted for that long time.

Janet and John like her teach us that you need not go far to make a difference, in fact, one might actually make the greatest impact, by staying home, or finding a home worth keeping and digging in.

I will think of her personally of course, but I will also remember Janet as making their own unique mark, putting her own unique spin on what it was to what I think is accurately known as the Greatest Generation.

Amen