Funeral Cathy Ann Coston, noon on January 24, 2024, Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church.
We have come today to Saint Mark’s to celebrate and give thanksgiving for the life of Cathy Ann Coston. We gather as friends and family suffering an empty space in our lives. We also express gratitude for everything Cathy has meant to us and everything she continues to stand for. It is a day for tears and smiles. Friends have described Cathy’s unique humor, love of nature, and uplifting faith even after becoming homebound and having early retirement for health issues. Camille describes her mom as the embodiment of a life well lived. Cathy left all she touched with the gift of love and fun for life—a life of laughter and good humor.
I think the scripture readings and music Camille selected for this service give us an extraordinary hint of the love Camille knew from her mother and her mother’s parents. Camille described her mom as a great gift-giver. She and her friends are still receiving gifts from her mom that have arrived after her death. I can’t help but tell one of Camille’s stories about how her mom brought humor to every part of life she touched. Camille was being wheeled into emergency surgery for a ruptured appendix. Her mother was writing little notes to Camille with a magic marker on Camille’s hands and toes. The best one was what her mother wrote of the bottoms of Camille’s feet for her surgeon and all to see, “Dr. Tucker, don’t let me die!”
Camille loved going to church with her mom, because her mother had a pocketful of pipe cleaners that her mom made stick figures for her during the service. When they went out to eat, her mom made puppets out of their napkins. What great childhood memories.
We indeed do reach out today to Cathy’s family, especially her father, George, and her daughter, Camille. How do we tell them that someone they so cared for has gone on to life in the resurrection?/ How do you explain that eternal, resurrected life differs from immortality? Immortality means we never die. That is what we believed when we were teenagers. Eternal life is a new life, moving into new territory, different from the past. Remember that sometimes friends recognized the resurrected Jesus immediately, and sometimes not. Sometimes, he ate with them, and at other times, he walked through walls. He would suddenly appear, and then just as suddenly disappear. Eternal life is a new and different life, not more of the same old life. How do we say that dying is not a PERIOD at the end of a sentence, but more like a COMMA, where we die and go on to a new relationship with God AND with those we love?
This new life is truly a mystery. How I wish there were more stories about it in scripture. Couldn’t Jesus have spent a little more time telling us what this eternal life would be like? I wish we could have had some eyewitness stories about life after death, from Jarius’ daughter, the widow’s son, or Lazarus,/ those three people Jesus brought back from the dead. Maybe just a paragraph from them about life after death, but their words and experiences are not recorded.
We only know about the resurrected Jesus. When Jesus was raised from the dead, he did not bring us back any pictures of a place. All he brought back was himself in person. The resurrected Jesus did not resume his previous life. Nothing in the Gospel resurrection stories implies that he died, came back, and carried on life “as usual.” He did not seem confined to time and space. He would appear and disappear. Sometimes, his closest followers, like Mary Magdalene, could not recognize him until he called her specifically by name. He still had his wounds in his hands and feet,/ but they were healed.
The disciples who meet Jesus after the resurrection on the road to Emmaus do not recognize him as he walks and unbelievably explains the scriptures to them UNTIL he breaks bread with them.
And so here we are today, so much like those friends on the road to Emmaus, grieving the loss of someone we loved, our friend, a close companion, the one we did learn so much about love from when we ate with her at those family meals that were so important to her.
Like Mary Magdalene, like those on the road to Emmaus, we will know that both Cathy and Christ’s love is very much here with us, but for some reason, we often may not recognize it. We may sometimes feel that love in our prayers or for you, Camille, when you sing. Sometimes, we will genuinely feel that love beside us. Sometimes, it will be more difficult, but that love will be there. The love of those who loved us and Christ’s love is always near, in death as in life. The love from the Good Shepherd they gave to us remains with us. It is that love from God that never dies.
We are told that the light we see in the night sky is the light of a star long since dead, but the light reaches us and leads us on. We are not surprised, therefore, when a light stranger than the light of any star falls across our way, warming us, leading us, reminding us, and pointing us to love we have known in the past. The light is real; we know where it comes from. It is the love from God that was always there in your relationship with Cathy.
Camille, your experience tells you that God loves you so much that God brought you to live with your mother, Cathy,/ who loved you / more than either of you can describe. Our experience tells us that this Good Shepherd would not just let this love stop with Cathy’s death. The love from your God reached out to you in the life of your mom, and will still embrace you in her life beyond death.
It is impossible to believe that Cathy, her strength, her love, and her kindness are extinguishable. The God of our understanding would not do this. In this mysterious universe, we know that those who mean most to us mean EVEN MORE to God. The Good Shepherd will keep them, and because God keeps them, we will never be separated from their love, or they from us. //
Camille, do you remember the year your mom went with you when you started school? Remember that first day of school and how new and exciting everything was? You were the same little girl,/ but everything in your life suddenly changed. Death, too, is the beginning of something new and different. That’s what it is like right now for your mom, like starting at a new school, maybe a graduate school, and goodness knows you know she will LOVE IT, for she loves to learn and share with others. Somehow, we also know she may still share that new love with the rest of us. Perhaps you intermittently will receive some new understanding of her love from a particular piece of music/ or a prayer/ or when you are sitting outside in nature/ or watching a sunset, or at the Eucharist.
Some say that when the body dies, life stops. Our experience is that life continues in some form when the body dies. This was Christ’s gift to us. We know this is true because he has told us/ and we also know it because he has shown us in his life and the lives of so many others still going on.
Today, we give thanks for the life of Cathy Coston, who was a tower of strength, who stood by us and nursed and nurtured us; who cheered us by her sympathy and encouraged us by her example, who looked not disdainfully on the outward appearance, but lovingly into the hearts of men and women and children; who rejoiced to serve others; whose loyalty was steadfast, whose friendship was unselfish and secure; whose joy it was to be of service. May Cathy find abiding peace in God’s heavenly kingdom, and with God’s help, may we carry forward her unfinished work on this earth. Amen
Theodore Ferris, Death and Transfiguration (FM Maxi Book 1974).
Edward Gleason, Dying We Live (Cowley Publishers 1990)
J. B. Bernardin, Burial Services (Morehouse Publishing 1980), p. 117
Joanna Seibert. joannaseibert.com