Catherine Cooke Lux, RIP

 Catherine Cooke Lux

October 11, 1951 - March 22, 2021

The Rev. Nancy E. Gossling

Celebration of Life, September 18, 2021

We have friends and then we have our best friends. Cate was one of my best friends. A forever friend from the first day I met her until eternity, we could pick up and leave off without missing a beat. We shared many times together, laughing, weeping, wondering about life and death, and how to negotiate the reality of now. 

Let’s face it. It’s been more than a year of wondering about life and death, while we continue to respond to the COVID 19 pandemic and its variants. Cate found it especially hard during this time in her life. Her love language included touch; and she hated not being able to hug those she loved. For whatever reasons you have, and we all have them, this is a hard, hard time for us all. And so we acknowledge it; we accept it, and we can still not like it.

So what’s the good news that I can share with you today? What can I say, along with all of you who are gathered here virtually or physically, both near and far, from Massachusetts to Philly to New Zealand and as far away as heaven? How can we celebrate the earthly life of the one and only, the deliciously, naughty Catherine Cooke Lux?

 Like her, I have an active imagination and certain opinions about many things. I can see her now, amazingly gorgeous in her little red dress, driving her dream green car with a tan interior. The windows are down, letting the wind blow through her recently highlighted hair, and the radio is blaring. Chip liked her hair short. I liked it straight, not with those little permy curls we all tried in the 1990’s. I can see her face now, raising an eyebrow at me for something I’ve said or done.

I always thought of Cate as a teacher and a student of life, who was eager to learn new things and then share them with others. As a child, she created her own little classroom on the green moss of the forest. She liked working with her colleagues and spending time with various groups of friends. She had a lot of them from all chapters in her life. 

Cate loved museums and art; and her choices for today are filled with beauty. They paint pictures for us in our imaginations; we can see sheep in green pastures and rainbows in the sky. We can hear beautiful music. Cate had talked about sending love letters to her family. And as I listened to the music she selected, the scripture passages that she chose, and the poetry that she recited, I was amazed. This was her love letter to us all.

To her credit, she faced death squarely in the eye. She offered words of faith, hope, and love to those who would listen. The author of Ecclesiastes reminds us that there is a time for everything. A time to weep and a time to laugh. A time to be alone and a time to be together. A time to die; and a time to rejoice.

Rejoice. I love that word. It means to find joy once again. Living each day as a simple and precious gift of life, we can start fresh every morning. Joy comes when we mingle our grief with our gratitude, our tears of love with our tears of loss. We rejoice when we share bear hugs and belly laughs, when we share memories over good food and well-aged wine, when we raise our glasses in a toast of thanksgiving to the woman we all love. Rejoice, I say, always rejoice.

Deep down, Cate knew that life is a holy mystery. Like so many people these days who identify themselves not as religious but spiritual, Cate knew that joy comes when we have faith in something or someone beyond ourselves. We can find joy in things not seen, like our virtual love crossing these airways, and going in all directions. Cate knew that love is complicated and that our dreams are sometimes broken; and yet in the face of all that difficulty, we can still say, “Hallelujah.” Even in her times of darkness, she trusted that there is something beyond that multi-colored rainbow which we call heaven. 

In and with the spirit of Cate, I’d like to end by reading a children’s story called Water Bugs and Dragonflies, explaining Death to Young Children, by Doris Stickney.

Praise God from whom all blessings flow, praise God, us creatures here below. Praise God for Catherine Cooke Lux, my BFF, then, now, and forever. Amen.