My Eulogy for My Beloved Wife

by Charles Barnard

I didn’t think I would ever be able to do this and I know you all will be forgiving and patient with me if I have trouble getting through this but I came to realize there were words only I could share. Also, because I have not mastered the art of the SHORT story this may run a bit long.

Some of you know the story of how Donna and I met but many of you may not and the story is actually something that gave credence to our faith, and it is this faith which speaks to the person we all know and love.

I need to give the abbreviated backstory.

From the time I first truly discovered my faith near the end of my junior year in college until I met Donna some seven years later God had been working in my life, which is an entirely separate story. The part that relates to my meeting Donna was as a 28 year old and only three or four months from turning 29 who wanted to have a family, a career in education, and didn’t see any of that on the horizon as I was looking at the real possibility of another year of substitute teaching, coaching, and trying to do private coaching to pay the bills, and with no relationship prospects in sight, I found myself for a second time praying and giving something over to God by saying okay God I get it. I can’t do this, whatever your will is for me I’m ready. All I can tell you is that in that moment it was more than just saying the words – I felt it, the giving it over to God.

Well, it wasn’t long thereafter, on the last day of my summer job as an assistant recreation director at the Elan school, the headmaster came to me and said, “you are a certified social studies teacher aren’t you.”

I said yes.

She asked if I had a job.

I said no

She asked if I wanted one.

I said yes.

This was literally with only an hour or so left of my summer job and I was prepared to start substitute teaching and school was starting within a week.

When I arrived home I had a message on the answering machine for an interview for a job at the West school in Portland. I never applied for any job in Portland that spring or summer but I had subbed in Portland the year before and was planning to sub there again. I interviewed and actually after school had begun I received a call early in the morning asking if I could come in today and start as an ed tech at the West School in Portland. I did.

I found myself working days at a day treatment school for kids with significant emotional and behavioral challenges in Portland while teaching nights at the Elan School in Poland. Both schools were dealing with students with serious behavioral issues. This was 30 years ago this coming September.

At the West school I was asked to help serve breakfast to students who came in early. There was another ed tech who was supposed to have gone into the peace corps but strangely the case worker handling all the paperwork abruptly left without ever processing any of her paperwork over the summer and at the very end of the summer this young woman asked if she could have her old job back at the west school. As you have figured out by now that other ed tech was my soul mate – Donna.

Every morning we got a chance to talk while serving breakfast to the students there. We started dating and on a Friday night in late March before a bunch of us were to go to Worcester to watch the University of Maine play for a spot in the hockey final four in 1993 we became engaged.

Donna changed the direction of my life. Donna changed me.

Donna, who by nature was actually an introvert, was one the kindest most considerate people you would know. She was a beautiful women. It was the kind of beauty that comes from within and radiates outward and it made her very attractive. In some of my writings and philosophizing I have posed the question to myself and others do we consider ourselves genuinely kind or are we really just being not unkind. There is a difference. I am not an unkind person but I don’t say high to strangers as I pass them while running the streets of Portland. Donna did. I don’t greet everyone I meet with a glowing smile and kind words. Donna did. I say my pleases and thank yous and smile and am generally polite and respectful, but I am not always genuinely kind the same way Donna was. She did things in a way that was naturally and genuinely… kind – not just being not unkind.

Donna was fiercely independent, stubborn, and tough. I mean stubborn and tough in the determined sense. At one point in her college running career she was running 70 miles a week. Then there was the time she and her friend, colleague, and running partner, Christine Braceras had their Forest Gump moment. They decided to go for a run. It was snowing outside so they decided to go for a run on the tiny track, and I mean tiny, that overlooks Portland High’s gym. It may be 100 yards – maybe. Like Forest they just kept running. And Running. After 13.1 miles – yes, a half marathon – they decided it was time to go home. Donna did run marathons. In fact, a good friend and I cheered her on in her second Boston Marathon in 1993.

Donna spent essentially her entire life in the Portland school system. Minus the first five years of her life and her years in college at USM where she ran cross country and track in the fledgling track and field program and would eventually be elected into their Hall of Fame, she was either a student, ed tech, or teacher in the Portland school system. She worked first as an ed tech and then she got her coveted teaching job at her beloved Portland High School. Between being a student and teaching, Portland High School had been her life for 32 years. She was a bulldog.

It is said that a person who is a “bulldog” will move amazingly swiftly to protect those around them and what they perceive to be their territory and family. She would do that for her family – including her Portland High Family. She formed many special relationships with too many people to mention all individually but these people were more than just colleagues to her. They were her Portland High Family. She would fight for her students, colleagues, and what she believed was the best thing for her Portland High Family.

It is also said a bulldog enjoys bringing others to laughter. Donna loved to laugh, especially at her own expense. She would tell about some silly mistake she made or what might have been an embarrassing moment and would have a hard time getting through it because she would be laughing so hard. And we would laugh right alongside her. She liked to see others laugh. She was a true Bulldog in every symbolic sense. She truly loved the students and staff at Portland High.

During her college years she worked in the Portland summer track program, where she coached and mentored kids, one of whom, Katie, became one of our nanny’s and another, Liz Koherian she coached from the age of 7 through high school and became a life-long friend, mentor, and eventually a colleague. It wasn’t long after starting teaching that she took over the girls’ cross-country program at Portland High and then the indoor and outdoor track programs where she impacted the lives of many young ladies. Many of these former athletes and students are here today.

As we started a family and then the children began school we began to “add” to our family of four children – especially boys. When we first started talking about building an apartment to the house where her mom could live, we knew we would be adding a basement below it. We talked about how nice it would be to have our house be where our kids and their friends would congregate and we could keep eyes and ears on them. Well, it was more like Donna keeping her eyes and ears on them – one I don’t hear well and two she was the mother always on alert.

Our three boys have been incredibly fortunate to have some really unique special friendships. When our oldest first entered elementary school it wasn’t long before he developed several friendships. A year later our twins entered and they too quickly developed some friendships. When our youngest entered he too began to develop some friendships and what was very special was that four of his friends were the younger brothers of four of Charles’s friends. The Stasiums, Westphalls, Lorangers, Barnards along with Owen Sprague have become known to us as the Hall squad – very special lifelong friends. Then in middle school more friends were added to the circle, and then in high school more, and college more with most of them sitting in the audience today. As someone who has treasured many lifelong friendships I can assure you the relationship these boys – ah young men – have is quite special.

Through it all our house did become the go to place, which for the most part Donna and I both loved – that is until I would get an elbow in the ribs telling me to go tell the boys to turn the music down at 11:00 at night, or the time we could see the flames from the fire in the fire pit that somehow became a roaring bonfire, or the lights they put on the roof so they could play night whiffle ball were still on at 10:00 and Donna was worried about the neighbors. Truly, we both love all these young men – they are a special group with special friendships shared amongst all three of our sons.

For Anneke, her friendships were different. First, she did have all these brothers always around so she rarely had friends over. In part because of a testosterone filled house she and Donna forged a special mother daughter bond. I have no doubt that now as a young woman and with all these young men still around she will miss those moments she could go to mom. I know she treasures the time she did have with mom but my heart breaks to think she won’t have that now and in the future – at least in a physical sense.

Donna touched so many different lives in so many different ways by her genuine love. Whether it was handing out candy bars or setting up a tea bar for her students, simply listening to them and their challenges and struggles, sharing her sense of humor and her love of laughter or whether it was baking special goodies for the PHS staff on different occasions during the year, she was always trying to do something nice for people.

She always said she was an introvert and not really a people person yet she was drawn to a profession and expressed love to so many people that she was the epitome of a people person – but what she really meant was she preferred our quiet time together as did I. What I will miss most will be the quiet dinners together, the hikes, the weekend get aways, and those little things we were looking forward to doing more in our retirement. I will miss her touch, holding her in my arms, her smile, her laugh, and the beauty of her eyes which reflected the beauty that resided in her soul.

There are a number of insidious diseases and cancer and ALS would be two at or near the top of my list. I know diseases such as that have challenged people’s ability to believe in God. Long before Donna was diagnosed with her cancer I struggled with the same question mankind has struggled with since the beginning – why is there pain and suffering. On one level I understand why but on another it is very, very difficult to accept. Donna and I had talked about this before she ever got cancer. Since I first met her, she had experienced losing her father just a year after we were married, one of her brothers, and her sister all way too young. I lost a couple of cousins too young and countless prayers didn’t keep any of them from passing on.

Donna and I both have strong faith and our faith was not shaken by this. We both believe in miracles – actually we know miracles happen. Even before we knew we needed a true miracle, we had complete faith that she would beat this insidious disease. One of our mantras was somebody always survives cancer and Donna is somebody; she will survive. Nevertheless, here we are today despite all the prayers of so many people. The question remained, why do some experience a miracle and others don’t.

I can’t give a definitive answer, none of us probably will ever truly be able to in this lifetime. In Donna’s case, knowing what I know, I have come to the conclusion that her cancer was unquestionably a result of an ever darkening world beginning to come too close to home. She began to experience too many people living life much less kindly than she herself did. It was no longer just things you saw on the news in places that were away. She was experiencing it and she just couldn’t digest the idea that this was real and had invaded her little world. Like so very many of us, she didn’t truly know how to turn her burdens over to God. She didn’t truly let go of emotional experiences and there is no doubt in my mind that holding onto them became the cancer. She just couldn’t accept that this darkening world had found its way into her world. I believe God didn’t perform the miracle we wanted for a couple of reasons. First, the world is becoming a darker place and to borrow a line from the song Vincent – This world was never meant for one As beautiful as Donna.

In terms of the battle and the pain and the struggles toward the end I have come to the conclusion God was teaching both of us one last lesson before taking Donna from this place that was not meant for one as beautiful as she was.

Donna’s fierce independence stems from her childhood where she became at a young age a primary communication point person for her mom and dad who were both deaf. She grew up early. She developed a need to be in control but was never overbearing in this regard. We simply knew and accepted that in the Barnard house there was one way of doing things – mom’s way. We all recognized and came to accept that but it was that independence, the need to be in control, that became something she was forced to let go of at the very end. She needed to learn to love in one way she had not fully done – she need to learn to trust in a way she never really had in the past.

Me, I needed to experience love, to live it – in its fullest sense. Love is patient, love is kind, love does not easily anger, love is not self-seeking, love does not dishonor, love protects, love trusts, love hopes, love perseveres. The end gave me a different perspective on my love for her. I also needed to experience watching up close and personal other people showing love every day. I have always had a special admiration for those who care for – love – the severely physically, mentally challenged, the sick, the elderly… the dying. Watching though up close the way the nurses cared for Donna near the end I saw true love in action – whether they recognized it or not, the nurses we had were treating her not as a patient who needed to be taken care of but as one who was made in the image of God. It was a beautiful thing.  

As God was teaching both of us a different level of love, I have no doubt I will be able to laugh at what I can now imagine things looked like and sounded like if someone was eves dropping.

First, my hearing and Donna’s voice becoming weaker made for interesting communication.

Honey, I need to go pee.

What, you need some tea.

No, I need to go pee.

Who do you need to see?

No, I need to go P E E – oh, okay.

Donna also became the master of using the Milton Model Language pattern of the unspecified pronoun with no body language.

Chuck can move that.

Move what?

That.

What, this?

No that?

What this?

No, THAT?

Then there was the night Donna woke me up after a few hours of sleep to tell me she threw my imaginary socks on the bed. Or the night she woke me to tell me we had to make sure someone, I have no idea who, got her PE credit.

For the first few days in hospice, even as she was beginning to lose her ability to think clearly, she would direct me to put things in their place before our visitors arrived and to figure out if we had enough chairs and places for people to sit. Things still had to be just right. She began to gradually learn to let go of everything having to be just “right”. The chords to her medicine bag that ran up to the IV in her arm, to the cups and other “stuff” being just so.

In the beginning, it was literally at least an hour process to get ready for bed not because it took her an hour to go pee and clean up but it took her an hour to make sure she could process exactly what she was going to do, how she would do it, and then make sure everything was in just the right place to make it happen. Even through this she was touching other people as I would hear laughter as the nurses helped her clean up. The nurses would say to me you have a beautiful wife. The nurses and their special gifts gradually helped her begin to realize she could let that need for control and independence go. She could truly trust. And when she finally did, she finally began to let go. Her final lesson was learned as was mine.

When my tears come it generally is because I think about what I am missing instead of what I had – an incredibly beautiful woman who quietly lived out her faith, was a teacher, coach, mentor, friend, mother, and amazing wife – someone who was much too beautiful for this world. I love you Donna.