We held Aidan’s funeral today.  Just like last night, many people came; some of the same people from the wake, but many others as well.  More teachers and aides from Albany came.  People from the hospital in Springfield came.  Good friends from Boston and New York City came.  It was another outpouring of love for Aidan.

      The ceremony took place in the church that Maureen and Maggie attend.  The space was filled with all sorts of people.  Maureen and Maggie and I had picked out the music and the readings and we felt they captured some of what Aidan’s life means to us.  The pastor, a close family friend who knows Aidan well, knit the various words and lyrics together with his own understanding of our family. 

     Maureen and I served as pall bearers, along with Aidan’s cousins and one of the women who had helped him for years in the local school.  It was important to feel the weight of the casket as we lifted him into the hearse.  We have always lifted him; we know his weight well.  Picking him up those last times helped to impress his memory into our muscles.

     We blew bubbles as the graveside.  This was Maureen’s idea, linked to the summertime playgroup she has run for the past several years, where the kids would blow bubbles all over Aidan.  It was good to see close to a hundred people all blowing bubbles, the iridescent spheres drifting up to the sky.

    Afterward we went back to the church, where members of the congregation had generously arranged lunch for many of us.  It was just another example of how people are good.

    I spoke a eulogy for Aidan.  It is reproduced in full below.

A Eulogy for Aidan M. Crane
Spoken on March 22, 2006
Community Bible Church
Williamstown, Massachusetts

  Aidan – our son, our brother, our grandson, our
nephew, our cousin, our student, our friend – lived a full and rich life.

  He touched
many, many people in his fourteen years. It seems a short time, it is a short time in comparison to the span of
many other lives, but his youth did not limit or diminish his effect on the
world. His presence radiated throughout
this town and outward to places far and wide. Just look around this church today. His life, his unique gifts, his wordless love, is what has brought us
all here today. We are a group that,
were it not for Aidan, would probably never have come together in quite this
way. There are people here who, though
they share the same small town, might never have crossed paths were it not for
Aidan.

  His web of loving friends and
relations stretches throughout the county, up into Vermont, over to  New York, and Eastward to Boston. In the past few days we have received phone calls from Florida and Ohio and Arizona from people who know and love Aidan. Emails have come from California and Wisconsin and Texas.

   Love for him spills across national borders. A
woman in Japan, Reiko’s mother, who once visited in Williamstown some years ago and met Aidan, has been
praying for him in recent days, her words rising up into the sky over Hokkaido.  Friends in Australia
are casting flowers into the waters of Sydney Harbor in his memory.   A man in Malaysia sent a quotation from an ancient Chinese philosopher in his honor. And an internet acquaintance in South Africa is
reciting a Buddhist sutra for him.

    In fourteen
years Aidan connected with more people than any one of us can know. He filled a large place in the world.

  His effects
on the people who met him were numerous and varied.

  Aidan often
brought out the good in people. This was
especially true for the children around him. When he was in school here in Williamstown his classmates made him a
part of their doings in countless ways. They knew he could not see, and that it was best to engage him through
his sense of touch. Many a day it was,
when he would come home from school and we would find flowers and pebbles and
sticks and grass tucked in the crevices of his wheelchair, the daily evidence
of how his friends had brought him things to feel and sense, to connect him to their
surroundings

  He also
moved many of the adults who encountered him. I remember some years ago, we were up in  Manchester. We rolled into a little restaurant to have some lunch.  Maureen went up to the counter to order some
food. I stayed with Aidan and Maggie,
who was then just an infant. We
ate. It was all fairly normal. But then a man, who had been sitting at a
nearby table, got up and came over. A
complete stranger. And, out of the blue,
he said he had noticed us, and what a beautiful family we were, and how lucky
we were to have each other. This was
Aidan’s work. Aidan had inspired him.

  Aidan was a
great teacher. For those who took the
time and opened themselves up to his view of the world, his lessons could be
transformative. I know there are many
teachers here with us today, talented teachers, inspiring teachers. Some of you taught Aidan both here and, more
recently, in Albany. Some of you worked closely with teachers and
others in the schools Aidan attended. Some of you are teachers who, while they never taught Aidan, know well
what good teaching is all about. It is
about that moment of recognition. When
the thing you are trying to get across finally gets through and a light of
understanding shines in the eyes of the learner. That is what Aidan, as a teacher, could
do.

  He taught
us about patience and perseverance and strength. He taught us about the value of each human
life and what really matters in any life. In a world where fashion and fad and products and sales gimmicks seem to
dominate the definition of value and worth, Aidan quietly offered another
perspective. Sitting with him at home in
all of his simplicity and beauty, I often relearned that those material things
and desires don’t really matter at all. What matters is our human connections. What matters is the cultivation of our closest loving
relationships. What matters is the daily
performance of our common humanity. That
is what Aidan taught us. He brought that
light of understanding to us.

  Aidan could
impress people, sometime in unexpected ways. Maureen remembers a moment some years ago, when she was with Aidan at a
summer school program in Adams. Another boy in the class was watching as
Maureen gave Aidan some food through his stomach tube. He looked on in wonder as Maureen slowly
pushed the liquid food through a syringe and into his tube. He said:

  “What are
you doin’?”
“Just
giving Aidan some food,” she replied.
“You mean
he gets his food that way.”
“Yes,
that’s how he gets his food.”
“How come?”
the boy asked.
“Oh, he was
born that way,” Maureen answered. “You
know some kids have blue eyes and some have brown; some have black hair and
some have blond. Well, that was the way
Aidan was born: he gets his food through a tube.”
The boy looked
at Maureen in wide-eyed amazement: “You mean he never has to taste broccoli?”
“No.”
“Cool.”

  He was
cool. He was beautiful. He was strong.

  And he
changed us. He will have a lasting
effect on us.  For those who knew him
well but did not have as much time with him as those closest to him, the
changes he wrought may be rather subtle, but powerful in their own way.  He is there inside of you. Perhaps one day you
will see a boy in a wheelchair, a purple wheelchair pushed by a loving mother,
and an image of Aidan will flash in your mind and a warm wave of recognition
and remembrance will wash across your heart. Or maybe you will hear that name, “Aidan,” and a hundred memories will
leap to mind. He will be there and he
will return time and again.

  For Maggie
and the children who grew up with him, he did not so much change their lives as
shape them from the very beginning. He
was foundational, a part of the very stuff of their being, a daily expression
of the marvelous diversity of humanity that they have become accustomed to.

  For Maureen
and me, and those others closest to him, it is safe to say that we are not now
what we had been before he was born. We
have grown in ways we could never have imagined. We have become something more than what we were.
His love for us and our love for him
has magnified us.  He changed us
fundamentally for the better. This is
not merely a matter of memory, though we will remember him. It is more than what we will find in the
pages of his book, it is something deep inside the pulse of our lives.

  And in
those changes he brought to us and the world around him, in the love he
inspired and absorbed, he lives.  He
lives in me; he lives in you; he lives in all of us.