"...like to the swift flight of a sparrow..."

I think she would have liked the stillness at the heart of blizzard. Though she would have worried for the mourners, snow-blind, slewing madly on the Lyke Road. It was like a Russian novel at the graveside, or the film Orlando: she was graved in snow and earth.

A few brave loving mourners came: her children, valiant friends and cousins. What touched me most was the presence of her workers, people who have stitched or printed for her twenty, thirty years. In the best mediaeval tradition, they were truly her family. We were short a pall bearer, so Tom the welder leapt to carry her, without a topcoat, through the storm.

(And he drove two of us home afterward, with one arm out the window, flicking snow from the clagged wipers. My dear friend B. is another such cheerful pragmatist: she came all the way from Boston and got safely back. No trouble, she said: she just went along hugging a snow plow and listening to requiems.)

My mother loved pretty things and always wanted me to Dress. So I wore her lovely old cameo, and the little amethyst from Venice, and the ring with nine garnets (my talisman). I wore the exquisite shawl that rushthatspeaks knitted for me: cobweb-fine, greenblue, and silver-spangled: it's the heavens that I hope she's in.

The understudy rabbi was inspired to tell Bede's parable of the sparrow passing through the firelight, between the darks. That was heartstoppingly beautiful. My dear negothick read the 121st Psalm. My brothers spoke earnestly and well. And I said roughly this:


She was always the mother, like the Mikado, like the Queen. The lawgiver, the last word. "Have you asked the mother?"

She was the mother, like the north star: our direction and our hope, the light we travelled by. Who ever thought that star would set?

That star, I say; but SJ was many stars, a constellation of lives: daughter; loving sister; wife; mother; mentor; working woman; friend.

And from the first, a teller of stories.

Every Saturday as a child in Mount Vernon, she'd go with her twin brother to the Embassy Theater; and afterward, she'd tell the movies to a breathless circle of her friends. And do you know what happened then?

All her life, it was narrative she loved: not the silver screen, the glamour, but the interplay of lives enacted, how it all came out. She always watched her Netflixes twice over, with an eye to craft.

As a young woman, she wrote stories; had screenplays produced on television. She had a nibble from Hollywood and was deep in talks; then one Fourth of July, she met my father, Marty Gilman, and her story changed. The romance was handled beautifully.

He had the bluest eyes, forget-me-not.

For thirty years—too brief—they worked together, bringing up a family and bringing forth his work and hers, his inventions: the children of his brilliant mind.

After his too-early death, and all her life, she went on tending to the company: the plant, they called it, as if it were the garden he had made. The people she worked with there were always like a wider family to her. They were truly her company.

And later she found a new companion in an old friend, Marty Sheridan, a writer and photojournalist, who'd been an imbedded correspondent in the Pacific Theater of War.

She loved her two Martys and they dearly loved her.

How unlike they were! the elements of fire and water; the creator, the observer; the stay-at-home, the traveller. Marty Gilman, my father, was a man like a golden peach, exuberant, bursting with life; and Marty Sheridan, cool as a martini, understated: the international man of mystery.

With him, she travelled six continents, from Venice to Beijing, the South Pacific and the south of France, the Valley of the Kings, Jerusalem, and all the peopled earth. Her passion was not wilderness, but civilizations: the stories in the stones.

She loved the wide world and she loved the village; but in that narrow world between the hills, she loved the river most. It is here and going elsewhere, like a story. After a good rain or in a thaw, she'd go to see the little waterfall above the village. She loved the onrush and the thunder of it and the leaves whirled onward on their journey to the sea.

Oh, she always loved a journey, and it called her on.

Death was the only road she never wished to take, the dark way to the undiscovered country.

So I tell her, as I did beside her bed:

You do this every night. You go to the front door and you open it wide wide to the dark and look out. And it's the newest day of spring. The leaves are just unfolding; they're that thrilling vibrant green, that early green. And there are stars. The leaves are dancing, just a little, in the wind before the stars. And you take a deep deep breath of all that sweetness, all the mystery and the mingling. There's a little golden light in Maudie's house across the way. Behind you in the house are children sleeping; Marty is asleep now with his paper, in his chair. And you hear the river. It is high with rain; you hear the onrush. It runs down over the little falls, down over the big falls, and on past the house, behind the stone wall and the willow, and on. It comes from forever and it runs on forever. The river is story. It goes on.