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By Jacqui Banaszynski
I didn’t know the woman honored in an essay in the Phoenix Spirit, a Minnesota-based publication focused on emotional and spiritual health. Even after reading it, I only knew her first name, Eileen, that she was a professor and gardener and walker, that she explored with art, and that she had died of ovarian cancer.Yet by the end of the piece, I felt I knew far more about writing, and about life.
That happened throughout the tribute, written by the woman’s walking friend, Mary Lou Logsdon. I met Logsdon in a writing workshop several years ago. She had, over the years, moved away from more traditional career pursuits and was working as a spiritual advisor; as part of that, she writes a column for the Phoenix Spirit, which is as thoughtful as it is well-crafted.
Her tribute to Eileen is a masterpiece of profile writing. Much of Eileen’s story seemed quotidian stuff, but Logsdon had a way of punctuating it, at paragraph ends, with a little hitch of surprise or meaning. Consider these two grafs:
While I was already retired from my first career, she was fairly new at the University. She had married right out of high school to an Army man she met while her father was stationed in Alaska. She soon had two children, was living in a trailer house near her husband’s Wisconsin family and left alone while he told stories into the night at the local bar. She walked her children past and sometimes into the nearby college, peeking around corners to see what life was like for the students she saw, not much younger than her. She feared they’d know she didn’t belong.
When she told him she got a job at the college, he assured her they would never keep her. What could she offer? She took one college class followed by another, growing in confidence and amazement as she discovered a new side of herself.
The pacing and detail kept me going through a story I otherwise might have given a brief scan. As I read, I was able to touch the edges of Logsdon’s loss. I learned about a person I would like to have known. I thought about my own close friends and what I most value about them. I considered what they give to my life, what I would miss about them if they were gone, and whether I spend enough time tending to the gifts of their friendship.
These are the kinds of things not only eulogies, but all intimate storytelling should do. They tell us the story of one to tell us the story of all — and of ourselves.
That was capped, with grace, by the last paragraph of Logsdon’s essay, and by a last line that is a stunning bit of both writing and life wisdom:
Eileen died June 10, 2024. She leaves a big hole in my life and in my heart. A person could protect themselves from this aching sorrow by not bothering to venture into love. That would come at a much higher cost. Besides, there’s more room in a broken heart.