Stony Creek Diaries - Winter Solstice edition
Memorials, memory and light in the darkness
Welcome, new subscribers! A number of you joined after my last edition and then when the dynamic K-12 marketing communications leader Angela Brown promoted this newsletter on LinkedIn.
This is an edition of Stony Creek Diaries, which are personal reflections on transition, reinvention, and life at the midpoint. Please join me, but if you’re here just for the school leadership stuff, that’s fine, too! Scroll down to the bottom for more info and a week from Friday, there will be a year-end wrap up edition with some exciting news for 2023.
And now, on to Stony Creek Diaries, Winter Solstice edition.
Tomorrow is the shortest day of the year. And this year has been equal parts bumpy and interesting, and at times, even verging on thrilling. It has also been sad and hard, adjusting to realities I am coming to grips with at midlife, such as how I want to spend my “one wild and precious life” (thank you, Mary Oliver) when there is no way I can prioritize everything and everyone I hold dear but also realizing all the potential life holds.
My dad passed on December 4th, very peacefully. I am grateful and I am sad. I keep thinking of Masha’s line from The Seagull, “I am in mourning for my life” - not because I am, exactly, but my father’s death has put me on a slow moving carousel where I am looping through not just my current life but experiencing moments of feeling every age I ever was. Nothing is ever the same after you lose a parent; the world shifts. You shift with it, I’m told, eventually, but in the interim, there is the whole weird disorientation. It’s not earth shattering tragedy or paralytic grief but it takes time to get accustomed to the waves of sadness that hit you at unexpected times, such as when I saw the pfeffernusse in the supermarket the other day and the finality of his absence strikes again.
On November 30th, when my sister was visiting my dad and my mom, his breathing took a turn and hospice went from thinking he would live until well into the New Year to thinking his passing would be sometime much sooner. After hearing this news, my first instinct was to start getting thoughts together for the eulogy. I had been thinking about this for a while and it was time to get thoughts on paper. I poured out most of what was a very personal first draft which in retrospect was therapeutic for me, but as we were swallowed up into all the post death rituals, it became clear it was too personal to serve the purposes of a eulogy and it was way too personal for me to deliver effectively, standing in my childhood church before assembled family and friends.
So I rewrote substantial sections of it. I also saved the other draft and marked up the parts that were too much to deliver and later this winter, I’m going to write a Stony Creek Diary about eulogies, obituaries, and elegies and share the first draft, with commentary. There are also some insights into this experience I will likely want to share once I can get enough enough distance to sort out what is durable, and hopefully helpful, to share and what is a fleeting and perhaps insubstantial half-formed thought. I know for sure there were some very important things that happened for me as a person in this process.
I have come to fully appreciate the importance of death rituals. Raised Catholic, I have always been a fan of rituals in general to help us process human experience as a community - and boarding schools do them exceptionally well. I can still do without open caskets, but many years ago, my dad expressed a desire for a New Orleans style jazz funeral, and much to my astonishment, we were able to give it to him. I thought maybe we’d get some jazz music tacked on somewhere, but we got a whole parade behind the casket down School Street in Waltham, Massachusetts. (I tried to link a video clip but my limited tech skills have forced me into defeat.) My sister Marie engaged the band and collaborated with the band and funeral home to make it happen. The parish priest went along with it. (I think maybe that’s the best I can say? He was a good sport. He also did not attend the lunch following the service but then there was also a noon Mass.)
Members of the Bo Winiker Band outside the Chateau in Waltham, MA
And all I know is that I felt such a genuine, unexpected, overwhelming sense of catharsis when the casket was slid into the hearse as the band played “As the Saints Go Marching In.” Terrible and final and beautiful and fantastic. A pinpoint of light in the darkness.
Below is the eulogy I delivered at my father’s funeral on December 14, 2022 at St Mary’s Church in Waltham, Massachusetts.
Richard Joseph Faulstich
October 30, 1929 (Roxbury, MA) - December 4, 2022 (Southbury, CT)
I want to start with apologies to all the other great dads out there - and I see many out there in the church this morning. But I always thought Marie and I had the BEST dad. He just seemed more smart and more competent, with a better sense of humor than so many other dads. He drove cool cars. He listened to cool music. He refused to wear a leisure suit in the 1970s. He was eating sushi back in 1988. He loved Christmas and road trips and taking us to Dairy Joy on hot summer nights. He was the best dad.
He was born the day after the stock market crash of 1929 and his father had died from a burst appendix shortly after he was born. But his childhood, growing up in a former mansion turned multi family home on Fort Hill in Roxbury sounded like it was anything other than grim. When he told stories about it, it had the allure to me of the books about orphans I read as a kid - five siblings and an array of other relatives, his mom’s cooking and her warmth, the deli his mom’s family owned, hanging out with his brother Frank getting up to no good in the neighborhood, and attending a one room schoolhouse run by German nuns. He also liked to describe how at one point, they got rid of the furniture and installed a full sized pool table in the living room and you could always back up as far as you needed to take a shot.
He also lost his mom as a teenager but I think weathering the tragedies and moving on nurtured both a natural stoicism and a love for life. He was steady in a crisis and he had an unusual ability to completely accept the present moment, never harboring a scrap of cynicism or bitterness. He had what I sensed as a kid and then fully realized once I was older, an incredibly fine tuned sense of irony that fed his dry sense of humor and his wry insight into human nature.
He attended Boston College High School and finished in three years so he could fight in World War II but the war ended before he could do his part. His siblings pooled their funds so he could go to Boston College. Because of his college degree, when he was drafted during the Korean conflict, he was sent to do Army personnel screenings down in New Orleans. There was coffee with chicory and Jambalaya and lots of jazz although he never counted dancing as one of his talents. He was discharged from the Army on what would be my future birthday and his Army experience kicked off his career in human resources.
He came back to Boston a committed citizen of the world and shortly thereafter met my mother on a fix up by their mutual friend Piccolo, teaching CCD. They were soon inseparable; my dad said my mother won him over because she reminded him of Doris Day (check out one of her old movies - that is quite the compliment, and I think, accurate!) They had their 65th anniversary last April 27th. She was always the light of his days.
Many of you were guests at one of their merry parties in the beautiful home they created together on Wetherbee Road. Often people never made it out of the kitchen and my dad always made sure that there was plenty of the “good beer.” They always stayed up late the night of a party, doing the dishes together and talking and laughing while I eavesdropped from my bedroom.
He shared his passions with me and Marie, taking us to places every weekend, like the MFA, the Science Museum, annual Nutcracker performances, and concerts at symphony hall. He supported our passions - when I became fascinated with history during the bicentennial, he took me to every historical sight in greater Boston. He was a very good listener and he was curious about us as developing individuals.
He was an accomplished professional who was well liked everywhere he worked. He steadily climbed the ladder in human resources across a number of big New England defense contractors in an era where men generally stayed at one employer most of their careers. He traveled widely as part of his job and always remembered to bring back souvenirs for his family. The best ones were from Mexico.
Here are a collection of random facts about my dad, once again proving my best dad thesis:
He was the only person I know who truly loved a fruitcake.
He thought the wild card ruined baseball.
Visiting the battlefields of Normandy, he ignored the signs warning of unexploded munitions and walked happily along the bluffs.
He had a health scare in mid 30s and stopped smoking two packs a day, cold turkey.
He survived a major heart attack in his early 50s and completely cut fat out of his diet overnight and religiously walked two miles every morning until his 80s.
At some point, he got totally into the Tour de France.
His favorite musical was A Little Night Music.
One of his favorite places in the world was Provincetown, Massachusetts and he loved the sunset off Race Point.
He consistently voted Democrat and in 2016, he said he hoped he lived long enough to see a certain someone voted out of office.
When he retired, he attended Mass at 8AM every morning, for years.
He thought Jon Stewart and Bill Maher were hilarious and he watched every episode of The Sopranos and Mad Men.
As a long time owner of foreign cars, when someone said to him, “live in America, buy American” - he responded, “live in the world, buy the world.”
Even as his attention span waned over the past few years, the movie Vice, about Dick Cheney, held his attention from beginning to end.
He always said money ruins everything.
He had an absolute and unfailing sense of integrity, of what was right and what was wrong. It was not fraught. And in this I think of both my parents as a team. When they took on being guardians of my cousin Bill in the late 1980s, they committed to taking on parenting an intellectually disabled adult, to being deeply engaged in his group home life and supportive of his work life at a local supermarket and a closed workshop. It meant regularly giving up weekend days to take him out. And it meant never seeing it as a burden but as privilege, and it was something they enjoyed. And they were both sort of puzzled and amused when other people would comment on their sacrifice.
I have come to understand that having a well developed sense of irony and a deep sensitivity, as he did, are two sides of the same coin. He was quick to see the absurdity and contradictions of people and their behavior. One of his favorite observations from his days as a manager was “when someone doesn’t get the answer they want, they act as if they haven’t gotten an answer at all” which I have found only to be too true.
And he also felt, overall, the world was moving to be a better place, that despite the craziness that was part of being human in this world, things were improving. He was certain about it. And I think up until the end, it gave him an enviable peace.
We were lucky to have him for as long as we did and it is an honor to celebrate his life with you all today. Thank you.
Readers - this week, celebrate the slow and gradual return of light.
Julie
Stony Creek harbor, December 9, 2022 #nofilter
Talking Out of School will return on Friday, December 30 with a year-end wrap up and a preview of topics and features for 2023, including the official launch of Stony Creek Strategies consulting. Stony Creek Diaries are published without a schedule on Tuesdays.