7/30/2017   Eric's Memorial Service  
Sarah and I testing setup for Eric's service
The memorial service, on a sunny Sunday afternoon, was in a big wedding tent at the Eagle. John arranged for an open bar starting half an hour before the service and for heavy hors d'oeuvres afterwards. We planned for about 150 people since we knew we had almost 50 family members present. Heather and Nick, Uncle Nathan's granddaughter and son, both came along with Nancy and all of the Banham cousins. Most of them I hadn't seen since Gram's service back in 2004. Our cousins on John's side, Rob with his wife BG and Randy with her daughter Paige and family, came from Florida and Maine respectively, and my cousin Sally came up from Marblehead. Jamie and Jennifer drove down from Newfoundland for the occasion while Maizie stayed home with the kids
Altogether about 300 people showed up, the biggest crowd the Eagle had seen all summer. From Marblehead Donna and Stacy drove up and stayed at the Eagle, and Diana's brother David whom I hadn't seen for decades drove up from central New Hampshire. John and Carol came by on Saturday afternoon but couldn't stay for the service. It was good to see them and to hang out with Donna and Stacy, though I was too busy at the time to recognize the comfort these long-time friends brought with them.
Sarah opened the service, then Bridget read a modified version of a poem Gram wrote and which we had read at her Memorial service.
OLD AGE
Mountain summits lure me
To trails my feet once knew
But, far below, 5 miles a day
Is all that I can do.
Ski slopes seem to beckon,
What fun they used to be!
But aging hips are brittle,
Tucks is not for me.
I wonder, what is heaven?
Not harps to play nor streets of gold
But mountains to climb and slopes to ski
And never growing old.
Sarah then played a fiddle piece accompanied by Whit on the guitar.
I gave my remarks next and have written here what I for the most part intended to say:
Eric was probably in second grade when he came home from school one day. Apparently he was acting up because Mom asked him why he was misbehaving. "I used up all my good in school, Mommy," Eric replied. Now I can picture Eric at the pearly gates where Saint Peter asks him, "So Eric, what are you doing here?". I can picture Eric replying, "Well, all that good you gave me, I used it all up down there. I lived my life to the fullest and did the best I could." And I hope and expect Saint Peter to respond "Well done, Eric! Come on in and have a beer! It's on the house."
We in Eric's family had a particular picture of Eric and it was a pretty narrow picture. We saw him couple times a week, when he came to dinner or when he came down to mow the lawn; we saw him pretty regularly for the last couple of decades but we only saw one side of him. He could be kind of cranky at times, like at Christmas when we'd try to take a picture of him. At best he would make a face; at worst he might threaten to grab the camera and throw it out the window. Amazingly enough, we did get a few pictures of him.
He was just kind of a crotchety younger brother. We knew there were other sides to Eric, but we didn't see them as well as some of you did. So there's a time on the program called open mic, and we really hope that you will feel free to come up and share your stories and your memories of Eric with us. You know, I didn't mean the story about Saint Peter and the pearly gates literally. I used to think I knew what happened after death, but I don't anymore. What I do know is that we have him alive in our memories.
When Sarah and Roger and I were walking over here to check out the tent and plan the service, we were talking about who would do what and I was about to say to Sarah, "We have a part for different family members to play, but we left out Eric. What is he going to do?", then I realized he does have a part to play. He's the star of the show. So we really want to make Eric the star today.
(long pause)
Well I think at this point I'll turn it back over to Sarah to invite people to share their stories, while I try to remember my own stories to share.
I don't remember if Sarah spoke at this point or later on, so I will include her remarks here:
Thank-you all for coming. This has been a tough 2 weeks. We've been lifted up by all your kind words, cards and Facebook comments, sharing memories of Eric in the past week and a half.
If Eric were here, he'd be in the back with a beer in his hand, maybe having found another solitary guest to connect with, making them feel more comfortable, not wanting to be in the limelight, but adding his sense of humor and perceptiveness to the occasion.
I grew up in the middle of the family, sandwiched between two brothers, one older and wiser, and one younger and rebellious. And by early adulthood I had figured out that I had to advise my younger brother on how to live his life. It didn't go very well and I wisely gave up. Now, 40 years later, I've realized that he had a lot to teach me. I will probably spend the rest of my life trying to learn from him.
So here we are together, in shock, sad, missing him, and trying to understand...remembering so many times when he touched our lives. Let's take this time to share our stories, to celebrate the wonderful person Eric was and the place he filled in our lives. We all have a steep hill to climb here, whereby Eric would have said, "little do we realize that it seems that we're going uphill." But we can do it. Hopefully he is even listening, enjoying a chuckle as his own stories are retold, and understanding at last how much he meant to all of us. When we're done with the formal program, we can have some food and drink and continue to talk about Eric, and start to heal the hole in our hearts.
Jennifer, accompanied by Jamie, came up to the microphone next and shared her experience as an only child living in Newfoundland far from her half-brothers and half-sister, and how she got to know Eric only as an adult, when she was delighted to discover that her brother liked her. He had a goofy sense of humor, a common interest in philosophical things, and connected quite well with her young children. Not until this visit, after he died, did she learn of his interest in Tibetan Buddhism and realized that they were reading the same books at the same time. (The rest of his family likewise learned of that interest only after Eric died.)
The grandchildren came up next, Eric's nieces and nephews.
Kirsten spoke first, and after observing that Eric was part of the fabric of their lives, went on to say:
"I spent a lot of my life experiencing sadness and guilt that, for example, I didn't come by more and that I didn't keep in touch with him during my long stays away from the Valley. Now I'm aware of how Eric was a constant and loving witness to our lives.
The other day at his house my mother found a trove of postcards that Eric had written as journals on our family vacations. One recounts our trip to Idaho to watch Silas at the Junior Olympics. There were about five postcards, gushing about the great powder skiing we did, Silas's results, the food, the awards ceremonies, the Nordic skiing we did - so much joy in everything, in all of us and what we were doing. One of them ends with a sentence that resonates with this quiet joy in our presence. He writes "It's the end of a long day. I'm alone with the three girls. They're reading quietly." We were the three girls, quiet readers oblivious to the very ordinary significance of that moment, and many others.
I was intrigued that Kirsten shared some of that sense of debt to Eric that we all felt, that each of us neglected him or failed him in some way, and that had we done more for him at one point or another during his life, he would have been happier or more successful. The implication of our shared assumption is that Eric's life was not as happy or as successful as we expected of him. Who can say how that expectation affected our respective relationships with him? At any rate, I think that through his memorial service we all came to understand a little more the richness of the life Eric built for himself in the Valley and perhaps we can therefore forgive ourselves that debt. By one metric at least, the number of people attending his memorial service, Eric will undoubtedly exceed us all.
David came up next and introduced himself, "Hi I'm David. Uncle Eric was my uncle." People laughed. David explained that a condition called Dupuytren's Contracture runs in the family and that it caused Eric's fingers to curl into his palm. He remembered Eric telling him how at the annual ski club end of season graduation he couldn't really clap for the kids. His kids would ask him about it and he would explained that he had this condition but that he would appreciate it if they would straighten out his fingers for him. The kids would grab his fingers and pull and pull but of course the fingers remained curled. For David it indicated how Eric must've been with him and his cousins when they were young, that he could even use his disability as a way of engaging with the kids he coached for the ski club.
Daniel told a story about a saying the family has long attributed to Eric, "Little do we realize that it seems that we are going uphill." As I recall, we were somewhere in the middle of the long gradual climb on the trail up to Mount Carrigan when Eric made that announcement. He was probably six at the time. Anyhow, Daniel dusts it off and reuses it from time to time during the rush at the restaurant where he works. He will announce "Little do we realize that it seems that things are quite busy at the moment", and enjoy watching someone take him seriously and try to reason it out, "Yeah. No. Wait, I do realize we are busy. Wait, what you mean?" and Daniel will explain, "It's just something my uncle used to say."
Silas recalled:
"For a number of years the only time most of us saw Eric was at Christmas. We didn't see as much of him as other times as we probably should have but we saw him at Christmas. We all had a lot of people to buy presents for so we had this somewhat informal agreement with Eric where we would shake hands and agree "All right, I won't get you a present if you don't get me a present." Some years that worked and some years it didn't. I remember that one of the years the deal fell apart, Eric bought me a bicycle repair stand and he said "You better use that." The next year he got me a tow rope for my truck and he said "You better not use that."
I think we all have these snapshots of Uncle Eric, because we didn't get to see him as much as we would've wanted to.
Bridget reminisced about the trivia games that grandpa would play with them over dinner and how Eric would usually win the prize of the fur-lined bathtub, a virtual award that sounded to her as though it might actually be rather nice. She appreciated how Eric would engage with her in conversation about almost any topic. In closing, she read another postcard journal Eric had written, this one at the close of a family vacation in Florida. "Oh well... Kroger and Doucette kids got all their classmates gifts from their vacations. Sarah got NOTHING for Bridget and Rowan to give. We are going to look for something in Philly International Airport."
Rowan recalled Eric as a consistent and constant presence in their life, someone who although often like them, quiet and perhaps a little shy, would make an effort to connect by engaging them in conversation.
At this point Sarah stood up and pointed out that Eric, after college, returned to the Mount Washington Valley and took a job in the kitchen here at the Eagle Mount House. As an aside here, Eric would later regard that decision as a turning point in his life. He had graduated with a Bachelors degree in Geography and one of his professors had offered him a position working in that field. Eric declined the offer. I don't remember if he ever told me why, but he did speculate that had he taken that position, his life might have turned out very differently. I think maybe he regretted not being more adventurous but in any case with that decision, the Valley gained a character, as many of the following stories will demonstrate.
Whit Symmes spoke first.
(At the Eagle) Eric got promoted to breakfast chef and was apprenticed to the great Clark Perry. who is not just the breakfast chef; he was the breakfast show! So at some point Clark passed the baton to Eric, and Eric took a look at this elaborate system Clark had set up with all these different ways of preparing eggs - over easy, over hard, over this, over that - and concluded 'This is nonsense. Who needs to waste life-energy on all these different ways of doing eggs?' Eric reduced it to just three choices. There was omelettes, there was scrambled and there was not scrambled! The servers would submit their tickets and Eric would send out the eggs and the servers would ask, 'Are these over...? and Eric would reply, 'Yeah they're over...' and that was that.
Fred Symmes shared another story of Eric at the Eagle.
Eric didn't just work breakfasts. I remember one time at some fancy occasion, some big event at the Eagle, Eric was out there carving a big steamship round of beef. He was all dressed for the part with his white chef's coat all buttoned up and his red scarf, but on his head he had not one chef's hat, but six of them stacked up on top of his head. People are going through the line, getting their roast beef and looking at Eric kind of funny, and there's Eric, carving the roast beef and dishing out all with a perfectly straight face.
Fred remembered how smart Eric was, recalling a telemark race at Wildcat where he was involved with the timing. Each skier did two runs and received a separate time for each run but the score was based on the total time for both runs combined. The individual times were all posted in two columns on a big whiteboard in the base lodge and while Fred watched, Eric just went down the list and wrote in the combined time for each runner in a third column, adding the two times together in his head as fast as he could write them down.
Eric was known in the Valley for his skiing. Fred was watching in Tuckerman's on the day of the Tuckerman Ravine Classic GS in 1984 as the racers emerged one by one out of the cloud ceiling at the rim of the headwall and as one by one, each racer did a quick turn to check his speed before dropping over the lip. Except Eric. Without hesitation Eric swept over the lip and smoothly carved two or three turns down the face of the headwall, a perfect run. He won the race that year, then once the award ceremony was done, hiked back up to the top of the ravine to ski it again.
Fred had one more skiing story about Eric, this one just last winter. Fred was out cross-country skiing on the ski touring foundation trails in Jackson and had stopped at a road crossing, the way everyone does, to take off his skis and carry them across the road, when Eric skied up behind him. But Eric didn't stop. He just clattered on across the road on his skis without even breaking his stride. When Fred called after him, Eric explained, "I really like these boots and I don't want to scratch them up on the pavement."