I didn't think it would take a week or more to blog about last weekend. Time flies when one is absorbed in a thousand things with the goal of making the world a little better.
Jack's funeral was an incredible experience, as I'm sure is already clear to all. I arrived just in time to join in the procession from city hall as it neared Roy Thomson Hall. Police cars everywhere blocking off streets, but this time in complete peace. And quiet, too, now that I think about it. Bicycles, strollers, kids on shoulders, splashes of orange everywhere.
The highlights for me remain the words: words being used to console, to inspire, to describe and analyse, to build up. There were no put downs, no sly digs, no rage, just eloquent insistence that the goodness so clear and obvious in the life of one man, Jack Layton, is actually present and available in all of us.
Rev. Brent Hawkes' sermon, Stephen Lewis' eulogy, the family's tributes, the songs--the words were carefully chosen, the stories powerful, the mood created was one of grief mixed with high hopes for a better Canada, a better world. I wept during some of the music, when children spoke of their father, when the camera picked out a widow now very much alone without her soul mate as the honour guard slow-marched out of the hall.
None of imagined losing Jack in the middle of things like this. But it is impossible to imagine a more fitting service of mourning and celebration than the one we saw and heard. Across the country and across the political and cultural spectrum Canadians paused to ponder their best selves as embodied by one determined, spirited and optimistic person.
He lived his principles day by day. We can, too.
We should not have lost him so young, but how lucky we were to have had his vision and leadership all these years.
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