Eulogy for My Uncle: Gardiner Dutton

When my father, who was Gardiner’s older brother, died, I wrote a song for him. At my mother’s urging, (it’s always the mothers who make us do these things, isn’t it?) I pulled out my guitar and sang a rendition for Cam and Gardiner. They were sitting in what had newly become just my mother’s dining room, and Gardiner was touched. When I was done he asked, “Will you write one for us too when we go?” “Sure,” I said, touched myself by the childlike way in which the question was asked. It was an easy promise to make because of the gratitude I had toward a couple who had done so much for me.

It was a lot harder to deliver on that promise than to make it though. I find that the quality which most stands out for me when I think of Gardiner is a kind of inner restlessness that he seemed to have. He was a generous and sensitive man, encouraging of others, principled, intelligent and successful, yet he always seemed to me to be searching for something more. He was not a man to rest on his laurels or to look for quiet times and spaces in which to unwind. He was very unassuming for such an accomplished man, and he always seemed to have an eye on the horizon, scanning for something I’m not sure even he could have articulated. To write a song or poem about that, though, would be to move beyond the life of the uncle I came to honor today, and instead to explore the restless search for meaning that is common to the inner life of each of us. So today I will speak to honor the Uncle I knew as a child, and then the Uncle I knew as an adult.

I characterized Gardiner’s reactions a minute ago as childlike. This is what I honor most of all about him. He was childlike in the most positive sense - first and foremost in the sense that he always seemed to have an easy rapport with children. He managed to give them the feeling that he understood them and he had a knack for making them feel comfortable. For me as a child, his house was always the one that was so much fun to go to. There were swimming pools in which he and my father tossed me back and forth like a sack of potatoes, never letting me sense any tedium in the repetition. Gardiner especially would throw me each time with as much enthusiasm as the first time. There were barns at his house with haylofts and acreage to explore. There were horses to ride, over trails and jumps and through farm fields. Sarah and Jenny were there to play with, and their ages matched Anne’s and mine closely. There were what seemed to me to be extravagant presents that would arrive for Christmas, ones I could never imagine buying myself, but which I was sure represented a more exotic and interesting life. There was the first show I ever saw on Broadway. He took Jenny and me to see Godspell when we were still in elementary school. I went dreading the experience of having to sit still and behave for so many hours, and left with surprised gratitude for the gift of the experience.

Gardiner’s knack for making children feel comfortable extended to my own sons, Colin and Jesse. In 1987 I was 23 and my life was at a low point. I was in what is euphemistically called an "unfortunate" marriage: a gross understatement. My boys were three years old and nine months old, and I had made up my mind to leave the situation and make a new life for the three of us. Cam wrote me a letter after she had heard of my predicament and asked me to call her. She was my advocate and urged me to come out to Phoenix where she and Gardiner were living at the time. She was very persuasive and assured me that Gardiner could help me get a job. So I took the leap. I’ll never forget sitting on the airplane with those two small boys, one suitcase, two car seats, and exactly $30 to my name. At the time it felt like madness, but I didn’t know what a broad safety net was waiting to catch me.

It’s really impossible to speak of all the support I received from Gardiner without including Cam in equal or greater measure. Although she came into my uncle’s life when I was already in my mid-teens, she and Gardiner both supported me way above and beyond what would be reasonable for an aunt and uncle, beyond what many parents might be willing to do. They took us in, opened their home to us, set us on our feet financially, got me a job and a place to live, helped me buy a car, acted as grandparents to my boys, put up with my youthful tactlessness, and so much more. I can never repay the debt of kindness I owe both of them.

So this remembrance is really a chance to give a double thanksgiving, to Cam who is still here with us, and to Gardiner who has already passed on into the Great Mystery. I will pass that way one day myself. When I do, I fully expect to be met there by a young man with an impish grin, who’ll say, as he so often did when speaking to me on the phone, “Susannah! How are you, kid?”