Gail Drohan Funeral Sermon

The story of Zacchaeus climbing the sycamore tree to get a better view of Jesus isn’t a standard reading at a funeral. And, much as you may think otherwise, I didn’t suggest this reading for Gail’s funeral on account of Zacchaeus and Gail sharing a comment lament of being rather short in stature.

No. What made this particular gospel story so fitting a story for today, was the description of how Jesus and Zacchaeus responded, one to the other. Zacchaeus had climbed a sycamore tree to get a better view of this celebrity walking by. And Jesus sees Zacchaeus up there in the tree and says, “Hey there! C’mon down. I want to stay at your house tonight.” And then the story says, “So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him.”

I never heard from Gail that she was in the market for a personal saint to call her own. But if she had been, then surely St. Zacchaeus would be Gail’s patron saint – the one who understood her, the one whom she resembled. “So he hurried down and was happy to welcome him.”

That, in a phrase, is our Gail – happy to welcome whomever passed her way.

Her friend Jean Peterson was visiting Gail during one of her stints in Cottesmore, a rehab facility here in Gig Harbor. For most folks, rehab is not a happy time: Your body hurts; you’re afraid the healing won’t come or that you won’t have the stamina or will power to do the therapy you’re supposed to do; you’re frustrated by the systems that don’t seem to be working; you’re a little depressed. But that’s not what Jean observed in Gail. “I noticed that she left her door opened,” she writes, “and greeted everyone who walked by. I wondered if some of the residents repeatedly went by her door just to get a cheerful word and a smile. Her laugh was priceless.”

I suspect Jean was right – that Gail was intentional in leaving her door open, and that residents did keep walking by, craving the jubilant kindness that poured so naturally out of Gail. Right to the end.

When Gail moved to Harbor Place six years ago, I knew she’d thrive there. For many, a move to a place like that begins a season of shutting down. For Gail, it would be like moving into a sorority house: Look at all the new friends! She didn’t know it, but as soon as she arrived there, I made her a de facto member of St. John’s Pastoral Care Team. Whenever someone moved into Harbor Place, or whenever someone began a stint at Cottesmore, I’d sick Gail on them. Her kindness and her enthusiasm were never contrived things. They were genuine, through and through. They were life – both for herself and for the one she was loving. Gail was life.

Even during the COVID lockdown, even when forgetfulness was becoming a way of life, it never stopped Gail from knowing the fulness of life to be found in friendship. Elaine Clark remembers visiting Gail during the pandemic, out on the back patio. Gail had prepared a cheese tray and a bottle of red wine. And “oh, my gosh!” she writes, “she spilled the wine and dropped the grapes…and we giggled like crazy! I loved Gail and all her happiness.”

Gail was a lifelong Episcopalian and a faithful Christian. And yet, she didn’t regard herself as a particularly “good” Christian – not that she was some wretched sinner – it wasn’t that. But she wasn’t sure she knew how “to do faith” like others seem to do. She wasn’t confident she knew how to pray, like she thought she was supposed to. But what Gail knew how to do, was to love. She was like we heard read earlier from the apostle Peter,

Above all, maintain constant love for one another, for love covers a multitude of sins. Be hospitable to one another without complaining. Like good stewards of the manifold grace of God, serve one another with whatever gift each of you has received (1 Peter 4:8-9).

Oh, Gail, I wish you’d known what an extraordinary Christian you were. Yours was never a faith to get lost in the eddies of theology and piety. Yours was an embodied faith, for you were like Jesus among us – at church, at Harbor Place, at the Harbor Inn, at whatever marina or RV park you spent the night, at every gathering of friends and family, with whatever person you met – you were Christ with us. In you, “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14), for you saw us and loved what you saw. And we knew your love was real – which made it a true sacrament of God’s love for us. You were the tangible sign of God’s intangible grace. And, by you, we were forever changed.

Gail began life in Philadelphia, in 1938, where her father worked as a journalist with United Press International. His career made him witness to some of the great journalistic moments of his age: the Hindenburg Airship disaster, the Lindberg baby kidnapping trial. And when the war came, he became a war correspondent. But before leaving for Europe, in December 1943, he moved his family back across the country to southern California, where they could be near family. Gail was five at the time. And the memory of that winter drive with him was one of the sacred memories she had of her father – a memory she held right to the end. That January he returned to New York, took a transport freighter to London and, throughout the next year, reported on the war. During the Battle of the Bulge, they removed themselves to the supposed safety of the Palace Hotel in Belgium. But that hotel was bombed and he was killed.

The family got the news on Christmas Day. It was just as devastating as you’d expect it to be, and became quite debilitating for Gail’s mother. So it was then that six-year-old Gail stepped in to become the care giver for her brother, Brian. He was just 17 months old at the time. “I will forever be grateful for her,” he writes. “We [were] extremely bonded, close friends throughout our entire childhood. [And] throughout our lives together, Gail has always been my very best friend…. I will always be grateful that God chose me to be her little brother.” And I know, from countless stories, how grateful Gail was, too. She spoke of Brian all the time – always with love, always with pride. “I will miss her greatly,” he wrote. “There is something missing in my heart now that she is gone.”

Brian is not alone, of course, in his grief. For one who has loved much, leaves many hearts bereft.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that someone with Gail’s personality would have the unusual ability to maintain friendships that spanned a lifetime – like her friendship with Ann McCrary. When Gail arrived in kindergarten mid-year, Ann was the one designated to show her around, and they became life-long friends, each the maid of honor in the other’s wedding. Their husbands became with friends with each other. They sailed together and travelled together.

Gail and Ann were just two of the fourteen friends from Chaffey High School in Ontario, California, who – since 1989 – gathered annually in La Jolla (the weekend after Mother’s Day) to keep their friendship alive. They were the “Tiger Lilies:” Ann Peralta, Marilyn Rollins, Midge Coburn, Marjorie Coburn, and many others. Marjorie describes their weekends together: “We slept, ate and talked and mostly laughed together for 3 days. The conversations were open and helpful and funny and sad.” Gail’s particular role – apart from simply being Gail – was as chief cook. She’d do the menu planning, the shopping (which she couldn’t trust others to do right!), and – with humor and love – she could order everyone else around the kitchen. During COVID, the Tiger Lilies met weekly via Zoom.

In Gig Harbor, for 32 years, Gail and her husband, Bob, were known mainly through their restaurant, the Harbor Inn. Located, literally, at the heart of Gig Harbor, Gail was the heart of the Inn. She was, as Jean notes, “a big part of [its] success.” How could she not be? Not only was she the gracious hostess for any patron who walked through the door, she was also the boss. And there’s an extraordinary dignity in being a good boss. You are the one to provide the living that allows the employees to live. And, over the years, hundreds (if not thousands) of employees passed through her care.

And, what was true of her love for employees and friends, was a thousand times more true for her children and grandchildren: for Gray and his children; for Tom and Mary and their children. As her priest, I never made a visit when she wasn’t telling me about them – and not just the things they were up to – but her pride of them, her love of them. And, as her health declined and her needs increased – her gratitude for them. She was never alone. And she knew it.

Her body was wearing out; her health diagnoses were stacking up. But these realities – these threats – were really quite insubstantial to her. I’m sure it was partly due to her peculiar form of dementia (or whatever it was properly labeled). But it was more than that. It was her love embedded deep within her character, her delight in others, that remained the thing that mattered – the only thing worth paying attention to.

I got the call late this summer that her condition was now terminal. I remember going to visit her, prepared as a priest to start having these “ultimate conversations.” But she wasn’t having any it. All that mattered was the pleasure that I was there with her, before her, in her room. And, to be clear, there’s nothing particularly special about me. That aliveness of relationship was just as fresh and important for whomever was before her.

I remember my last visit. Her forgetfulness did not prevent her from remembering details about me and the current events of my life. She sat up in bed, and grasped my hands; she looked straight into my eyes and addressed the things happening with me… and she blessed me.

It was supposed to be the other way around. I was the priest with the holy oil, there to pray for her, to anoint her, to bless her. And I did. But she was just as much a priest to me, conveying to me her blessing, and God’s. And I will not forget it.

Not many days later, I was out of town, hiking in the countryside. It was late in the day. The light was golden, highlighting a large, old, stately home on a hillside. The phone in my pocket rang. It was our deacon, Kae, telling me that Gail had just died. And as I stood there, with tears, watching that house in the evening light, it became for me that home of which Jesus spoke:

“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places…And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also” (John 14:1-2a; 3).

Gail is now in that house with its many rooms. She is one with God and God with her… and one with all those with whom God is one – a vastness of belonging beyond all conception. But this in no new reality for Gail – just the transition into a larger reality that was already distinctly hers. She knew love. She knew the substance of love and the priority of love; she knew the delight of love and the unifying power of love. For her, this was no ethic or duty. It was simply life.

And this life she revealed to us is now being revealed to her as something quite familiar and something gloriously fresh, something for which she had been long preparing – and is now hers, complete. Amen.