Liz Bonner, Feb. 16, 1969 - Sept. 6, 2023

Eulogy for Liz. Sept. 9, 2023.

I’d like to first of all thank you for coming – by coming, you tell me that you cared about Liz, and I’d like to thank you for that, too.

I am speaking today on behalf of my mother, who is unfortunately not well enough to be here, and my sisters, Trish and Denise, and their families. I also speak, in a way, on behalf of my father who left us just shy of two years ago and who never lost hope for Liz.

We are heartbroken by this loss but soothed at least a bit knowing she is no longer suffering – after so many trying years.

I am the youngest in my family so growing up, Liz was very much my big sister. But at some point, any authority she lorded over me morphed into a friendship that was one of the deepest bonds I’ve had the privilege of knowing.

It was a bond marked by shared interests, including a love of books. Now we’re a family of big readers – beginning with my parents to my sister, Trish, and down to the rest of us, but I think she loved books the most. Good thing she was a librarian! A job she loved, and a job she excelled at. And even after she could no longer work at the library, she continued to practice library science with me and I suspect anyone she knew, recommending books and fiendishly listening to books on tape.

And I will also let you in on a secret I’ve been harboring. While she often said she found writing quite difficult and simply couldn’t do it, I think she would have been the better writer and it’s one of many facets of what could have been, had the hand dealt to Liz been a little different – or if the society she was born into had been a little different. One that wasn’t so punitive toward those with mental struggles.

As she put it to me one day, “I really wish I could write; then my eccentricities would be more acceptable.”

But about those books and other shared interests – like public radio and music and the New Yorker magazine – we corresponded about all of these things continuously for the past 25 years via emails, letters, phone calls and eventually text messages.

And after a while, I began squirreling away the best of these missives with a plan to write an essay about Liz. So on this day dedicated to her memory, I will draw on the correspondence to reflect a bit on Liz’s life and on her character, which was truly unparalleled, in all senses.

One of the most memorable of these communications – and perhaps my first inkling that the text message distilled her particular character to its essence – came on the morning of Nov. 9, 2016.

Do you remember that morning? I’ll give you a hint. It didn’t dawn sunny for Hillary Clinton.

Liz, who perhaps like many of us was still new to texting, sent me a two-word text in ALL CAPS:

“NOT GOOD”

Capital N, capital O, capital T, capital G, capital O, capital O, capital D

What more needed to be said?

My apologies if I am offending some in the room but anyone who knew her would know she didn’t support Trump.

It reminded me of some of the quirky things she did as a child. Like hiding her flute in the bushes because she didn’t want to practice it.

She often sent texts that I learned to recognize as quotes from the authors she loved.

Like the Somali poet Warsan Shire who wrote a poem excerpted in The New Yorker with a line Liz especially liked, and which she sent via text: “Daughter, be stronger than the loneliness this world is going to present to you.”

Through the writers and books she favored, one can trace the existential conflicts she’s always battled.

She loved the essays of David Sedaris, a humorist who nonetheless has often written about family tragedy including the suicide of his sister. Of an article about his father’s decline, Liz said:

“At first his honesty is jarring but on second thought brave and admirable in a way. It made me reflect on the darkness within my own soul. Maybe that is what good or honest writing can do: shine a light on the parts of ourselves that we keep hidden from the world and sometimes ourselves.”

She also loved music. Her bedroom in high school was plastered with posters of Prince and the Revolution. Her favorite Prince song was “Controversy,” which contains the line, “I wish there was no black and white, I wish there were no rules.” Not because Liz was rebellious – or not only -- but because the world often didn’t make ENOUGH space for someone like her.

One day a few years ago, she wrote in a text, “Just heard on the radio ‘Bring on the Night,’ so I think I have a reason to live.”

What else did Liz love?

*“The Brian Lehrer Show” on WNYC; it was often blaring in the background when I would call her. Terry Gross, too, because she unwittingly channeled Liz’s profound curiosity about other people through her questions.

*John Lennon – she always observed Dec. 8, the day he was gunned down in 1980, as if it were a national holiday….

*The British comedian Ricky Gervais, whose bold, unsentimental observations tickled her.

She also loved Steve Levinson, who was her boyfriend for many years before he succumbed to cancer.

And she was devoted to our mother, who is now in a nursing home in New Jersey. Whenever I visit her, I listen to her voicemails and there are invariably many, many voicemails from Liz, achingly intent on reaching my mother, on maintaining their connection.

She was devoted to Buddhism as well, which will be apparent today at this service honoring Liz.

I am of course mainly focusing on the positive even though I know very well her life was marked by so many negative moments, so many negative diagnoses, so many people who couldn’t help her adequately…

Which is of course tragic for many reasons but to offer one:

We in the family casually considered her the smartest of the four girls.

Unfortunately, the chemicals in her brain were forever unbalanced.

Liz spent a lot of her high school years in the hospital for treatment for anorexia nervosa and was forced to leave college to go to a psychiatric facility in New Jersey. They were unfortunately life-changing experiences that left an enduring mark.

As she wrote in an email, five years ago, “The food can only cover up a wound that refuses to heal.”

But food wasn’t her only medication – words were. And connections to people.

She never took words for granted. She wrote to me about a French novel she was reading in which, she wrote, “The narrator says that literature, of all the art forms, can most reveal a person's soul.” And she asked, “So is the writer bearing their soul because of some innate need to do it or are they operating on more altruistic motivation to touch another's soul and try to relieve their suffering through the power of connection?”

I probably don’t need to tell you that she herself was READING the work of writers in the hopes someone would touch her soul through words and relieve her suffering…

I’m not going to lie: there is no consolation in this death.

We sisters never lost currency with Liz, and she bombarded us with questions.

In addition, she was eternally interested in all of her nieces and nephews and always sought a closer bond with them. She was also curious to the point of noseyness arguably about her brothers-in-law, who, coming from other families with different traditions, struck her as particularly interesting and she longed to know them better.

The hole she leaves is immense. We worried about her health for 40 years but I, for one, did not actually prepare for this moment because it is truly unthinkable.

But I’d like to offer a palliative to our collective grief.

I have learned in recent years of a saying some people of the Jewish faith use when someone dies. It is an expression that almost magically converts grief into the pure joy of beloved memories:

“May her memory be a blessing.”

I will be leaning on this word-formed lifesaver in the days and weeks and months to come and I say to you:

May the memory of Liz be a blessing to all of you.

Remember her and be filled with the joy of having known her.

THANK YOU.

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