Beloved of God - Michael Dana Prewitt
eulogy by Catherine (Prewitt) Ricketts, daughter
When I was born, my father bowed his ruddy, happy face over my tiny body and prayed two things:
That his daughter would be at home in the world, and
that she would have freedom to feel things deeply.
My father has given me many things: my blue eyes, my love of language and good design, my love of people, lots and lots and lots of books. But I am most grateful for these two inheritances, prayed into me from the beginning.
My dad was at home in the world. Picture Michael, windows down in the Volvo wagon, winding over Carter Road, drumming the steering wheel to Paul Simon’s Graceland and chirping bird-like with the voices of Ladysmith Black Mambazo. He was at ease wherever he went, totally un-self conscious.
He loved the world-- loved being human. More than anyone I know, my father lived in his body. He routinely ran and cycled. He laughed and sang with his whole belly. He spent most of his first years of fatherhood on his hands and knees, grass-stained and rug-burned, playing. He practiced his golf swing in the living room. Two summers ago, he danced with a New Orleans Jazz troupe in a street parade. His cheeks were always rosy, his eyes as blue as flame. He was a sensate who celebrated everything: sticky buns from the Village Market, the paintings of Caravaggio, the nuances of serifs and sans-serifs, the cool water of Lake George at dawn, and the yellow wildflowers from the Watershed, which he gave my mom for every birthday and anniversary. His mind was as engaged with the world as his body. He had four books going at every moment, from Hemingway’s fiction to Barth’s theology to Malcolm Gladwell or Seth Goden’s latest take on marketing, to a robust study of Scripture through which he made sense of it all. In his last days, my dad kept sipping in those little breaths as long as he did because he simply loves living.
Dad’s favorite play is Thornton Wilder’s, Our Town. He loved it for Emily Webb’s final monologue. After this young New England woman has died in childbirth, she returns to her small town of Grover’s Corners to relive one day: her twelfth birthday. She says this:
“Oh, Mama, look at me one minute as though you really saw me...Let's really look at one another!...I can't. I can't go on. It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back -- up the hill -- to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look. Good-bye. Good-bye world. Good-bye, Grover's Corners....Mama and Papa. Good-bye to clocks ticking....and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths....and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you.”
Then she turns to the Stage Manager and asks, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every, every minute?”
“No,” the Stage Manager replies. “The saints and poets, maybe they do some.”
My father was one of these few.
His middle name was Dana. Dana is a family name going back many generations. He gave this name to his company and to his children: Joseph Dana Prewitt, Catherine Dana Prewitt, Christopher Michael Dana Prewitt. In Hebrew, the name Dana, like Daniel, means God Is My Judge. Dad lived in freedom, fearing no one’s judgment but God’s, and he knew that God’s judgment over him was a loud and loving, “Well done, good and faithful servant!” We have listed many of my dad’s accomplishments today, and they are impressive. But as active and entrepreneurial as he was, as accomplished as he was, the most important mark of my dad’s character had nothing to do with activity. It is, rather, a passive attribute: Michael Dana Prewitt is beloved of God. As such, he was at home in the world.
***
His second prayer for me was that I would have freedom to feel things deeply. My father felt deeply. He was not afraid to empty himself into each moment, into each person. He did not count the cost. When we were together, he was entirely present to me. With his look, my dad tugged me into the water of his eyes with the force of an ocean wave in August, and yet I felt entirely safe, buoyed by his delight in me, and his hope for me. I think of Nathan Coulter, a character from dad’s favorite novel, Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter. This is the fictional memoir of a woman at the end of her life, looking back on her marriage, family, work and rest--on a life woven into the Kentucky farm that she and Nathan kept together. My mom and dad and I spent the past six months reading this aloud. Hannah says this of her late husband: “[Nathan] looked at you with a look that was entirely direct, entirely clear. His look said, ‘Here I am, as I am, like it or not.’ There was no apology in his look and no plea, but there was purpose. When he looked at me with purpose, I felt myself beginning to change.” (Hannah Coulter, p. 65). This was my father’s look. Maybe you, too, have been its object. I can tell you, he looked at me that way every day of my life, and it never got old.
Likewise and more so, he was entirely present to my mom. Their love for each other was the room we lived in, the air we breathed. It was what Wendell Berry calls, “the room of love.” Berry writes,
The room of love is another world. You go there wearing no watch, watching no clock. It is the world without end, so small that two people can hold it in their arms, and yet it is bigger than worlds on worlds, for it contains the longing of all things to be together, and to be at rest together. You come together to the day’s end, weary and sore, troubled and afraid. You take it all into your arms, it goes away, and there you are where giving and taking are the same, and you live a little while entirely in a gift. The words have all been said, all permissions given, and you are free in the place that is the two of you together. What could be more heavenly than to have desire and satisfaction in the same room?
If you want to know why even in telling of trouble and sorrow I am giving thanks, this is why. (Hannah Coulter, p. 111)
My parents’ marriage, our home, is a picture of what happens when God has his way with two people, when God kneads the yeast of His love into their love, their home, their children, their work, to raise them beyond what is possible on human love alone. My parents’ marriage is a preview of shalom - a Hebrew word for the cosmic re-webbing, re-weaving of all things torn, of nothing missing and nothing broken. Their marriage helps me to know the Love of God and to imagine heaven.
Every day of my dad’s illness, from September, 2012 onward, he talked about being “held.” He told how he was resting in the loving hands of God, like this [cup hands]. If you visited my dad over the past 22 months, he likely shared this with you. This was his story. This is his story. Last Saturday morning, in those loving hands, God gently ushered my dad into the fullness of His presence. There, what my dad loved of this world is fuller, richer, more real. It is not so much that my dad has said “Goodbye” to the life that he loved so boldly, but that he has gone, as CS Lewis puts it, “further up and further in” to life. In the fullness of God’s presence, my dad is fully himself: running, biking, laughing with his whole belly, reading and writing and speaking and loving.
I will close with the last passage of the last book of CS Lewis’s Narnia series: The Last Battle. It is not so much an ending as it is a beginning. Lewis writes:
Aslan turned to them and said, ‘You do not yet look so happy as I mean you to be.’
Lucy said, ‘We’re so afraid of being sent away, Aslan. And you have sent us back into our own world so often.’
‘No fear of that,’ said Aslan. ‘Have you not guessed?’
Their hearts leapt and a wild hope rose within them.
‘There was a real railway accident,’ said Aslan softly. ‘Your father and mother and all of you are--as you used to call it in the Shadow-Lands--dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.’
And as he spoke he no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us, this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page; now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one one earth has read; which goes on forever; in which every chapter is better than the one before.