Khephra's Service Report - Democratic Underground

Plaid Adder

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Sun Jan-16-05 01:16 PM
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Khephra's Service Report

Edited on Sun Jan-16-05 01:18 PM by Plaid Adder

Howdy everyone,

I saw hippiechick's brief report on the service but couldn't find any others, so I thought some of you might like to have a more detailed account. I'm in a better position to do it because for me the loss is not as personal and intense. So, here's as comprehensive an account as I can give:

I was coming from up north, so it took me a few hours to get down to Indy, but once I got there MapQuest turned out to be trustworthy, for once. bloom had arranged for us all to meet ahead of time at a Panera Bread in the Merchants' Square Mall in Carmel, which thanks to her very concrete directions I was able to find, if only after half an hour of driving around cursing whatever suburban developer invented the concept of the strip mall.

As I said, I had never met a DUer in person before (to my knowledge, anyway) so I wasn't sure exactly how this was going to work. But as it turns out that at a Panera Bread in Carmel on a Saturday afternoon, it is pretty easy to spot the group that is headed out to a funeral. It's even easier to spot when they are sitting around a couple tables topped with folded stand-up signs bearing eye of Horus. I went over and said, "This must be the Khephra table." We all introduced ourselves, which was kind of a weird experience--everyone had to use their real name and their screen name, and none of us are used to using both in the same situation--and then I got lunch and came back. In attendance were: hippiechick, Voltaire, Raindog, bloom, WakeMeUp, and Speedwaydemocrat and her husband Jokerman. (Please tell me I'm not leaving anybody out. If I am, I promise it is only out of early senility and not because you didn't make an impression.) A good half of us had never been to a DU meetup, and we observed that this was another example of Khephra bringing everyone together. I think it was Raindog who wondered, for the first of many times that evening, if Khephra really knew how many people he had touched and how much he had mattered.

We had a good time finding out more about each other's real lives and ranting at length not just about Bush but about Indiana's own personal incubus, Mitch Daniels. We agreed that Mitch's de-election campaign must begin instantly, though nobody seemed to know who to run against him. WakeMeUp's husband, incidentally, is shipping out to Iraq next week, so please keep them in your thoughts. Bloom passed out little stickers printed with the eye of Horus for us all to wear on our lapels.

At around 1:00 we all got into our cars and headed toward the funeral home, or toward what we thought was a funeral home. Hippiechick had told us to follow her, but somehow I was not able to find her car after I got back to mine. However, I had directions from MapQuest for the route from the mall to the funeral home--which was good, because even though I swear it couldn't have been more than a hundred yards I managed to get woefully lost and lead poor WakeMeUp a merry chase, since she was following me under the mistaken apprehension that I knew what I was doing or was following someone who did.

However, eventually we all arrived at the funeral home and went in. I had somehow not realized it was going to be open casket; I think I had the idea he would have already been cremated. Anyway, Khephra's mom was up at the front, and the family was sitting together on the right-hand side. bloom and Raindog went up and introduced themselves and she took them over to the casket and talked to them about Khephra for a long time. While the rest of us were waiting and looking at the flowers (the DU flowers were very nice, kind of a big wreath with a lot of different blooms and colors, and there was an arrangement sent by someone called "Lurking Dem" who I figured must be one of us, as well as a few other different arrangements sent by individuals) I noticed a tall, narrow, glasses-wearing, young guy come in and head over to the left-hand side and I thought, that's gotta be Skinner. So we all went over and I said, "Are you Skinner?" and he gave me that look that I'm sure all of us were giving everyone, which means, "Yes, I am, but I feel kind of stupid admitting to it in a face to face situation." So I told him who I was, and then everyone else introduced themselves, and Skinner showed us the memorial book that Rick_Myers put together. It is a great book--very beautifully done with great production values and layout and so forth and I'm sure his family will be very glad to have it.

Eventually the rest of us went up and gave our condolences to Scott's mom. She told us all that seeing everybody there from DU gave her peace because it made her feel like Scott had found his purpose in life and achieved it. Scott's mother, of whom more later, seems like a really wonderful person--very warm and very kind to all of us strangers even at a time when her heart was breaking.

It was sad seeing Scott in the casket. Back during the primaries, I had been posting on one of Scott's thread's about something and he had said, "Well, so you're in Indiana too, maybe I'll see you around at a Dean meetup," and I had explained that I am paranoid about keeping my internet life separate from my real life so he might well see me but he wouldn't know it was me, as it were. Well, I never did go to a Dean meetup, and I never did get the chance to meet Khephra while he was alive, so here I was meeting him for the first time after he had died.

We were joined by other DUers as the visiting period went on--Ignatius, prolesunited, Vinnie from Indy, IndianaGreen and...dammit, now I'm not remembering her screen name, but there was another DUer there who had gone to IUPUI and I hope someone will fill that in for me. Scott's uncle came over to talk to us and tell us stories about Scott. Scott's uncle is also a really nice guy who obviously really cared about Scott and was in some ways a kindred spirit (he talked about how pleased he and Scott were to agree on the conclusion that Atlantis had been located in what is now Antarctica).

Speedwaydemocrat and Jokerman had to go visit a friend in the hospital who is having bypass surgery this week (good luck with that, Speedwaydemocrat and Jokerman) so they left before the ceremony. It started out with the Masons marching in in full regalia and standing up by the coffin while they read out their funeral service. I had never seen a Masonic funeral service before. It's very solemn--the Masons stand in a straight line sort of at attention while the celebrants read the texts. They gave us Scott's history in the order and talked about how although he had faults, that was just a sign that he was human, and now that he's passing on we should remember his good qualities, and about God and the hope of the afterlife, and they put his white lambskin (the 'apron' they all wear) and a branch of an evergreen tree into the casket with him before they processed out.

Then the funeral home played the CD that Rick_Myers had sent, which started with a contemporary arrangement of "Amazing Grace" and led into a really touching tribute recorded by Rick. When Mike Malloy's tribute came on the volume immediately plummetted but they were able to get it turned back up so that people could hear most of it. Malloy told a story about meeting Scott at a demonstration and being impressed by his passion and his commitment to ending injustice, and about how he used to be such a regular contributor to the show through his emails to Kathy. (For those who have heard the announcement Malloy made on his show, this was a different piece that he must have recorded later.)

Scott's mother got up and started the memorial off by telling some stories about Scott. Now, it has been a while since I've doen the whole meet-people-in-real-life-that-you-know-online thing, but the memorial brought back a very familiar feeling. Often when you meet someone in person that you've known online, it's a little bit of a shock to your perception of them; they don't look or sound like what you were imagining, etc. But as you talk to them, you start fitting in what you're learning from being around them with your impression of them through your online conversations, and it all starts to come together to give you a better understanding of the whole person. It was like that for me listening to Scott's family talk about him. There were a lot of times when his mother or his uncle or one of their friends would say something that made everyone on the DU side laugh just because it reminded them so much of the Khephra they knew. The big one was probably Scott's mother's story about how when Scott was 3 years old she wrote a letter to President Nixon demanding that she be allowed to participate in a program that some local goon was trying to block her from. She got into the program--eventually--and Scott apparently learned from this that if you want something you have to take it all the way to the top, because when they went shopping for orthotic shoes, and Scott didn't like the way they felt, he told the shoe salesman, "I'm writing a letter to the President because you're hurting my feet!" She also talked about how polite he always was even as a child, something that was borne out by just about everyone from Scott's 'real life' who spoke about him.

Scott's mom talked about Khephra's health problems and how much trouble his body always gave him. At the end, she said that he was at peace now and that "his poor little feet don't hurt him any more," which was just heartbreaking.

Scott's uncle got up and told us more about Scott's early life and the challenges he had faced with his health, and also told some very funny and touching stories about bonding with him over Atari and Commodore64 games. (*I* remember Commodore64! Do you remember the Commodore64? Hmph. Whippersnapers.) He and Scott's mother both thanked everyone from DU for coming to the ceremony and talked about how important DU was to Scott in the last years of his life.

One thing that came through in a lot of the speeches from the non-DU contingent was that SCott was constantly evangelizing. He converted his mother, a 2000 Bush voter, into a Democrat. One of his mother's clients talked about how much she looked forward to getting her 'weekly political update' from SCott whenever she came to visit. The wife of the head of Scott's Masonic lodge talked about how they used to argue politics all the time but even though she was a libertarian conservative Scott was always friendly and polite to her while they were arguing.

Skinner started things off from the DU side (I don't know how it happened, but yes, we were all clustered up on the left side and the family was on the right). He had written his eulogy on the back of his MapQuest directions. I thought he did a great job of explaining to the family why Khephra was so important to us, and of explaining to us why Khephra was such an integral part of DU. He said that Khephra had logged over 50,000 posts, making him "the second most prolific poster"--I wonder who the most prolific poster is--and that of all us DUers he may have had the greatest impact on the way the community turned out. I had planned to say something if the need arose but I thought Skinner had done such a good job of saying what I would wanted to say about why Khephra and DU matter to all of us that I ended up sitting it out.

Hippiechick went up next. I knew from talking to her that she was not someone who enjoys being up on stage, but I thought she gave a lovely and very moving personal tribute to Khephra, talking about all the times they had shared and what a fighter he was and how sweet and good he was to everyone. Voltaire, while she was doing this, passed around Pepsi and paper cups to the audience. At the end she explained that whenever they were on a road trip anywhere, Khephra had to have his Pepsi before anything else could happen, so she wanted us all to use the Pepsi to toast him before he set off on his last journey. So we did, and hippiechick put a 20 oz. bottle of Pepsi into the casket with him. Voltaire then gave his eulogy, which was also very moving and which really brought across how much Khephra had meant to him.

Several of Scott's mother's friends shared their memories of him, and then Scott's mother came up and closed the ceremony by announcing that we would all repair to Dooley O'Toole's across the street for further waking. We all fetched up over there after a while--the whole DU contingent minus Ignatius, who couldn't stay for the whole thing, plus Scott's mother and one of her longtime friends. Skinner bought us all munchies and everyone got drinks and we sat around telling war stories and Khephra stories and then Skinner had to go catch his plane and I had to head home to the wife so I don't know what happened after that; hopefully someone else will pick up that part.

As hippiechick says, it was very sad. But I was really glad I went. One, because I think it really did make a difference to Scott's family to see...my count is 14 DUers coming to pay their respects to Scott (we all told Scott's mother and uncle that there were loads of DUers who wanted to come but couldn't be there). For people who don't live on the internet like a lot of us do, I think it's hard to understand what it can mean to people, and it was really important for them to get to *see* at least some part of Scott's legacy in living three-dimensional human form. Two, because I got to meet so many of my fellow-DUers, all of whom are truly delightful people. And three, because it reminded me again of how important community is and how lucky we are to have it, in whatever form it manifests itself, and how grateful we should be to people who use their time on earth to try to bring people together instead of driving them farther apart.

Everything I have heard about Khephra in the past week and a half has made me wish I'd known him better. So one lesson I take away from this is that you should never pass up the chance to make a friend.

Another thing I got out of this is a better understanding of what DU has really meant to me over the past four years. I think it means what it does to us because it gave us a way of connecting to our fellow-progressives, at a time when we felt we were losing our connections to the rest of the country. It has become a community for all of us who are now not allowed into the officially sanctioned American community because we have not signed onto the officially sanctioned American ideology. As I had been going to say in the eulogy I didn't give, if you want to understand what Khephra was doing with all that time at his computer, maybe the easiest way is to think of him as an architect. What he was doing, day after day, was building a place for us. So every day, we are all going to be walking through the place Khephra built, and using it, and loving it, and being deeply grateful to him that it's there.

C ya,

THe Plaid Adder