Eulogy for Harry

Eulogy for Hendrik Thomas Neudoerffer Venema -- Harry
St. Mary's Road United Church, 10 August 2008

(Cynthia and Henry Neudoerffer Venema)

Cynthia: Harry’s story could be told many ways. The story we choose to tell is one of hope, transformation, and transcendence. A quote that I love tells us that we are not humans having a soulful experience in this life, rather we are souls having a human experience. Henry and I believe that all souls come from God for a particular human experience. Harry was sent from God to be a teacher and a healer and in his short life Harry taught us a lifetime’s worth about joy, happiness, courage, strength, and love. He taught us about living in pure joy in every moment of life, no matter what you are facing. He taught us the true meaning of strength and courage. He taught us about the unbounded nature of pure love.

There are two parts to Harry’s life. The first part of his life is a dream of hope – our hope for him in this world, our unrelenting love for him - the dream of watching him grow up.
Harry’s gifts to me began with his birth. Start to finish from the time my water broke, prophetically at about 9:00 pm on April 3rd, Harry’s birth took no more than four hours. I won’t say it was painless, but it was entirely manageable and exactly the birth experience I had hoped and prayed for.

Harry had many nicknames: “huggy pet,” “hugs-bugs,” “hares,” “hares-bears,” “boinga,” “love-bug”... He liked them all. Harry was quite simply a perfect baby. He was always smiling and happy – he was our Happy Harry. He hardly ever cried and was content just watching the world perched in the crook of his Daddy’s arm. Many of my friends would comment that they would have a third child in an instant if they could guarantee that they would have one like Harry.

Lydia adored her little brother; although she is more than three years older than Harry, she loved playing and cuddling with him and was oddly covetous of his trucks.

Henry: The second part of Harry’s life is also a dream of hope. His unrelenting love for us, his joy and courage and how this transformed our family and so many others who accompanied us on this journey. In late February, Harry was hospitalized with what turned out to be an extremely rare and aggressive Stage 4 cancer of the liver. There was some concern that he would live through the first weekend in hospital, the first round of chemotherapy, and would ever come home. He lived another 5 and a half months and came very close to becoming the first child in the world to ever beat this disease back from a stage 4 diagnosis. Harry had enough time to transform us and so many around us.

There are many words one could use to describe this phase of Harry’s journey – we chose the word exhilarating. The spontaneous outpouring of love and support from our family, friends and colleagues was overwhelming – that was Harry’s doing, his ever buoyant courage and optimism moved people - even people who didn’t know him but could see the infinite love of God in his eyes in the photos on the website so patiently and artfully maintained by his Auntie Kathleen and Uncle Gareth.

Words, meals, information, support, hope always arrived exactly when we needed it, we were held in the arms of a community that bonded around Harry and for that we are eternally and profoundly grateful.

Harry never cried or complained – only when he bumped his head or Mommy or Daddy was out of sight for a split second. Cynthia and I would alternate nights while Harry was hospitalized: you never got much sleep crammed into those narrow pull-out beds in the hospital, but it was easier to be with him there than at home. The closer you were to him, the better he made you feel. Harry’s courage was infectious: he pulled us through all the hard times. I remember saying many times that it was easy to stay so optimistic with Harry in charge; what a brilliant leader he was.

Harry slept through the first round of chemo, laughed through round 2, and danced and bounced through rounds 3 and 4. He learned to walk through rounds 5 and 6, pushing a favorite cart in a loop around the pediatric oncology ward at Children’s Hospital, while we raced to keep up pulling his IV pole – although he never quite gained the full confidence to let go of our hands.

He came home in late March after over 5 weeks straight in hospital, in time to celebrate his first birthday, and then his mommy's and his daddy’s birthdays. He watched many of big sister Lydia’s soccer games, and got to go with her to the wading pool. He loved playing at the Wolseley School playground on the swings and slides. He enjoyed his life and lived it richly, communicating with us through baby signs – "please," "thank you," "bye-bye," "milk," "more," and "where is" -- giving us all kisses, pushing his cars and trucks around, reveling in the sights and sounds of the neighbourhood, the kids, the buses, the playgrounds, the friends constantly dropping by.



We are stunned by the events of these past five and a half months; it’s very difficult to make sense of such an exceedingly rare and deadly disease until you realize that this radiant little angel came into our life to show us how to live.

Today we celebrate the life of our dear, sweet Prince Harry the Handsome. We promise to always honour Harry’s life by living as he taught us, full of hope, living in joy and happiness in each moment. Bless your children -- love them -- exhilarate knowing they love you. Love never, ever dies; Love is endless. God is Love.

Good night sweet Prince. Mommy loves you. Daddy loves you. Lyddie loves you. All your people love you. God loves you.

*********************************

Tribute to Harry’s family

(Kathleen Venema)

After the last intense five and a half months, it didn’t seem right to let this afternoon go by without a short tribute to Harry’s parents and his sister. I’m Harry’s Auntie Kathleen, and I’ve known Harry’s father Henry all of Henry’s life and almost all of mine. I was just a little older than Lydia is now when Henry was born and once I got over being annoyed that I wasn’t the baby anymore, I really got to like him quite a lot. I was, to tell the truth, fascinated by him, and I pestered my mother with questions about him from the moment she arrived home from the hospital:

“Mummy,” I’d ask, “what will the baby look like when he learns to walk? What will he look like when he learns to talk?” “What will the baby look like when he’s one?” “What will he look like when he goes to school?” And, “Mummy,” I asked once, astonished at the possibility, “what will the baby look like when he’s twenty?”

Twenty was as far as my little pre-school imagination could travel and I’m grateful for that now: it would have been grievous to have known already then to ask, “What will he look like when his own baby is desperately ill?”

I didn’t meet Harry’s mother Cynthia until much later. I didn’t meet Cynthia until twelve years ago, when she joined the women’s group that I belonged to at the University of Waterloo, but I was equally fascinated with Cynthia because on the afternoon that we met, Cynthia provided me with the single instance I’ve ever had of psychic match-making. It took me just thirty minutes that afternoon to realize that Cynthia was not just the kind of woman my brother should marry, Cynthia was the woman my brother should marry. Among all the reasons I could and couldn’t have put into words that afternoon, I knew that Henry and Cynthia should be together because Henry would need to learn the strength Cynthia had been honing already for years, the strength to walk life’s most harrowing paths holding fast and holding gently to the ones she loves. And Cynthia, it turned out, would need to learn the great, immeasurable, matchless love of the remarkable father that Henry has shown himself to be.

Since the moment Harry’s illness was first diagnosed, Cynthia and Henry and Lydia and Harry have modeled for all of us what it looks like to walk into the future with unbounded courage and unabashed love, holding tightly to one another’s hands, eyes wide open, and, what’s much harder, hearts wide open, as wide open as any of us could hope to be, to mysteries and miracles vaster than our best imaginations.

Henry and Cynthia’s capacity for love and hope, for patience and endurance, for celebration and laughter, for keeping Lydia safe and secure and full of play but not sheltered from the fact of Harry’s illness – that capacity has stretched open all our hearts and our imaginations, has helped us remember and muse and act on the potential for transformation in each of our own lives. Harry arrived among us already dazzled with joy, and in every moment of his living, he reflected back the spacious, capacious, unbounded love in which his family held him. For every moment of the sixteen months he spent with us, Cynthia and Henry and Lydia matched Harry’s courage in equal measure, and because they could and because they did, he was able, when he needed to, to “walk on,” to what some of us call “heaven” and what Lydia simply calls, “the next place.”

To walk on ourselves, we search for and nourish various forms of consolation. Among the consolations I treasure is the conviction that in the “next place,” Harry is driving the transit buses of heaven, Harry’s driving Route 10 in heaven, Harry’s driving with his trademark grin and his thousand-watt smile, and people who had no idea where they were before he arrived are turning to one another with relief and saying,

“Oh I get it now: we’re in heaven!”

Over the last five and a half months, in what we sometimes think of as a blindly materialistic, coldly computerized, friendless, frightening, and fragmented world, Cynthia and Henry and Lydia and Harry have received support from friends and family, colleagues and neighbours, strangers, weavers, doctors, and bakers, list-makers, note-takers, and play-daters, healers, singers, drummers, pray-ers, and many, many others …

They’ve received more support than any of us could have guessed or hoped for, and everyone here is part of that unpredictable and immeasurable circle, choir, and orchestra of love. In the days and weeks and months and years that follow this one, Cynthia and Henry and Lydia will continue to need what you’ve shown are the unfathomable depths of your support, and I thank you in advance, because I know they will find everything that will be necessary.