eulogy: Helen Hill 1970-2007

Given at the Helen Hill Memorial Gathering, at the North End Church, January 13, 2007.

I went over to Lisa and Dan's place on Monday evening. The three of us watched a VHS tape that Helen had given to Lisa. When we watched her film "Mouseholes," the funeral scene moved me as it never had. Especially when the minister read from the New Testament, a verse that clearly meant something to Helen:

"But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him."

I looked it up—in his letter to the early Christians in Corinth, Saint Paul is quoting the Hebrew prophet Isaiah there. I was reminded of that passage—and about things we're not ready for—when I met my friend Jane for lunch the next day. Jane has a fixation, shall we say, on the Hebrew scriptures. She also had an interesting thing to say about Helen.

People are saying that Helen was an angel, in a way, and that's so true. But Jane wanted to use a different word to describe Helen's spiritual presence. And that word is "prophet."

Not a prophet in the sense of prognosticating future events. Not either in the sense of wagging the finger of judgment at the people who just don't "get it." Real prophets, I agree with Jane, have something important to tell us about the way that things could be. They tell us about a world that we can't see yet. Maybe we can't see it yet because we're too satisfied or complacent about the way things are now. Or maybe we can't see it yet simply because it hasn't arrived. It's just around the corner. If only we knew. If only we were listening.

Some of those Hebrew prophets made their point not with great oratorical skills, perhaps, but by living differently. The way they lived was their critique of the social order of their day. They would make choices—openly and demonstratively—that other people wouldn't. Some of them would do some pretty loopy things to make their point—like Ezekiel, who publicly cooked a meal over a fire built on human dung.

I think veganism probably seems equally weird to a lot of people. And keeping a pot-bellied pig as a pet definitely strikes some people as strange. On that videotape we watched on Monday night were a couple of TV news reports about Helen and Paul and their pet. That news reporter was really amazed to see Helen walking a pig down Gottingen Street.

Lives like Helen's quietly demand our attention. They question the regular order of things. What if meals could always be free to everyone who needs them? How would things be different if we thought of animals not as raw material but as companions? How would the world change if pasttimes reserved for the elite—like, say, making films—were something that anyone could do?

Helen has been taken from us, that's true. And the way it happened was untimely, unfair, and inhuman. But what she gave to us was something that will always be with us—her life, a prophecy lived.