A couple of years ago, I wrote an elegy for Joan Doran. Today, I write one for her husband, Bob, who died today. I cannot say that I knew this couple well; we were related through marriage. They were my sister's parents-in-law. From time to time I visited them, over the years, and have met all of the brothers (there are six) and most of their families; I guess you could say that they are extended families. There are ties that western kinship systems don't really have words for; maybe that's a reflection of our low expectations regarding connectedness. What do you call your sister's mother and father-in-law? They are my nephews' and niece's grandparents, my grand-nieces great-grandparents, and were loved by more than just their blood relations. I loved Bob and Joan Doran, not in a terrible, grieving way, but in a we-are-connected way. I loved Joan for her grace and charm and kindness; I loved Bob for his exacting and meticulous appreciation of the best things in life. I loved them because they upheld, sometimes in an unconscious way, the principles of truth and beauty.

Their grandchildren are my nephews and niece. I visited in their home, I cooked them some meals in the days when Joan was becoming more frail, and I liked listening to their stories, especially Bob's stories of the war, which he could repeat as though the 1940s and the war in Europe had happened yesterday. Bob was a veteran, one of the few remaining in the world who had helped to fight the scourge of the Nazi era. I was proud of him.

I remember accompanying him, my sister and her husband, and some of their family, to the War Museum in Ottawa. We wandered through those grand hallways and, as someone who has taught a generation of students about that war, in history classrooms, it was like walking through a diorama of the Grade Eleven textbook. The sections on World Wars One and Two brought to visual memory the names and places I had required hundreds of students to memorize: the Battle of the Somme, Vimy Ridge, the Phony War, the Battle for the Atlantic. The words of Winston Churchill are not the only ones immortalized there; everywhere there are comments from soldiers about their experiences. One of the most visceral exhibits re-creates a World War trench, complete with facsimiles of dying soldiers lying face down in muddy bogs. It is eerily lit and a testament to a time now almost a century old. I have posted one photo of the many I took on that occasion, including my sister with her dearly-loved father-in-law.

Today a fine man passed on. Bob Doran raised a family after surviving World War Two from a cold ship in the North Atlantic. He came home to Ottawa and married Joan. If I recall his story correctly, he saw her step from a streetcar and admired the turn of her ankle. It's a good beginning, I suppose, for a family of six strapping sons. They worked hard, the two of them, to build a family with high values and morals. Their sons inherited their determination, their world view, their high expectations. They also inherited a little proclivity for rabble rousing...ah, there are some stories. But those are not mine to tell!

They inherited the arts. Bob Doran was a meticulous painter, and he could build anything. The sheen of perfection was on all his work, from beautifully carved and painted Canada geese to exquisitely-rendered oil paintings. He also loved music: most of the sons are musicians of a professional calibre, and that gene appears to have continued into the next generation, as well. His grandsons Tim and Mitch are both excellent music-makers, born with a natural and sometimes almost uncanny talent. They owe some of this legacy to their grandfather, to whom they must say goodbye today.

If I were to write an elegy for Bob Doran, picturing him, as I do, joining his beloved Joan in a world beyond pain and cancer and Alzheimers, and surrounded by the most extraordinary beauties of a heaven he believed in, it would be this one. Joan has been in my prayers each day since her passing; today, Bob joins her in an homage to a couple of ordinary people who, in their own steadfast and formidable way, were extraordinary. God go with you, Bob, and take our love to Joan.

Luthier

for Bob Doran

There's a craft to life.
There's perfection in its building,
in the strokes across fine grains
of fallen trees,
in the plucking of a string.

When you hold something you've made
in your arms:
a son,
a grandchild,
a picture,
a piece of wood carved
as preciously as any of these,

when you touch the divine
in His own creation,
offer prayers and blessings,
when you believe that right is right
and live it with all your might,

then the just reward,
the right outcome
is not fairy tales or pipe dreams,
angels and minstrels at some
imaginary pearly gates:

it's to find yourself
surrounded. There's a wife
in her beauty,
opening her arms in welcome;
there's incantatory music
all around you,
tall steeples of gold and gems,
Irish roads riding you to
this new country,
this beauteous whirligig of eternity.

Here you are, Grandpa Doran,
there you are waving
from a ship sailing
not through angry, war-worn
waters but through
seas made of music.
Here you are, Grandpa,
holding hands with Grandma
from that island beyond the sun
where joy waves like wings
and you create the music.

You are the luthier, Grandpa.
If prayers were wings,
we would be flying alongside,
exultant in the salt spray
of light, this new life,
yours to play in pride,
and ours to dream, and ride.