I was in the living room at my house in Centerville tonight when my aunt called to tell us the news about President Hinckely. I'm not sure it's really sunk in, but I do know that the most touching moment of the night was listening to my brother Spence tell his son Cooper (4) that President Hinckely had died. "What can we do Dad?" he said. "Can we make him better? Can we give blood?" My brother explained the President Hinckely is with Heavenly Father now and that he will be resurrected someday while all of us tried not to cry watching this tiny boy become so sad over the death of a man whose significance he probably barely understands at this point.I don't really feel like joining a facebook group is the way I want to honor this great man. (I was invited to five.) Maybe a blog isn't the right thing either, but I write so much that is frivolous that I feel like I should at least say something, especially since Jennie already got mad at me for pointing out the "cause's" in the article about him. (I'm sorry, but even in times of sadness or crisis it's hard to turn off the English major part of myself. In fact, sometimes it kicks up a notch at those times because it's easier to be annoyed about stupid things than really come to grips with the reality of the situation. But I digress.) So here we go.
I loved President Hinckley. I felt the spirit that accompanied him when he entered a room on more than one occasion. I feel very keenly the great privilege it was to sing for him more than once while I was in Women's Chorus. I will always find comfort in so many of his words. Last year his admonition to cultivate a spirit of happiness did as much as anything to pull me out of a real slump about a really hard time. I am grateful for his inspired words; I'm sure I will be finding comfort in them for many years to come.
The rest of what he did is so overwhelmingly exciting and progressive that I won't even attempt to address it, but I am grateful that he was the prophet of my youth. Perhaps it's time to take his advice with renewed vigor and make sure that I am standing for something - the right things.
Goodbye, President Hinckley. We will miss you.
2 comments:
You may be happy to know that I learned of President Hinckley's death from your blog. I had not heard until I opened it this morning. The announcement is buried on page 21 of the NY Times. I think the man would be proud of you and find great humor in the fact that you are finding the typos and grammatical errors in his obit announcements. Most people tend to forget people's education after 70 more years of life, but he was a classics scholar. When I was in college, we used to love to pick apart his sermons in Latin class for the elegant turns of phrase and simple, unpretentious oratorical flourishes that were overlooked by the layperson, but were his trademarks. In fact, we used to refer to the partitive genetive as "the Hinckley genitive" because he was so fond of using the construction in English: "much of good", for example. I fondly remember reading his general conference sermons aloud with English-speaking companions while in Brazil. Since we couldn't attend general conference we would read them aloud and try to capture his cadence and tone of voice to feel like we were there.
It is a sad day and I feel deeply the loss of a great man.
And another thing. His mother was an English teacher.
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