Fay Reid - a eulogy

Our community has lost one whom we loved

Whew! Another day another euro. As we say. A day of life (which I’m certain of, because I’m alive as I write this), and of liberty (since I do not write this from within the confines of a prison) and of the … pursuit of happiness.

If you don’t know the Johnny Vicious and Lula tune Ecstasy (Take Your Shirts Off) (you can search for it in YouTube (some naughty lyrics, so be warned)), then you were probably never in a rave club in the 1990s. It’s one of the funniest (genuinely funny!) house numbers that I know, in which Lula invites his audience to take their shirts off: “All of you take your shirts off,” he demands in one mix. Then he adds “Well, maybe not all of you ... Some of you can put your shirts back on …”

Anyway, he asks, “Did you find your ecstasy?” which is one way to ask Did you find your happiness? So, did you?

Clip: Parental advisory.

What, I hear you ask, is happiness? We have difficulty sometimes with defining life. Certainly the conception and ending of life can pose their medical ethical problems—a woman in Latin America recently awoke to find herself in a morgue. It happens fairly frequently—so that deciding what life is can be hard, even for a doctor.

Liberty, likewise. I am free; but I am not free to end the life of another person. I am not free to end the life of an animal, except subject to conditions. Ending the life of another creature is not a freedom that we enjoy without restriction. Yet it is a prerogative that is extended—under our pernicious laws—to certain institutions and certain persons: to the State; the warring State; an executioner acting under the order of a court of law; an abattoir; you, if I come at you with a knife.

If life is subject to the vagaries of assessment by others, of the will of him who is alive, of the precise moment at which life commences and the precise moment at which it is snuffed out, would it not be simpler to regard life as a never-ending intangible state, which takes on a tangible form for the duration of what we call lifetime? That is a question with which I now grapple as I mourn the loss of a Substack friend and colleague, who passed away this morning—into eternity, by my way of it, or into nothing, by hers. Her blog is still here, and will remain here until circumstances contrive to delete it. In that sense, nothing has changed. I knew Fay Reid only through these columns. We never met and we never spoke—we only wrote. We only wrote—why the only? What we wrote is still there to be read. But she now will write no more, not in this lifetime. She is gone from our Substack community, and yet she has left an indelible mark upon it.

My own convictions are that her love of her family and of her country and of her fellow man was such that, if there be an afterlife—of which I am myself convinced—then there would be few finer candidates for it than her. Tonight, as I step into my bed, I shall call out to her, I told you so, Fay Reid. She will be unable to tell me what it is I believe in, or that I am right and she was wrong, still less that I was wrong and she was right. Only she will by that stage know who is what.

She studied in great depth her adopted country’s, America’s, constitution. She revered it, and was greatly saddened when she observed its breach. She wrote on it often. In the end, I had to demur on her insistence on adherence to its esteemed words. Like the prime minister of the land of her birth, Mark Carney, and like Benjamin Franklin, signatory of that very work, I told her that the vision encapsulated in the U.S. Constitution was over. By Franklin’s allusion, they had lost the baby. It was time to begin again. That’s what we do when someone comes along and tears your œuvre to shreds—we start over again.

Well, Fay is starting over again. Of this I’m convinced, as I am that she has made a contribution, however short in time, that is of great value to my lifetime and to my life’s times. She had a remarkable gift to make us think, to cause us to reflect on the things in this world that are wrong and on the things in ourselves with which we are complacent. Of one other thing I am convinced: that, in Lula’s words, she has found her ecstasy; her happiness; a happiness that is richly deserved and that cost nothing to anyone else. A happiness the likes of which we might all pursue; not one which comes at the cost of others.

Fay stated truth simply, so I know she will appreciate what I hope is the truth of that sentiment. For the rest of us, the quest for happiness continues, tomorrow.

God bless you, Fay Reid.