Drafting obituaries and eulogies ...

 An attempt at a properly formal obituary:

SLADE, Gloria Jean

March 1943 – December 2021

We announce, with a profound sense of loss, Gloria’s relatively sudden passing into the presence of her Lord, on Saturday, December 18th, 2021, at the age of 78, following a few months of illness, and a few weeks in hospital.  No, it wasn’t CoVID, it was cascading complications from multiple sites of cancer.  Gloria is survived by her devoted husband Rob; her daughters Karen (Michael) Hoff and Linda Hutchinson, her grandsons Ryan (Alexx) Hoff, Trevor Hoff, Devon Hutchinson, granddaughter Hannah Hutchinson; and great grandson Bennett Hoff (whom she never met face to face, but delighted in pictures of).  Gloria raised her family on the salary of a secretary, or personal or executive assistant, but generally to the President, CEO, or Board, and contributed to the existence of two major buildings in Vancouver and the structure of the Pacific Coast fishing fleet.  Occasionally she could be prevailed upon to bring her secretarial and management skills to improve the situation of a guild or charity.  She was a dearly loved soloist, a skilled seamstress and designer, and avidly followed quilting and embroidery.  Gloria had a great sense of fun, a limitless curiosity, a passion for words and the English language, a determination to be of service to her church, and a deep and abiding love for her family (as well as no small connection to her friends).  A memorial service will be held February 26th at West Vancouver Baptist Church, with an online component for those who would prefer to attend remotely or participate at their convenience.  To meet CoVID restrictions, the family asks all those attending in person to RSVP to gsladememorial@gmail.com, and advises that proof of full vaccination and the wearing of masks will be required for entry to the service.  Flowers are gratefully declined; in lieu, donations may be made in Gloria’s name to The Sharing Way or to Regent College.

(For further details, and how Rob is doing, see http://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/)

What I sent out to my security colleagues:

In the evening hours of December 18th, 2021, Gloria J. Slade passed away.

While she was never paid for doing security work, she nevertheless had an impact on the field.  Rob Slade never would have written any of his books had it not been for her support.  (Some say this might have been a good thing.)  Certainly the books would have been even worse without her.  At the time of the publication of “Robert Slade’s Guide to Computer Viruses,” due to reading the manuscript seven times over, she was the fifth leading computer virus expert in Canada.  In addition, she made contributions to his researches into stylistic forensics.  She is remembered as the definer of the second definition of “encryption” in “The Dictionary of Information Security.”  And, finally, she allowed him to pursue his ill-paid passion for information security, rather than demanding that he get into some better remunerated area.

Gloria addressed questions such as those of identity and authentication, wondering whether the cremated remains of your loved one which you received from the funeral parlor were actually the remains of your loved one.  Unfortunately, her personal investigation into this question, while definitive, is unlikely to result in any publication.

Gloria leaves behind her husband of thirty-four years, Robert M. Slade, who is spending his time writing up obituaries which he thinks might be in some way amusing, but that others know only show the poor taste of a sleep-deprived and emotionally overwrought individual.  No, really, he's fine, it's just that he keeps bursting into tears, roughly every forty-five minutes, for no reason which is readily apparent to anyone else.  If you should, for some reason, have any wish to follow along as he tries to find a reason to carry on, he is either messing with http://infosec-inmemoriam.blogspot.com/, or pottering about in http://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/

A draft of a eulogy:

Gloria Jean Furneaux Meeter Slade

Furneaux because she was born Furneaux, Meeter for her first husband, and Slade for me.

Gloria was born into a fairly traditional family.  Father worked, and mother stayed home.  Gloria really didn’t have a problem with that model: all she ever really wanted to be was a wife and a mother.

And while circumstances dictated that she couldn’t *only* be a wife and mother, she was wholly devoted to her family.  And she did a great job.  She loved her daughters, and wanted them to be best friends with each other, and they are.  She produced two capable, competent women who have owned and run businesses, and raised families of great kids of their own.  Gloria loved her grandchildren, and wanted them to be close to their cousins, and they are.  Although she was never able to meet him face to face, she adored her great grandson, and was still responding to pictures of her family even when she no longer had the strength to carry on a conversation.  She loved the joke about her niece in New Zealand reading her (the niece’s) Dad's email online, even in her last days in hospital.

Because she had to raise and support her girls on her own, Gloria had to find a job.  She worked as a secretary.  But she was pretty much always the secretary to the president, or the CEO, or the Board.  Which meant that, in reality, she was an underpaid manager.

She was a planner.  She organized filing systems, and schedules of her work.  She organized our wedding.  She still had, and I still have, the infamous “pink binder.”  She organized parties and events, including her parents 50th Wedding anniversary, after which many of her parents’ friends said that they would have to leave town for their own 50th anniversaries, because they could *never* top that.  (She organized the time, and it worked out to the minute, which became a family joke: “What time is it, Rob?” “10 PM.”)  She organized her own memorial service, so that we would be prepared, whenever it happened.

A number of her jobs were quite responsible and stressful.  One of the skills that she taught herself (and I don’t know who can teach this to you, because it calls for a lot of judgment) was to take minutes.  That isn’t just recording who says what.  Minutes become legal documents, and it is important that they reflect what was, actually, agreed upon and decided at a given meeting.  And it is also important that they do not contain material or conflicts that don’t really help with the tasks at hand, and may lead to legal wrangles if they are included.  It’s a significant and sophisticated skill.  Gloria became known for it.  When important meetings were to be held, Gloria would often be seconded to do the minutes, even if she wasn’t, strictly speaking, part of that group.  This happened with the treaty negotiations between the department of Indian and Northern Affairs (as it was then known) and the Nisga’a.  Gloria was part of those meetings in order to take minutes.  Her minutes became important, and one of the leaders of the First Nations, who have very little reason to trust documents and pieces of paper, singled her out, by name.  “When I read Gloria’s minutes, I hear my words.”  It is probably not going too far to say that the quality of Gloria’s minutes, for those negotiations, changed the tone of those negotiations, and probably for a number of later negotiations as well.

She was secretary to the Principal of Regent College.  That was during the time of the major fundraising campaign to build the new building.  Essentially that meant that Gloria ran the College, freeing the Principal to travel the world, to raise the funds necessary to build a new one.  (Carl disputes that: he says they “co-ran” the College.)  That there is a beautiful new building on the UBC lands is, in large part, due to Gloria.

There is another building in downtown Vancouver that is part of her legacy.  She was secretary to the General Manager of the Terminal City Club while that property was being re-developed.  Given the volume of work to be done to keep the Club running while the construction was going on, she was also secretary to the Board, and to the engineer in charge of the project.  That meant she was putting in sixteen hour days.  Not just occasionally, but sometimes for weeks at a time, without a break.

These jobs were stressful.  They took a physical toll.  Gloria often said that her body was never her friend.  It often let her down.  She suffered chronic pain from arthritis and degenerative disk disease, as well as irritable bowel syndrome.  She suffered many kinds of headaches, including migraines.  The responsibilities of the jobs that she held didn’t help.  Well, now, as she frequently requested, she has her resurrection body.

Occasionally she could be prevailed upon to bring her secretarial and management skills to improve the situation of a guild or charity.  She always left the minutes and files of an organization in *much* better shape than she found them.  In one situation, the Vancouver Women’s Musical Society asked her to update their Website, because they felt that was simply a clerical task.  It wasn’t, of course: the Website had been left in quite a mess.  Gloria taught herself HyperText Markup Language (I gave her a bit of a start) in order to clean it up.  She loved it: she said it was just like Word Perfect, which was always her favorite word processor.

Many people did not give Gloria the credit she was due, including Gloria.  I had the teaching qualifications but Gloria had some amazing insights into teaching that I've never heard elsewhere.  She taught her girls.  She taught her grandchildren.  She taught *me*: about emotions, about love, about teaching, about writing, even about stylistic forensics.  She never considered herself a great cook, although, as she said, her family didn't starve.  But she made the best potato salad I have ever tasted, anywhere.

Gloria was a hard worker, but she wasn’t just a worker.  At least, not in the strictly commercial sense.  Of probably greater importance to her was her work for the church, devoted to her God.  She taught Sunday school.  She was involved with junior choirs, and their musical plays.  She made costumes for those plays, as well, combining both her musical and seamstress talents.  Many of those costumes are still stored, used, and sometimes loaned out from this church.  Again, a number of those church activities were chosen because her girls were involved in them.  As her job responsibilities increased, and her health declined, church work necessarily declined as well, but she always maintained a keen interest in a number of congregations that she had helped over her lifetime.

As you have heard, and will hear, from the scriptures she chose and left us for her service, Gloria trusted in God’s provision.  Not just theoretically, but for *her*.  Personally.  Many times she said that God had specifically chosen the Baird townhouse for her, and her specific concerns.  Not just the complex, but that specific unit.  She had no choice when she moved in: she needed a place, and that one unit was available.  It was only later that she realized how perfectly chosen it was for her.  She trusted in God’s provision.  She told of one time when she had enough money for one bus fare to work.  Not enough to get home.  So, she got on the bus, not knowing what would happen.  When she got to work, someone came by with an overtime cheque that had come in for her.  She was able to cash it at lunch, and get home, and buy groceries.

God’s provision even extended to the time and manner of her death.  The oncology report, when it came in, indicated that, had Gloria survived this event, and left the hospital, her remaining time on earth would have been filled with pain and discomfort.

She was a singer, which gave her a perspective that was rather unique in her own Baptist denomination.  Baptists give great importance to the local congregation, and relatively few dedicate time in congregations other than their own.  As Gloria frequently said, when you are a soloist, your home church is the one you don’t attend, since you are often in demand and serving other church groups.  Gloria had a very wide range of contacts among churches across the lower mainland.

She was a singer, and a soloist.  She was not considered great by the world's standards of musical art, but she had, without any formal singing or voice training, what seems to be an absolutely unique gift of being able to sing the emotion and emotional message of a song, while still allowing every single word to be heard and understood.  Gloria understood, as early as twelve years old, that this was a gift, and was to be used in the service of God and His church.  And Gloria could sing even when she was emotionally involved, which is unusual: she even sang at her own mother’s memorial service.

Gloria was gracious, in the sense that she could meet with anyone, from any situation of life, and be comfortable, and they could be comfortable with her.  This extended from the Lieutenant-Governor of the Province of BC (two of them, in fact), to a three-year-old boy who wanted to talk to Gloria, and, when she objected that it was too cold to keep the door open, told her to, “Put a jacket on.  Get some fwesh air.”  (This became a saying in our house, over the decades since, any time jackets or fresh air were needed.)  There is a Barry McGuire song that points out that we learn more from sorrow than from happiness.  This ability of Gloria’s to relate to anyone undoubtedly came from the troubles she had had in her life.

Since I have started writing books, I tell people that a good copy editor is vitally important, and that when you find a good copy editor, you marry her.  When I married Gloria, I actually didn’t know that I would write books.  It was she who gave me the support to do so, and, without her, I probably never would have published anything.  But she was also the best copy editor I ever encountered.  She did the full range of editing, including developmental editing, and I benefitted greatly from her help in my writing.  My first, and, probably, last books are dedicated to her.  It’s too bad she couldn’t have editted this.

We now know that it was probably six months before her hospitalization that a metastatic recurrence of cancer led to a cascade of complications in her stomach, lungs, and other areas which were unidentified until it was too late.  This led to the emergency department, cardiac care, ICU, a medical ward, and finally palliative care.  Typically, no single problem could stop Gloria: it took a whole gang of them.

Some years back, Gloria found an article which pointed out that married couples tend to take each other for granted, and spend, on average, only fifteen minutes per week actually talking to each other.  That was not the case with Gloria and I.  While I was out teaching, I have the long-distance phone bills to prove that, even though we were communicating fairly constantly with each other via email, we still needed to spend at least forty-five minutes *per day* talking to each other on the phone.  While we were together at home we talked constantly.  We talked about what she read in the paper.  We talked about my research and presentations online.  We had to record the news and TV shows that we watched, because we had to pause them and discuss aspects of what we were being shown and told.  For the same reason we didn't watch movies in the theatres, but waited until they came out on DVD.  Gloria was the most interesting person that I knew to talk to.  What she lacked in any way in terms of formal education, she more than made up for in a boundless curiosity, completely unrestricted by what she was *supposed* to be interested in.  Time and again, topics that I was supposed to know, and had been authoritatively teaching about for years, got overturned and extended by Gloria asking that one extra question in an unexpected direction.

I have lost my best friend, the person I most wanted to talk with, my administrative manager, and even my job, because I was essentially her caregiver for the past seven years.  I am grateful that God loaned her to me for a time.