Welcome from Ana Lisa and Tony
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Tony: Welcome.
Ana Lisa: Thank you for coming today to help us remember and celebrate our son Javid. How much we wish we were gathering for a reason other than to mourn the loss of our son. But we also want you to know how much it has meant to us that you’ve walked alongside us in the months of Javid’s hospitalization.
Tony: You’ve all been so nice to us over the last seven months, we feel like we’re running out of ways to express our appreciation to you. It’s getting so bad we’re resorting to affectionate insults ... referring to you on our website as loveable louts and noting that there’s “not a Sackville-Baggins among the lot of you.”
Ana Lisa: We’ve known many of you since long before Javid was born. Others of you have come, like unexpected gifts, into our lives just in these last few months.
Tony: We were thinking as we prepared for Javid’s memorial that we know you but many of you don’t know each other. So we thought it might be nice to introduce you all to each other. What we’d like to do is ask you to stand (or raise your hand if standing is hard) when you hear the category you fit into.
Ana Lisa: First of all, could we ask those of you to stand who are related to one or the other of us. This includes in-laws and out-laws. Thank you.
We’d like to ask the rest of you to check out our wonderful family. So you can now see where Javid got his good looks.
Tony: Having a baby and watching him grow has made us think a lot about who you as a family are to us. Mostly it’s made us realize the depth of the bond we have with you. You’re the ones who have seen us in all of our less-than-pretty stages of development, so you see with the clearest eyes how this adult “us” is really such a thin veil over the younger versions. And somehow you still manage to reserve affection for us. Thank you for that, and for the joy with which you greeted Javid’s birth, and the sorrow and support you’ve shown us in the days since his death.
Ana Lisa : Now we’d like to ask those people to stand who think of themselves as our friends, but who don’t live within a two-block radius of us and are not also currently colleagues, coworkers or also connected to us through our jobs.
Tony: Please take a good look at our friends. Hanging out with any of them is like being wrapped up in a bear hug and spun all around.
There are too many stories to tell of all the kindnesses these friends have shown us for years, and of how their caring was so quickly and so completely extended to the Wee Boy.
Ana Lisa: Thank you for being our friends. Thank you for praising us and for teasing us. Half the fun of parenting Javid was imagining the many ways you would teach and model for us how to be healthy and happy big people around him, so that he also could grow happy and whole. In losing Javid, we can think of no other way to communicate how much you’ve meant than to say that you’ve been like family to us and to him.
Tony: Could those of you stand now who have come into our lives because of our current jobs? That means coworkers, colleagues, and those of you who we have known primarily because of what we do for a living.
We realized when we were writing this greeting that we would have to be very specific about telling you not to stand up when we did the roll call for our friends. That’s because so many of you play dual roles for us. And what an amazing, energizing, life-giving thing it is to have both our work and those we get to work with be such a joy.
Ana Lisa These people who are standing before you are passionate, opinionated, funny, thoughtful and at their core so fundamentally decent. If you ever wondered how we kept a sense of humor during Javid’s brief life, it was because they kept us laughing. We are fortunate to get paid to keep such good company.
Tony: And now would our neighbors stand up, those of you who didn’t have to stay back on the block standing guard over the preparations for the gathering.
Ana Lisa: Some of you live here in the city, and some of you don’t. In the 12 years since we moved back into this area, we’ve lived and worked in many parts of Philadelphia. So we’re speaking with some experience when we tell you that we think we have the best neighbors in the world.
Tony: Just this: Thank you for being the kind of neighbors that make us look forward to coming home to our block. Thank you for loving our son without ever even meeting him. And thank you for letting us lean on you today, and in the sadness of the last weeks.
Ana Lisa: Now we’d ask that you stand if you’re connected in some way to the Neonatal Intensive Care Units of Pennsylvania or Children’s Hospital.
Tony: The summer after I graduated from college I planted trees for a reforesting company in northern Ontario. With the amount of blood I lost to mosquitoes and black flies, I could have used some of the many infusions you gave our boy. I worked harder than I ever have in my life, got half-crazed with boredom and frustration, and much of the time hated being where I was.
When I left, my college friend who also happened to be my crew leader told me to expect to experience a kind of perverse nostalgia. And that’s how it’s been ever since—I find I often miss planting trees.
Ana Lisa: Perverse or not, we miss you. Even those of you we’ve seen and spoken with since Javid’s death. Your nurseries feel like our second homes now, and it’s strange not to see you every day, to laugh with you and to cry beside you. We were only half-joking this week when we wondered whether they could just shut down your units so that everyone could be here with us today.
Tony: Thank you for caring for the Niblet, for fighting for him, for loving him, for rooting for him and for us. Thank you for showing us how to parent such a small child, how to harness our fears, how to find the ways and the spaces to love him. And thank you SO MUCH for walking with us as we’re struggling to learn how to let him go.
Ana Lisa : We hope that the rest of you can find some way before leaving here to let these people know that you honor them. Even if it’s just the gift of a warm smile. They deserve to be honored by us, and to be thanked for what they do for so many families other than just ours.
Tony: We have one final comment before we’ll sit down ourselves. We’re not asking that this next group stand, but we know there are some here today who have become connected to Javid and to us through paths other than the ones we’ve mentioned so far. Javid’s web page created and renewed so many more relationships than we could have ever guessed.
Ana Lisa: And even apart from the website, we’ve been learning in new ways through our time with Javid that there are webs outside of the electronic. We want you to know that we are grateful to you, also, for being here, and that you represent for us the wonder of the unexpected. Thank you for coming.
Tony: We’ve put together a short slide show with pictures. We know many of you have been following Javid’s website and have seen most of these photos, but we wanted to find a way to bring Javid into the room with us today.