Funeral Mass For Kathleen A. Sullivan

Remarks By Anthony T. Kronman,
Friday, June 29, 2001

Kathleen loved her family and friends. She adored her husband Steve and her beautiful daughter Victoria.

Kathleen was devoted to the Yale Law School, and to the work of its clinical program, where she taught for eight years. She gave generously of herself to her colleagues and students in the clinic, and inspired them with her own clarity of moral purpose.

Above all, Kathleen felt a deep loyalty to her clients, to those who came to her for help, to the poor and powerless who have no voice, and to whose cause she gave her own voice. Kathleen possessed considerable gifts of mind and spirit. She felt acutely the advantage of these gifts and was instinctively moved to share them with others. The impulse to share was perhaps the deepest impulse of Kathleen's nature, and her deepest feeling the sense of a common bond with others.

These are admirable and uncommon qualities. But Kathleen possessed something rarer still. She understood the truth about life and lived her life, to the very end, in the light of the truth.

The truth about life is that its meaning is more important than its duration, that the meaning of life is a consequence of the values toward which it is directed, and that the choice of these values, and our adherence to them, is within our own control.

This is a radically, and radiantly, hopeful message. For it means that the greatest good is within our reach, and that all we must do is grasp it. It is the message of Socrates to his disciples who could not believe that their teacher was dying with such equanimity and peace. It is the message of Jesus on the cross. It is the message on which the oldest teachings, and deepest traditions of our civilization are founded.

But most of us, most of the time, have a hard time holding on the truth about life. Bad things happen to us and our spirits sink. We become anxious and depressed. We become afraid. And no where does this happen more predictably than in the dark precincts of death.

In the shadow of death, Kathleen never faltered. She kept her spirits up, for her own sake and for ours, and of course she wanted more time, just as we all do. She wanted the chance to grow old and die in the fullness of years. But Kathleen understood that her time--and your, and mine--is limited, and that the truly important thing is not how much of it one has, but what one does with it. To the very end, Kathleen remained the author of her life. She remained in possession of it and its meaning. She remained the same selfless person she had always been, thinking more about her doctors and nurses than herself, more about her friends and family than herself, more about the needs of others than her own. Kathleen never changed, even in pain and the loneliness of dying. And when it came time to leave the world, she did so on her own terms, confident that she had lived the life she wanted to live and secure in the knowledge that life is a blessing.

In this respect, Kathleen died as she had lived. Her death and her life were continuous. This may seem unremarkable, but in fact it is quite rare. Under the pressure of dying, people often act in ways that are discontinuous with their lives. None of us who are still among the living, and have not yet faced death, have standing to blame them. But when someone dies by the same honorable commitments they have kept in life, we should acknowledge what a rare and beautiful thing this is. There is an old-fashioned word for the special kind of beauty. We call it "integrity" - the quality of being a whole person, and in possession of oneself. There is nothing more beautiful in the world than integrity, the kind Kathleen possessed.

In the last two days, since Kathleen's death, many of us, I think, sense that something amazing has happened. Most immediately, it is the grace and selflessness with which Kathleen died. But in a larger and deeper sense, the amazing thing that has just happened is the grace and selflessness with which she lived her entire life. The truth about life--that its meaning is more important than its length and that the meaning of life is within our control--is something we all understand. The truth about life repeated in books of philosophy and sermons of worship.  But a life lived in the truth, right up to the end, is the least common thing of all. It is, in fact, a miracle, and that is why, in the presence of Kathleen's life, we all feel a kind of amazement.

I think I can hear Kathleen laughing. For someone who could not stand to be treated in a privileged way, whose instinct was always for the common and the shared, to hear her life described as a miracle would seem ridiculous. But if we insist and say, "Yes, it was a miracle that we have witnessed," and then ask ourselves, "What shall we do with this miracle now?" I think I know what Kathleen would say. She would say, "Be miracles yourselves. Serve the world and the other people in it. Put their suffering before your own. Be kind and generous. And know that the greatest good is within your grasp." And Kathleen would say this not with pride, not to set herself up as a better example--how foreign that would be to her democratic spirit!--but out of a desire that we share the same joy of integrity she knew, in living and dying, the greatest joy there is, and one Kathleen would want to share with us, as she shared everything else.

1 Dean and Edward J. Phelps Professor of Law, Yale Law School.

2 The remarks originally appeared in the Clinical L. Rev., Volume 8, Number 1, 2001. Reprinted with permission.