Death of an Icon

Brooke Russell Astor March 30, 1902 - August 13, 2007

"I had a wonderful life" is the epitath Mrs. Astor requested for her grave. Her funeral program is here. This had to be one of the all time beautiful funerals. As she had instructed it came directly from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer.

At the funeral her son recited his mother’s statement of faith, which included the following:

I want the creatures, the animals and the birds to be a little less afraid of human beings, because I have blessed them and loved them, and far from doing them any harm, I have done them good. I want to leave trees rustling with my thoughts, trees that one day, long after my form has disappeared, shall still, in some mysterious way, cherish in their very beginnings their secret knowledge of me, so that when others seek shelter from the rain, or seek shade under their branches, they shall catch the peace that went from me. I want to leave the whole of nature nearer to the whole of man. I want to store up riches in the wind, and leave blessings traveling upward to the stars. I want to leave my roots in the grass, I want the tears that I have shed for the sake of high love to come again as dew. I want to leave nature richer for having known me. I want to leave my fellow many more sure there’s a divinity that shapes his end. I want to leave him with a wider vision and a greater sense of purpose. I want to leave him with the knowledge that death is nothing and life is everything. When I go from here, I want to leave behind me a deeper sense of God.

Mr. Marshall concluded, “Yes, New York and her many friends have lost a wonderful person, but I have lost my mother.” His voice cracked, and he broke into tears.

After the mourners stood to sing a third hymn, “Love divine, all loves excelling,” Canon Andrew delivered the homily, starting at around 3:15 p.m.:

There are comparatively few people in the English-speaking world who haven’t heard of the Astor family, and certainly in the United States and Britain, the name of Brooke Astor. We are not here to recount a long life of brilliant social connection, or of wealth, or even to begin to summarize the length of her extraordinary reach into the lives of the important and the powerful. Countless newspaper articles regaled the doings, the dress, the friendships, the social and civic activities of this woman. People have read books she has written, and at least one book about her. And here let me observe the truth can go beyond factual exactitude.

We are here to give thanks to God for a woman who spanned a century and five years, and in it, had an extraordinary effect for good in countless hundreds of lives she came across. The energy of her curiosity, and interest, was personified in a marvelous vitality of imagination. Brooke had what the psalms call a ready heart. She was ready to meet, ready to explore, ready to discuss, ready to read, ready to write, ready to decide, and as her priest I can tell you that she was ready to listen — and give of herself. I can tell you more. Brooke, I suspect, would have found it easy to recite with the psalmist in Psalm 108, “O God, my heart is ready.” The ready capacity for friendship which graced her for its diversity always thrilled me. I have seen her captivate, on the one hand, a member of the British royal family, whom I had introduced to her, with a stunning remark, “I am 95, sir, and never had a facelift,” and on the other, be taken by a great big Afro-American janitor at the Metropolitan Museum, taken into his arms, in a loving embrace, as she got out of a car, and my God, did she return that embrace. One lovely May morning — evening — in the 80s, when Tiffany’s had magnificently opened its doors for a fund-raising dinner, the St. Thomas boy choristers had walked in a line down Fifth Avenue in their scarlet cassocks, in order to sing there for the generous and the glitterati. They were met by Brooke, who monopolized them. And captivated them, in preference to the important. It was spontaneous. Let me tell you, it was magic.

She never shirked responsibility. She accepted it with a ready heart. And wielded it with a wise one. Look how she made it her duty to be proactive when causes for her foundation were brought to her notice. She would go there, talk there, ask questions there, make contacts there, friends there, having done her homework earlier. Her prudent generosity with what she had to give stemmed from a heart ready to imagine. This is why her touch was so sure, she came. She saw, she conquered, in her shrewd assessment of need. If any — if ever money were well-spent, it was in part to do with her readiness to spot priorities. And I can attest to hear readiness to sing and give praise with the best member that she had, as that psalm so poetically puts it. I’m not one for disclosing the secrets of the heart of a soul I minister to. Suffice it to say that she told me much that will die with me. Her assessments of people and situations were often seasoned with salt, startlingly frank, and unsparing of herself. It came from a heart ready to try for the truth, before the Lord, whom she loved plainly and with unsentimental honesty. So for Brooke, there was a quiet commitment based on a lifetime of experience of God’s priorities and regular worship. When the mists began to gather about her, and her faults began to fade, the disciplines of worship never left her, she never wanted to surrender her readiness to worship. And now that the mists have cleared, and she is young, and well again, her readiness to explore the mansion Christ has promised her is renewed. Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven, she is ready now to see God’s face.
Brooke,

God rest you.
Praise well.
Until we meet again.Amen.