Sometimes, Mary Quinn remembers, when he was not lucid he would suddenly call out repeatedly for “Mary, Mary,” and she knew “it wasn’t me he was calling for.” The past resurfaced in other surprising ways, such as the time that the nurse found two old letters from Irene O’Connor in his bedside table, the one that had faithfully displayed a picture of his mother throughout his life. During short periods of sudden clarity, Norman would enjoy talking about his past. He’d reminisce about his ancestors and Molly’s, egged on by the portraits of their relatives that hung on the walls. The dining room especially, the walls and rug dark, dramatically red, the warm rich burn of the deep wood furniture casting a glow in the late afternoon sun, seemed to inspire his most complicated and romantic reveries.
One day when things weren’t going too well in the household, Norman’s yelling reached a crescendo that mobilized his loyal little entourage to carry him downstairs, tuck him into his wheelchair, and roll him into his studio. But now that the big day had come, and the artist was finally inside, he sat there for almost an hour, saying nothing, just staring at the picture on the easel. Finally, he spoke: “This is not my studio,” he said firmly. No one knew what to say.
He never asked to return, although his raging against his infirmities continued for a few more months. On the night of November 3, David Wood went up to bed before the Rockwells did. Settled in for the evening, a few hours later he glanced up from his reading to see Molly—still, slight, urgent, and commanding, standing in the doorframe. She had never before come to his room at night. “He is gone,” she said quietly.
He strode quickly down the hall toward the couple’s suite of rooms and, entering Norman’s bedroom, he immediately realized that Molly was right. Lying on his back, his hand on the coverlet turned gently so that his palm seemed to beseech heaven, the exhausted artist wore a look of repose on his face that reassured David even as it momentarily seized him with grief. He was happy that Norman Rockwell was dead; he hadn’t looked this peaceful in years.
. . .
Time magazine would mourn the artist’s passing, ranking him with Margaret Mead, Hubert Humphrey, Golda Meir, and Edgar Bergen as among the most noteworthy people to have died in 1978. And the art critic Robert Hughes, in the same publication, would sensitively eulogize the man whom one of his profession had less generously nicknamed “the Rembrandt of Punkin Crick.” Norman Rockwell’s funeral was held at two P.M. on November 11, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, where Mary’s funeral had taken place nineteen years before, and where he had married Molly two years later. Two hundred passes were printed and distributed by David Wood to parishioners and out-of-town friends. As the “neighbor, friend, tenant” explained to the newspapers, the family had realized that if they didn’t take some steps to control the crowds wanting to pay their respects, local people would have no chance to pay theirs.
The service was thirty-five minutes long, led with a reading of Rockwell’s favorite poem, “Abou Ben Adhem,” also printed in the program. Its author, Leigh Hunt, was a “middling” poet among the giant Romantics whose time he shared. The British writer was a generous, courageous, liberal, well-read man who, quite appropriately, reminds at least one major scholar of the period of—who else?—Mr. Micawber in Rockwell’s beloved David Copperfield. “Abou Ben Adhem” narrates the enfolding of one man’s love for his fellows into love of God; at first denied inclusion among the names of those who “love the Lord,” Ben Adhem’s “name led all the rest” “whom love of God had blessed,” after the angel has relayed the man’s love of his neighbors to the Lord.
During his short and powerful eulogy, David commented that “the world pays tribute to [Rockwell] for his creation of beauty and that is important, but more important was the man behind those images: the sensitive mind, the discerning eye, the loving heart, the generous spirit. We will let the world and time take care of his art, the pictures and the images and what they may say to us. What we say farewell to today is the man, our friend and neighbor.”
The sons sat up front with Molly, who, true to the word she had given David, stiffly remained dry-eyed, resolute in her desire not to cry private tears in a public forum. She knew how to do right by her husband; she could rise to the occasion, as the New England schoolteacher had always prompted her husband to do when he thought himself too tired or too sick to behave properly. Peter Rockwell led her out of the church, where honor guards of Cub and Boy Scouts lining the paths stood at attention. The coffin was taken to the cemetery a few blocks away, next door to the first house that Mary and Norman had inhabited back in 1954, when they moved to Stockbridge to begin the final leg of their journey together.
Rockwell was buried in a modest plot overlooking an expanse of brilliant green pasture off Church Street. His simple marble tombstone gives his name and the dates of life and death, nothing more. On one side of him, slightly to the upper left, is Mary Rockwell’s grave. Six years later, and by virtue of the artist’s forethought, Molly Rockwell’s would be exactly the same size, with the same imprinting, and in the same position, but to the right of Rockwell’s marker. Both women would have smiled at their husband’s typical tactfulness, and at the way that the artist once again seemed to have it all.
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