Chapter 33 –
Plans and hopes
I’d like to say I helped a great deal, but Elise put everything together for the next day. At some point she got the group of assistants together and explained how she wanted to do the memorial service. She asked them to find a good series of images and videos of Jolliet. She left it to their discretion to find the materials they thought most representative. The kids must have worked all night, but I bet they did it with pride knowing how many would be viewing their work.
Elise also had long talks with many people who wished to make a statement at the service. Allocating limited time to many people was surely a challenge, but she handled it well. At least I think she did. I went to bed around midnight. She was in bed with me when I woke up at six. How long she had been there, I had no idea.
She was pretty lost in her own thoughts as we went down to breakfast, and I did not bother her. As it was, she was interrupted pretty constantly by people who had suggestions for this or that. I am not sure she really got to eat much.
What was the memorial service like? Obviously I am biased, but I thought she did a great job. Precisely at nine she walked up to a lectern set between the two screens. For the last half hour the screens had been showing a long series of stills and videos of Jolliet for people to watch as they entered the room and took their seats. Now that the service was to begin, the screens froze on a great picture of him standing out on his farm with his family around him. Elise paused for just a second, and then began.
“President Claude Jolliet died yesterday. His body has been taken to Green Bay and it will lie in state in the Capital Building for two days while people pay their respects. Then there will be a formal service at the National Cathedral. As a former head of state, leaders from around the world will attend that service. That is as it should be. But it is also appropriate that we conduct our own brief service, we who were his family and friends. You are the people he chose to spend his final hours with. You are the people who pleased him the most. We feel grief at this time, and loss, but I think we should also take some pleasure in the fact that we came when he called. He had one final task for us, and we accepted the work.”
“So we will talk about President Jolliet – Uncle Claude – for the next hour. We will remember him as our friend and as our mentor and as a national treasure. And then, precisely at ten, we will return to the work he gave us. We will once again discuss how we can save our nation.”
At this point she introduced the first speaker, the first of nearly thirty. Most were former politicians, so they were articulate and witty. A few non-politicians stumbled a bit, or started tearing up during their remarks, but overall, it went pretty well. No one hogged the mic. No one told an inappropriate joke. No one mentioned how Jolliet had come to be so injured in the first place. The last three speakers each gave a prayer. One was Catholic, one Protestant, one a healer from the Sioux.
What I found interesting was that the memorial service was not an end in itself, but a prelude to Jolliet’s gathering. We would sit, and talk about him, and then we would do his work. That gave the service a completely different feel from anything else I have experienced. Usually a service like that is all about the past. This one was about the present – and the future.
Elise reminded us of that when she retook the lectern at ten.
“Uncle Claude was a great leader, and like any great leader, he was fundamentally a teacher. And, yesterday he gave us some homework.” There were chuckles around the room. I think people liked the somewhat lighter touch. “While we were talking yesterday afternoon and evening, Felicite and Paul took nearly one thousand statements and grouped them. I asked them to find common elements among the requirements for peace. Felicite and Paul, please stand so we can thank you for your work.” The two young people were standing at the fringe of the meeting. They raised a hand and received a very polite round of applause. “I would point out,” Elise added, “They were still working at this job at five this morning.” The applause got louder.
“And now they have the materials ready for you. Here is our challenge. In the two hours we have left in this gathering, we need to review these requirements for peace, and determine if they can be met. If they can be met, we then need to explain how they can be met. This is a task that cannot be completed in one morning. You will need to take these requirements with you, and you will need to continue your work with your communities. But this morning, while we are all together, we will start down the road President Jolliet left for us to follow. Now we will study these statements, and we will ask a simple question. Can the requirements be met or not? At twelve o’clock I will call you all together and we will vote “yes” or “no”.” She signaled to the young assistants, and they quickly distributed copies of the statements to all. Each booklet must have been twenty pages long. I immediately felt sorry for the people who had done the aggregating. What a job that must have been.
What happened for the next two hours? The noise was deafening. Everyone had something to say to everyone else around them. It felt like a thousand people were having two or three thousand conversations. I actually joined in. As an American, I probably should have stayed out, but I was interested, and the people around me just seemed to naturally include me. So we talked. The assistants had put labels over each of the requirements, and we discovered that at least according to them, twenty seven different things had to be done for the country to be saved. I guess that was a revelation in itself. Somehow being able to count the problems seemed to make them manageable. Did we resolve them all in two hours? Not even close. We jumped around a bit as one person in our group read ahead and found something intriguing, and then we would jump on to something else. But even a quick scan showed the problems were not unsolvable. Safer neighborhoods? Sure. Two new Huguenot holidays? Why not? More money from gulf oil to Louisiana? Not sure there. New history textbooks explaining Huguenot history more fully? Maybe. In short, we didn’t have answers for everything, but there was nothing we looked at that seemed to be impossible.
So when Elsie stepped back up to the microphone at twelve and asked, “Can these requirements be met?” The resounding answer was “yes.” Was that exactly a fair representation of the possibility of success? No. We were in Claude Jolliet’s room. His picture still showed on the screens. We had come to his gathering. Were we going to leave saying his efforts would not succeed? Of course not. So he had stacked the deck (with help from Elise), but we knew that. Just the same, I think people also left feeling pretty positive about how things might go once they got to their home communities as well.
Speaking of leaving, I thought we never would. While the gathering had been scheduled to end at noon, and most people did, there were many who wanted yet another conversation with Elise. She stood around the ballroom for two hours, talking. But that wasn’t the end of it. I got her down to the dining room for lunch, but again folks kept coming by our table to talk. At four most people were gone, but now the hotel people wanted to talk with her about charges and accounts. That went on so long I gave up on leaving until the next morning. Somewhere in the hotel lot was a brand new Ford with my name on it, but I would have to wait another day to get behind the wheel.
The Canadian Civil War: Volume 5 - Carbines and Calumets Page 33