Last Friday, our family celebrated a memorial for my wife Peggy’s sister, Michele (Mitchy) DuRivage, a mother, wife, sister, sister-in-law, aunt, cousin, acquaintance and friend who transitioned from this life several weeks ago. After the funeral Mass in Katonah NY, we all gathered at our daughter Maggie’s splendid green house in nearby Westport CT to share reflections on Michele’s life. What follows are my remarks as I remember them in somewhat expanded form:
When someone dies, there is always a temptation to simplify them. We smooth out the rough edges. We make them easier than they really were. But Mitchy would have hated that. She refused performance in life, and she would not want performance now.
She was a truth seeker. She cared far less about what people thought of her than about whether something was true. In a world built so much on appearances, and social performance, that could make her difficult for some people. Her refusal to pretend was sometimes interpreted as selfishness or entitlement. A former friend once described her as “the most aggressively entitled person I have ever met.”
But I came to see something else in her.
In the process of helping her write her memoir, I came to see a woman who simply could not comfortably live inside lies — not personal lies, not social lies, not emotional lies. She was outspokenly aware that she lived in a dishonest world. As a result, she was often dismissed as a conspiracy theorist. But Mitchy herself once said something quite unforgettable because it has so often proven true: “The difference between a conspiracy theory and the truth is about six months.”
That line was funny. But it was also revealing. Mitchy distrusted appearances. She kept looking beneath surfaces. Sometimes she was wrong, as we all are. But she was committed to honesty in a way many people never dare to be.
Her memoir made that especially clear to me. Before we worked together, I realize now that I had never known her very well. Through telling her story, I discovered someone morally sensitive almost to a fault. She was haunted by guilt over tragedies for which she bore no real responsibility — especially the death of her sister Suzy when Mitchy was a mere adolescent. That kind of unnecessary guilt does not come from lack of conscience, but from an excess of it. Mitchy felt things deeply.
She was also a woman with a powerful sense of beauty. She was a photographer, someone who trained herself to notice light, texture, faces, moments. She carried that same artistic instinct into the way she dressed and presented herself. She loved fashion, elegance, style — not, I think, out of vanity, but because she wanted life itself to be beautiful. She understood that beauty matters.
And she was deeply committed to the people she loved, especially as a mother. Beneath the toughness, beneath the sharp observations and fierce honesty, there was loyalty and protectiveness.
Over time, I grew to love Mitchy very much as we together finished what amounts to her last will and testament which inevitably evokes thoughts about our own endings and what we’re leaving behind.
Mitchy was tough. Passionate. Self-respecting. Honest sometimes to the point of danger. She laughed at herself — and of course at everybody else too. She loved nature. She liked getting dressed up for a drink and to work in her garden. She made mistakes and could admit them without endless defensiveness or self-justification. In that sense, she taught something important about love itself.
She taught us that love is not pretending.
Love tells the truth. Love admits weakness. Love keeps its eyes open. Love refuses falseness. Love remains passionate despite disappointment. Love laughs. Love suffers. Love keeps searching.
That is the Mitchy I came to know.
And now, whatever we believe lies beyond this life, I hope she has found what she spent so much of her life searching for — peace, truth, beauty, and freedom from the burdens she carried too long.
May she rest in peace.
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