Same job, different uniform.

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Dear Helen,
Dan Williams was at your funeral.
I wish you could have been there.
Love,
Kate

It was a tribute to you that he was there. Was Larry LaRocco there? I didn't see him. But Dan was. Approached by Graham Paterson, he was invited to join your staff in the front row. He did. It was at once comical and touching. He paid his respects and I think everyone felt that they were his respects.

Your grandson Dominick got it right. "She treated the dusty cowboy sitting at her dining room table, and probably getting dirt all over the floor with his dirty boots, with the same respect she had for a colleague in Congress. There was no front. Only Helen."

Butch Ottter, visibly moved, offered a kind of prayer, ending with the hope that "you would be proud" of your replacement.

Larry Craig recalled your work in the Forestry Subcommittee; work that survives in the form of the Healthy Forest Initiative.

Four of your grandchildren read tributes from dignitaries like Henry Hyde and Newt Gingrich. But it was the tributes of those who knew you best, those with less at stake than Hyde or Gingrich, like Ron Paul and Todd Tiahrt and your son-in-law John Keenan, that would have touched you most, I think.

There were themes: Your grace, your respectfulness, the love and kindness that you approached everyone with--even your enemies. The passion and frankness that inspired your voters; the unwavering faith in God that inspired your friends.

Everyone was there. Former staff members, like Chief of Staff Keith Rupp ("I always knew I'd come out for her funeral. I just assumed it'd be 2o years from now."), flew in from far and wide. Afterwards we swapped stories and raised a ruckus. As per usual. Only you weren't there to stop us.

We were stoic until they rolled the video tribute. The images of you--as a child, as a mother, as a grandmother, in three tumultuous elections, in Congress, in retirement, on the ranch, with Wayne--lept to life. For once, The Idaho Statesman got it right.

Idaho already feels empty without you.

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