Jenny Mountjoy - January 30th Memorial

My name is Jenny and I am Benji's first cousin. I want to thank you for coming here, for showing your support and love for our family.

We are a close family and I have always been close with my aunt Hope and uncle Bob. I was born 4 years before David, and this worked to my advantage. They would often take me for the weekend, spoiling me – I learned to walk at their house. Hope and Bob have always been wonderful and generous and unconditionally loving and I was lucky to be a recipient of their affection from a very young age. I want you to know this because I feel that who my aunt and uncle are helped to make Ben the great person that he became.

I was very close to Ben. He always felt like a familial soul mate…like you might feel about your sibling – having similarities, sharing a genetic link, feeling really comfortable and at ease together.

Standing here today, reading e-mails, and talking to his friends and family over the last two weeks, I realize that Ben was close with many people. And that is what I want to speak to today. I want to talk about Ben's gift to us - the gift he gave while he was here in this world and the gift that he has given us even though he is gone. It is the gift of relationship.

There were so many people who met Ben in so many places. Whether they met on a boat between Ecuador and Peru or lived near him in Boulder or went to college with him, everybody felt close to Ben. How did he do that? How did he impact the lives of hundreds of people so deeply? It is his gift of relationship. He traveled all over and I believe that part of his love of traveling was that he had the opportunity to meet and get to know people – other travelers and locals. He loved the relationship.

He would show up in California a lot and we always felt lucky and so happy to see him. He was so relaxed – he was the no impact houseguest, pure pleasure. There he'd be with his little backpack that held his 3 belongings for his 6 month trip to South America and it was still smaller than my purse. It became a bit of a joke between us, but lately I have been thinking about how he hardly ever had any baggage when he visited and I started thinking about that literally and figuratively. He had no baggage. (I think the whole idea of someone with baggage extends beyond us Californians but in case it doesn't, I am referring to emotional baggage.)

I think that his lightness, his free spirit way, his interest in other people and places was partly because he traveled lightly, not a lot of baggage. Yet he could go deep and be real. It was a gift that he had and that he used to touch hundreds of lives. It is work to form a relationship, to stay in contact and he was willing to do that work. He not only created relationships, he maintained them.

My friend once said to me that often in a relationship there is the gardener and there is the flower. Ben was a gardener.

Soon after the tsunami hit, family and friends gathered in Chicago , helping in any way that we could. Our closeness became evident immediately. Relationships were re-established and new ones were established. Cousins became siblings and strangers became friends. I had never experienced anything like it. Then it occurred to me – like a lightning strike. It was Ben. It was his gift of relationship. He was still giving it. I had received this gift before, when he was alive, but I had never expected it after he was gone. Ben, the gardener, was still at work, tending what was already started and giving strength to any potential that might be there.

While I was in Chicago , I learned that my son, Emmett had the word tsunami on his spelling list. I thought, “Who would have ever dreamed that that word would change our lives - that it would be a word that a fourth grader would need to know how to spell.” How poignant and yet strange. A week later, the morning after I returned to California, Emmett asked me to help him with his new spelling words. About half way through we came to the word coalesce . My first thought was, as I am sure you are thinking now, I certainly couldn't spell it in the fourth grade and I don't even know if I could spell it now! So I asked Emmett if he knew what coalesce meant and he said, “Sure, it means to form together as one.” He went on to say that he used it in a sentence at school. He pulled out a sheet of paper and read from it:

When we were hugging our mama so much it looked like we were coalescing.

It was then that I realized the relevance of my son's spelling words. How painful it is to think and write tsunami but how healing and important it is to coalesce. I thought about how we have come together; coalesced in order to search for Ben, coalesced to help and support Ben's family, and now today, we have coalesced. We have formed together as one, for Ben, because of Ben.

I think so much about how Ben lived his life using his gifts. I think of how Ben would want me to live my life right now. So I ask you to leave here today and use the gifts that Ben gave us – to have good relationships, be the gardener sometimes, get on the floor and be playful with your dog – or kids, take the trip to wherever and go light with the baggage. Doing this you take Ben with you. This is how he lives on.