Here is a brief description of the funeral for Captain Aloyisius Norton, my friend.

The Description of that February Day,
AS beutiful as ever, the Chapel of the Most Holy Trinity looked out majestically on the Hudson, and the "white radiance of eternity" was streaming into the Chapel in many-colored light through the stained glass windows. Kings Point (including Admiral Matteson) was very well and honorably represented in the Chapel by former colleagues and students alike, although I know that there were a great many people who would have liked to have been there and just found it impossible to do so. (Note: The Capt. wanted this to take place on a Saturday for people's convenience, but this wasn't possible.) After the mass, I delivered this eulogy. (Major Figa has put it on the USMMA home page under "Dedication.") After that, Captain Norton's former student and dear friend of thirty years, Bud Loechner, delivered a very moving eulogy as well. Subsequently, Aloysius was buried in the WP cemetery with full military honors. Then friends and family met for luncheon together at the WP Officer's Club.

His Eulogy
Very early last Saturday morning, just after learning about my friend Aloysius's passing and after having written my draft of this eulogy, I spoke with a close friend of mine, who, over the phone recited the Hebrew Sabbath Prayer. I was so moved by it that I asked her to dictate it , and I transcribed it. It seemed so right at the time, for there was much miraculous about Aloysius we were not always fully appreciative of, and that we now will especially miss. Here is the prayer:

Hebrew Sabbath Prayer
Days pass and the years vanish,
And we walk sightless among miracles.
Lord, fill our eyes with seeing, and our minds with knowing,
Let there be moments when the lightning of your presence
Illumines the darkness in which we walk.

Presiding over his living room in Douglaston Queens, Aloysius's picture of a brooding snow leopard stares out at us, perched on his ledge above a rocky, snow-covered chasm, like a Buddhist monk contemplating the abyss. But unlike the monk's eyes, the leopard's eyes are sharp, clear, and focused, and at the same time his inner clarity and integrity warms them, and they look not at the chasm above which they stand, but at us.

There was never, never anyone quite like Aloysius. My dear friend and colleague, Captain Aloysius A. Norton, was a great lover of life. He seemed to live by Yeats's line, "take all your days and ram them with the sun." You just had to see him once on a dance floor to know this. He embraced life so passionately and unequivocally that when he walked into a room he brought with him waves of energy and excitement that were palpable to anyone around.

If he was a snow leopard, he was also a gadfly of the Socratic variety. He believed in the life of the mind, in thinking and talking with others about the subjects of his thought . Often the focus of his conversation was the phenomenology of Christian love and God, which he was always redefining for himself, as well as thinking out its relation to human love; as his friend, I was privileged to share in this redefining process, which often took the form of intense conversations in my living room among Aloysius, my husband Boris, and me, and sometimes other friends who had joined us. Those conversations, joint meditations which would be carried on even while we were throwing dinner together or getting the kids ready for a playdate or relocating to the TV room to start watching a football game, would reverberate in my mind for weeks.

Through such dialogues, which he carried on with his numerous friends and students, Aloysius embodied and transmitted his belief in continuous growth and self-challenge, in our mission to encounter other humans eye to eye, mind to mind, and heart to heart. Aloysius cared very deeply about people. He made friends from all walks of life--and, friends of all ages, occupations, religions, and ethic backgrounds. And once you were Aloysius's friend, you knew there wasn't anything he wouldn't do for you. And as he very much appreciated that in the last phase of his life, there was nothing that his friends wouldn't do for him. In the l990's, he came back to the Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point after retirement because he wanted to keep on teaching, just as he wanted to keep on growing and to be around growing minds. He gave many courses and independent studies to students--courses on Zen and Literature, Classical Tragedy, Love in Literature, and Literature and Criticism on the Internet--and his classroom discussions always crackled. If you'd taken a course with Captain Norton, then you knew what life, literature, and thinking were all about! He knew exactly how to get his students wound up in discussion--though woe betide anyone who dared come to his class without having read the material!!

But his Socratic gadflyism was evident not just to his students. Oftentimes it made him want to shake people up, get them moving--intellectually, psychically, and emotionally. He could be crusty as all hell with people, but it was vital to him to keep the lines of human interconnection clear, strong, and unalloyed by things of lesser importance. As for anything that remotely resembled triviality, laziness, sloppy thinking, or bureaucratic delay or evasion--these were immediate provocations to him--and he was always determined to cut away at them to get done what had to be done. It's no wonder that early in the nineties, when he was in his mid-seventies, he could immediately grasp the importance of the Web and was able to prevail on the powers that be at fiscally strained Kings Point to find funds to put our institution on the Internet.

As a colleague, sometimes I'd find myself getting into ridiculous fights over literary interpretations with him, as for example when he'd say--outrageously--that the evil King Claudius in Hamlet pursued his fratricidal course because he was a fool for the love of Queen Gertrude, or that the Duchess in Browning's "My Last Duchess" deserved her fate because she needed to "get a life"--i.e., not be so blandly delighted with everything that came her way. By the way, it was only three weeks ago, when he was already quite ill, that we got into the Browning argument .! And I'd get all wound up, and tell him he was off the wall, and what about THIS, this!!!, and this!!!!! in the text--and suddenly I'd notice that he was sitting there with a twinkle in his eye. He would laugh and say, "well now, at least I've gotten you to rethink your assumptions about it." But then he'd just keep on arguing.

As I rode home from visiting one very beautiful and mild evening, the sunset, which I knew he could also see from his bedroom window, was especially spectacular, and a line from Hamlet popped into my head: "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will." One of the more wonderful aspects of the last phase of Aloysius's life is that he knew that he was nearing the end and had unfinished business to take care of. For one thing, he felt that he could not die in peace before he had finished the book he was writing on the novels of West Point entitled Heroes, Virtue, and Innocence, The Novels of West Point. Though he could not get around any more, with the help of a tape recorder, and help from West Point and Kings Point Library staff, he was able to complete this book, in which his deep love for West Point is evident. (It struck me, in reading sections of this book, that West Point might well have played the role of a cherished paradise in his life, reminding him of his own golden age. It was a Garden of Eden to which he could and did return.)

Even more significantly, he was able to visit with his large and remarkably wonderful family and talk with them. Lenore Norton told him of how grateful she was that God had blessed them with their eight children. There were many visits, calls, and letters from cousins, children, and grandchildren. Touchingly this last week, his son Paul recounted what turned out to be his last conversation with his father. Paul was with him very shortly before he died, and as Paul took his leave for the night, Aloysius said to him, "God bless you, Paul," and Paul said to him, "No dad, God bless you." And I know that, if he could not always bring himself to speak the words directly to each of them, in his heart he blessed his whole family. The beauty and quickness of life, and the all-consuming importance of love: these were Aloysius's living messages for all around him, and especially in the latter part of his life when I was privileged to know him. There was one thing in particular he did in his last few years that he was especially proud of: he served as a volunteer at a hospital in Queens where he would go to an infants' ward and spend his time holding those infants and looking into their eyes. Some of them were extremely ill; some had AIDS. They all needed holding...and he held them. This is the legacy of love that he leaves behind for all of us, his family, and his friends. It is this thought, that now in the ache of our missing him, sustains us, gives us comfort, and beckons to us, inviting us to continue to partake of his spiritual legacy."

Written and presented by
Dr. Laury Magnus, Professor of Literature
Department of Humanities,
US Merchant Marine Academy, Kings Point NY