Yoko was wonderful. It would have been enough if she had just been stylish and graceful, artistic, and endowed with impeccable good taste. But she also shared her gifts so generously with me and I know with each of you. This open generosity is the thing I will cherish most in my memories of Yoko.
I met Yoko at work in 1995, and we became much better friends in 1997 when she joined a reading group that I had also joined a few months earlier. In our reading group and in other situations, Yoko was a really generous participant and hostess. She had a way of making each person in a group feel comfortable and interesting and unique, usually against a backdrop of good food and great music. I remember in particular one summer evening in Yoko and Giordano’s back yard a couple of years ago. I was living away from the Bay Area at the time, and I was back here for a business trip. Knowing that I would be bored and alone in the hotel room over the weekend, Yoko kindly invited me to a barbeque on Saturday night with a few friends. It was an absolutely perfect evening, with the expected delicious, interesting food and great conversation, and also with a huge full moon shining down on us through the trees, as if Yoko had arranged that, too. And that evening I kept marveling to myself about the pure generosity of Yoko’s heart that she would think of me and open her home to me that way at a time when I particularly needed it. I hope she knew just how much her kindness meant to me. If we can believe in a hereafter or that we’re going to a heaven, I hope it has the same spirit of friendship, conviviality, warm hospitality, and simple beauty that that evening had. If Yoko is there, we know that it will.
In addition to her generosity, there were and are so many things that I loved and love about Yoko. I love her ability to turn something plain into something fancy, her thoughtfulness and concern about other people, her hard work at her painting and other arts such as cuisine, her sense of color, her good advice about decorating my own home, and also her courage. Every time I go to or drive by Kepler’s bookstore in Menlo Park, I think of Yoko. Once she told me that many, many years ago, she used to go to Kepler’s when it was a communist bookstore, and she used to hear Joan Baez sing there. And I keep thinking, here she was, this young woman from another country, from a culture that’s typically characterized as more restrictive or inward-looking than our own, and she was traveling and living and working in Europe and the US, being open to all kinds of great experiences. What courage it took to undertake this adventure. We all know that she faced her last illness with courage, too, and I hope that when the end of my own life comes, I will face it with Yoko’s example in front of me.
And I loved Yoko’s quiet sense of humor—the way she frequently described the color of her house as "the color of a bandaid" always cracked me up. With all of her innate talents and gifts and the abilities she worked to develop, she never took herself so seriously that she couldn’t laugh at such a silly description of the house she loved, and, typical of her, she generously shared that description with other people who would find it funny, too.
I guess we’ll never be able to understand why we lose people too early like this, and maybe the only comforts we can find now are, for one, to know that Yoko isn’t suffering any more, and for another, since each of us here loved Yoko dearly, to know that we share today a sense of not only loss but also gratitude that we were able to participate in the life of such a lovely, lovely woman.
Fran Fuller