Houston: At the Episcopal church that has been her spiritual home for more than 50 years, former first lady Barbara Pierce Bush was celebrated at her funeral as one of the most beloved political matriarchs in US history.
Bush, the wife of the 41st president and the mother of the 43rd, died Tuesday in the bedroom of her home in Houston. She was 92, and took her last breaths holding the hand of her husband of 73 years, former President George H.W. Bush.
As her coffin lay beneath an ivory-coloured pall in the Centre aisle of St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, some of the most powerful and famous political figures in the United States — including four of the five living former presidents — gathered to honour a woman who carried her own power and fame lightly.
“We learnt to strive to be genuine and authentic by the best role model in the world,” Barbara Bush’s son, Jeb Bush, the former two-term governor of Florida, told mourners in his eulogy. The family called her Bar, Mother, Ganny, the Silver Fox and, notably, the Enforcer, as she used her wit, humour and tough love to raise six children, 17 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
“She called her style a benevolent dictatorship,” Jeb Bush added, “but honestly it wasn’t always benevolent.”
Jon Meacham, a presidential historian, said in his eulogy that he once asked Barbara Bush’s husband, the former president, if he knew early on how resilient his wife would be. He and Barbara Bush had met shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, at a dance in Greenwich, Connecticut. She was 16. He was 17.
“She’s the rock of the family, the leader of the family,” George Bush told Meacham. “I kind of float above it all.”
Nearly 8,000 people, from the rich and the famous to the working-class and the anonymous, came to St. Martin’s for a public viewing Friday and the private funeral Saturday.
From noon to midnight Friday, more than 6,200 people paid their respects at the viewing, filing past her closed coffin and pausing just long enough to bow their heads or make the sign of the cross. On Saturday, about 1,500 people attended the funeral, under the watch of hundreds of local, state and federal law enforcement officers.
Former presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George Bush attended, but not the current occupant of the White House, President Donald Trump, whom Barbara Bush had criticised in television interviews during the 2016 presidential campaign. White House officials said Trump would not attend “to avoid disruptions due to added security, and out of respect for the Bush family and friends attending the service.”
Former President Jimmy Carter and Eleanor Rosalynn Carter, the former first lady, were also not present; a spokeswoman said that Jimmy Carter would be on a private trip overseas and that his wife was recovering from recent surgery.
Three former first ladies — Michelle Obama, Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton — joined the current one, Melania Trump, at St. Martin’s on Saturday. Even at the funeral for a woman who famously said she left the politics to her husband, the imagery was impossible to ignore in this moment of bitter divisions in American political life. In a single front pew, Melania Trump sat shoulder to shoulder with the Obamas and the Clintons to pay tribute to a Bush family eminence.
Amid the splendour of the scene — a white-robed choir filling the cavernous Gothic-style cathedral with “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” — the recollections of those close to her repeatedly brought the setting back down to earth.
“What an interesting thing to be a confidant to a woman who has no secrets,” Barbara Bush’s pastor, the Rev. Russell J. Levenson junior, the rector of St. Martin’s, said in his homily. “What you saw was what you got.”
The coffin was wheeled out of the church by eight of Barbara Bush’s grandsons, who served as pallbearers. She was buried more than 90 miles northwest in College Station, in a private service on the grounds of the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum. She was laid to rest beside her daughter Robin, who died of leukaemia at the age of 3 in 1953.
Barbara Bush’s wit did not wane as she approached the end of her life.
Days before her death, Levenson, Bush’s pastor, arrived at the Bush home in the Tanglewood section of Houston late Saturday afternoon. Bush had gone upstairs to bed. Levenson walked up the stairs to pray with her.
“I knocked on the door and came in,” Levenson said in an interview. “I said, ‘Bar, it’s Russ.’ And she said, ‘Well, I’m not checking out today.’”
In her last days and even hours, Bush appeared to be surrounded by her two favourite things as she lay on her bed — her family and her books. Friends, relatives and medical assistants read to Bush, a longtime advocate of adult and child literacy. They read to her from the Bible and from her book about her late English springer spaniel, Millie. Levenson read from the Book of Psalms, and then a couple of chapters from “Little Women.”
“‘Pride and Prejudice’ is actually her favourite book,” Levenson said. “I was looking for that as I was going through her library downstairs, and I thought that was a good runner-up.”
On Saturday, after he prayed with Bush, Levenson stepped outside the bedroom, shut the door and was talking to her medical aides when he heard Bush call out. Levenson went back to the door.
“I said, ‘Bar, are you OK?’ And she said, ‘Yes. But tell him I adore him.’”
He relayed the message to George Bush, the first and only boy, she often said with pride, she had ever kissed.
