Remembrances of Rion Wight

November 14, 2009
All Souls Church, Berkeley

Rio Wight was such a remarkable young man. As has been said in many different ways, Rio was an old soul in a young man’s body. I will always remember the way that Rio would look at you. He had kind and piercing brown eyes that seems to know so much, that communicated so clearly the life of that old soul, the deep and compassionate inner life he had. Quite aside from any suffering he may have had in his life, to look into those eyes was to see a serenity and a maturity and a wisdom that was undeniable. This sense he projected was so strong that it is evident in photographs of him, that calm and steady countenance, and that slight, almost Mona-Lisa-like smile

Rio’s given name was Rion a French name after his grandfather, that Rio changed when he was only six years old. When Rio had been mixed up with a boy named Ryan one too many time, he adjusted the French pronunciation to “Rio.” He could not have known then that he would grow to have a great love of rivers, and the name would fit him so perfectly. I met Rio when he was only nine years old, but I have been told that that his artistic spirit and even his talent and love of architecture was readily apparent from an even earlier age. At pre-school he would spend hours and hours building castles with legos or duplos, or later with those big card board blocks. And he would not build them the typical way. He would build these structures in surprising ways- ways that no other kid would have thought of. He later lovingly drew and painted these castles with fantastically tall towers and spires.

But as important as these expressions of his artistic soul were to him, his great love of nature was just as important, and also started at a very early age. Rio spent his summers for many years with his beloved mentor and former pre-school teacher, Brian, and an assortment of pre to grade school children in Tilden park, wiling away the hours spotting hundreds of species of birds- owls, great herons, red tailed hawks, one time even an arctic tern. They would play with newts in the creeks, and hike along blackberry-fringed paths. And best of all, they would listen to Brian’s endless and wonderful stories. Rio loved these summers and he became Camp Brian’s first paid counselor, helping out with the little kids once he had grown up a bit.

Later Rio grew to love tracking in the forest, trying to find and identify the tracks of his fellow creatures in the woods. Nature seemed to connect him to his own nature like nothing else. And Rio’s nature was rich in so many ways- he had a fine intelligence, all that artistic talent, that kind, compassionate soul. He was a beautiful young man, inside and out, and he had and has wonderful loving parents, a devoted younger brother and many loving friends.

It seems fitting that the last vacation the Wight family took together with Rio was to the exquisite natural wonder of Mount Shasta. At the end of the vacation, Susan asked Rio if she could take a picture of just him. So now we have this treasure- a beautiful picture of Rio, wearing that serene and slightly amused expression so typical of him, with the mountains just behind him, almost ready to go on his last journey.

I remember a day in 1999 when I was taking a hike in the Berkeley hills and I saw a figure literally appearing through the mist- that was Rio’s mother, Susan. We started walking and talking, and she told me about an idea she had that she thought would be really good for her artistic, somewhat introverted son- an after-school arts program for middle schoolers.

This became the Youth Arts Studio, and I never saw Rio happier than when he would sit at the tables- over there in the parish hall, drawing and painting to his heart’s content. The portfolio he developed at Youth Arts Studio helped him to be accepted at Cornell University where he studied architecture- a fulfillment of his early childhood castle-building ambitions. He had taken a leave of absence from Cornell in the past year, but then returned, re- connecting with his good friends there, hoping to resume his studies.

After a memorial service was set up for Rio at the Episcopal chapel at Cornell, Rio’s best friend called Susan to say, you know, Rio wasn’t religious, and none of his friends out here are really religious either- can we have the service in the architecture building? And so it will be- Rio will be remembered not only here, where his spiritual and artistic lives were nurtured, but in the place where he pursued his life’s calling with his fellow artists.

A week or so after Rio was gone, his mother told me that she had had a very specific sense of his presence. Rio had so loved to go off on new adventures on his own, and she said she got a sudden and certain sense of his joy in the adventure of this next part of his journey, a joy of discovering something utterly, thrillingly new.

There is a spiritual concept that I’ve always loved, about a great river- that the great stream of life, before, during and after our earthly existence is like a great river. When it hits a waterfall and the individual drops separate for a few moments- this is what we call life. And then the drops re-join the great flow of that river.

Happy travels, Rio. Wherever you are on the river, we hope that our love and our thoughts reach you. We know that you are now joyful, please know how much we love you, and know that you will always be with us in our hearts.