Projo 7 to 7 News Blog

Among the speakers at the service were the Rev. Michael L. Lindvall, senior minister of Brick Presbyterian, who urged those in attendance not to ask the question "why" but rather "how" they could move on from the tragic events that started nearly 30 years ago when Mrs. von Bulow was found unconscious on the floor of her bathroom at Clarendon Court in Newport.

Addressing the children, Lindvall acknowledged that over the last 28 years they had been burdened with "a long grief ... a very long coma and then the death," which he said was "almost a release of a woman so well-loved and so deeply respected by many."

"We are so very vulnerable," Lindvall said. "Life is a very precious gift and it is a gift that does not come with guarantees." Life, he said, carries "no guarantee that it will be free of pain and without disappointment. It is simply a gift. It is freely given, and it is oh, so very delicate."

Also speaking at the service was Sunny's best friend from her high school days at St. Timothy's, Isabel Glover.

Glover fondly remembered her friend as a bright, beautiful yet self-effacing woman who bought Glover her first pair of contact lenses. She said Sunny was someone who was "fun, full of humor" and someone who "giggled at everyone's witticisms." She was poised and looked sophisticated but wasn't stuck up in any way, Glover said.

Glover said one of the things she remembered about her friend was that Sunny wore her eyeglasses askew on her nose to play tennis because she felt she could see better if she looked through the rims. At school she liked to play the piano and sing in a choir and as an adult she became very bookish and traveled extensively. She was a woman, Glover said, who had "a strong sense of self."

She was also someone so beautiful and glamorous that she "attracted everyone, not just the fellows."

There was no mention of Claus von Bulow by anyone at the service. After he and Sunny divorced following his acquittal, he became a theater and arts critic in London, where he had lived before his marriage. He no longer works as a critic, according to the British press, but remains a popular guest at parties and is a doting grandfather to Cosima's children, who live nearby.

In eulogizing his mother, Alexander von Auersperg praised the care that she had been given for the nearly 28 years that she lay in a coma, first at New York's Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, and for the last 12 years at the Mary Manning Walsh Home on the upper East Side of Manhattan. He told those gathered that over the years his mother had turned gray but that she did not have one wrinkle on her face, "no worry lines, no crow's feet, nothing" when she died at age 77 on Dec. 6.

"She was immune to the worries and anxieties of the conscious world," he said.

He said the years she spent in her coma were peaceful, and that the nurses who attended to her bathed her, brushed her hair and took care to turn her often and fill the room with her favorite music.

While von Auersperg's eulogy was sad in parts, he spent most of his time telling humorous stories about his mother.

"Possibly my mother's greatest passion was her dogs," he said. There were four yellow Labrador retrievers at Clarenden Court, he said, and "I remember every weekend getting picked up at school" in New York City "and driving three hours to visit the dogs" in Newport. "My mother would disguise herself as a Labrador by wearing a white fur coat, perhaps thinking that the dogs were shy and this would make them feel more comfortable. Just in case that didn't work, she would stuff her pockets with rawhide bones and dog treats. As soon as we arrived, my mother would rush to the back door, where we could hear the excited clawing of four dogs who had managed to overcome their shyness. As soon as the door opened, the dogs grabbed her by her coat and escorted her into the house, where they celebrated the homecoming of their queen.

"And the dogs were right to worship my mother," von Auersperg said. "She was an enlightened ruler who banished all dry dog food in favor of the finest cut of beef, ground up and prepared to their liking by a remarkably overqualified chef."

Von Auersperg said that his mother did not believe in training her dogs and assumed that everyone loved them as much as she did.

After the service, those gathered were invited to a reception in a public room of an apartment building around the corner from where Sunny and Claus von Bulow lived together at 960 Fifth Ave. The guests, sipping red and white wine, gathered around Sunny's children. Waiters served watercress and smoked salmon tea sandwiches.

Mrs. von Bulow was buried by her three children five days after her death at St. M
ary's Episcopal Cemetery in Portsmouth, R.I.