I want to thank my brother Mark and my sisters for coordinating the events today. And I want to thank all of you for being here to share in the memories of my mother. She was important to all of us in so many ways.
My mom called me one Thursday last November to tell me she had decided, at age 75, to quit teaching. I was driving to Point Pleasant for my work and we talked for about an hour on the phone. She was tired and she really hadn’t felt well since my father’s death the previous January. She was going to see her doctor, take a short medical leave while she got things settled with the retirement board, then figure out what was next. She had talked about moving away from the home we grew up in. It was big and she didn’t want to be left with its upkeep.
She called me again at work on Monday to apologize that she wouldn’t be able to come to my son’s 1st birthday party. Her doctor insisted that she come to the emergency room. They’d discovered irregularities in some tests.
Later that day she told me the x-ray revealed a mass on her liver. “And a spot on the pancreas,” she said. I remember the sinking feeling in my chest at those last words. I’d known others with pancreatic cancer. I’d never heard of survivors.
She was dead within a month.
I think we all took it very, very hard. For reasons that I need not go into right now, my siblings and I all developed a pretty dark sense of humor growing up. It was never so much on display as it was when my father died last year. But it was different with my mother. When we gathered at their house after she died, it was grim. There were lots of tears and few laughs.
There were few laughs, but there were some.
Mark and I drove to the funeral home to make arrangements for her body. Her wish was to be cremated and there was some confusion about this initially. Finally a form was brought to us and we were asked to read it carefully. Across the top we read in bold print, “Cremation is final and irreversible.” Cremation is final and irreversible. Anyone who knows us will understand why this sentence led to fits of laughter, as we imagined the circumstances that had led to the inclusion of this important caveat on the document we were reading.
I think my mom would have appreciated that. I know my dad would have.
I took a great deal of pride in telling others that my mom was still working at 75. She was a teacher, a career she didn’t begin until she was almost 50.
She taught me a great number of things.
She taught me to love books. She took me to the library constantly as a child and once, when the librarian refused to check out more than three books to me, she argued with her that I should be allowed as many as I wanted. Whenever we talked, she would always ask, “What are you reading?”
She taught me that things that have value usually require a great deal of work. I can remember sitting on the piano bench with the kitchen timer ticking away the minutes until I’d finished my practice time.
She taught me to defend the things I believed. This meant arguing with her sometimes and we had lots of heated discussions about religion, politics, and education. It also meant arguing with teachers and Sunday School teachers and anyone else who made unsupported assertions.
She taught me that you can have a successful second chapter in your life, something I’m thankful to have learned in the last few years.
She taught me about love and how fierce love can be. Although I think I was a reasonably well-behaved child, I got my very first disciplinary referral in this very room for calling a teacher stupid. Because it was so hard for her to see any wrong in me, she argued with the principal that I shouldn’t be disciplined because the teacher was, in fact, stupid.
If she had a weakness, this was it. She believed her own children, and later her grandchildren, set the moon. I sensed this, even from a young age. We had a book at the house called Best Loved Poems of the American People and when I was seven-years-old, I memorized poem in it for my mother. It goes like this:
While walking down a crowded
City street the other day,
I heard a little urchin
To a comrade turn and say,
‘Say, Chimmey, lemme tell youse,
I’d be happy as a clam
If only I was de feller dat
Me mudder t’inks I am.’
‘She t’inks I am a wonder,
An’ she knows her little lad
Could never mix wit’ nuttin’
Dat was ugly, mean or bad.
Oh, lot o’ times I sit and t’ink
How nice, ’twould be, gee whiz!
If a feller was de feller
Dat his mudder t’inks he is.’
My friends, be yours a life of toil
Or undiluted joy,
You can learn a wholesome lesson
From that small, untutored boy.
Don’t aim to be an earthly saint
With eyes fixed on a star:
Just try to be the fellow that
Your mother thinks you are.
It’s sentimental and saccharine, but it still captures so much how I feel. In her mind I was the smartest, most handsome, most well-behaved, most talented young man there was. For anyone to suggest otherwise was to question the reality that she knew.
For some time, I really did just wish I was the fellow that my mother thought I was. But I wasn’t and I’m not. No one ever could be.
This week I’ve been wondering if she aspired to the same, that is, did she wish she was the person her mother thought she was? I don’t think that was how she thought at all.
What I think she aspired to more was to be someone her children would admire.
My mother came from a time and place that would lead others to narrow-mindedness and bigotry. But she read, all the time, and the things she read led her to become someone else entirely. I don’t mean to suggest that she was particularly progressive or liberal in her opinions; she wasn’t. But she wasn’t close-minded either and I watched her change her opinion on several occasions because of things she had learned.
She wasn’t the type of person who wished the world would have stopped turning when she was young. She looked into the faces of her children and grandchildren and wanted a world that was better for them. Even as she was dying she made plans and bought books for her grandchildren -- even one who hadn’t been born.
I’ve stopped wishing I was the fellow that my mother thinks I am. She is not here and though we may all disagree about what that means exactly, I think it is a fair thing to say that whatever obligations we felt toward her are no longer. Instead, I look into four young faces at my dinner table every night and try to be person they will one day admire.
What that means exactly, I’m still figuring out, but it does mean that I continue to learn, to destroy my own bigotry wherever I find it, and to fight for a better world for them. A lot of you have children, a lot of you will have children, and certainly all of you know children. If you would honor my mother -- and if you would honor your own mother -- then try to be the person those children will one day admire, even as I admire her today.
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