Eulogy For Mom: Part I

(Editor's note:  This is (more or less) the eulogy I presented for my mother this past Saturday.  As per usual, I have anonymized locations and names, but the gist of the speech remains the same.  Although delivered at one time, I have broken it into two sections for readability.)

On behalf of the TB family we would like to thank you for taking the time to be with us today in memory of our mother and grandmother. Your presence means a great deal.

Having to do this same sort of speech only 18 months ago, I approach it with the same sort of trepidation that I did with my father’s. Speaking of the life of one’s parents is something which, under normal circumstances, we assume will happen at some point. The assumption of that occurrence does not make it any easier: as I noted last time, the lives of our parents are in three stages, before we as children arrived, the time we had as a family unit in the same location, and then the time when we head out and our parents return to lives as a couple.

Mom was born on XX January 194X in Hometown. Hometown and the greater range beyond it became the geographic center of her life; other than short periods of living in state capitol to finish college and some time living with my father while he was in the Navy, she lived the rest of her life in the immediate area in which she was born.

She was preceded in birth by her brother R and was followed in birth by her sister J. They lived in the same house that her father had lived in since his early years.

My mom did not often speak of life at there what she spoke of far more often were trips trips to the almost ghost town farther up the mountain, where her mother was born and her Great Uncles lived. Here she got to run outdoors and listen to stories of life in her mother’s time and grandmother’s time, stories stretching back to the 1800’s. Even 60 years later, these were the memories she would talk about.

Hometown was a small town in those days, much smaller than it is now. She walked to to her elementary school and then cut her commute by 2/3’s by going to the high school just down the street. She met her two best friends in elementary school who both lived down the street from her; they would remain friends until death parted them.

At the close of high school, two things happened. The first was that she enrolled in college. The second was that she met and started dating TB The Elder.

They met during their Senior year of high school; my mother and my father never quite mentioned how it happened, other that it did – and it was successful enough of a first meeting that they began dating, a relationship that lasted through my father’s stint in the Navy and my mother’s college years. They were married in the later 1950’s. My mother remained local and finished up her teaching degree and then joined my father for a period of time living out of state until they relocated back to the Hometown area, where she embarked upon her teaching career.

She was a teacher from the early 1960’s until her final retirement in the early 2000’s. She taught at several schools, all local – but spent most of her time in the same district she herself had gone to school, including at the school she had been an elementary student at. She took some years off to have children, but even then was a volunteer and part time teacher.

While she had taught junior high early in her career, she spent the bulk of her years in the elementary grades. At least during our growing up years, she mostly taught between first and fourth grade, her favorite grades being third and fourth, when as she put it “the children could actually differentiate between what was a joke and what was not”. (Editor’s Note: I was informed by my sister and cousin this should have read “Second Grade”).

But, of course, she was not only a teacher. She was, first and foremost, a mother.

Our parents purchased their first home in the mid 1960’s; it would be the place that they lived for almost 40 years. It was here that they put together a home and we grew up.

It was a home filled with books.

My mother was a reader. The hallway had shelves on the wall filled with books and the living room had bookshelves filled with books. Growing up, she or my father read to us every night, until we could read. If she had some time to herself, especially when we were young, she would be reading.

Perhaps not surprisingly, her children became readers as well.

One of the greatest days of the week when we were young was library day at the local Library. For years we would go regularly every two weeks (because that is when the books were due). Originally we were shepherded through the children’s section, but eventually we were let loose to roam the library and pursue any interest we had.

My mother, like my father, was incredibly supportive of all of our activities. What we did, she was involved in – Scouts, 4-H, sports, music, plays – she came to them all. Even if (I suspect) she did not necessarily understand or enjoy all of them, she still came.

But eventually, of course, children grow up and move out, leaving parents to rediscover that they get to have a life again.

(End Part I)