(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.)
My mother and father had numerous interests they shared. They enjoyed traveling and when we growing up, prioritized taking a trip together as a family. For years it was camping in the same state park (because that is what they could afford); later by scrimping and saving they went to visit her brother R in Hawai’i and Japan and Norway. She and my father discovered a love of square dancing and danced for years with local groups, traveling with them – both in state and out of state. And besides those trips, they took other trips throughout the U.S. to go to my father’s ship reunions or visiting relatives and traveling with their children and grandchildren.
My mother, as mentioned earlier, was dedicated to her family. To her parents and extended family she remained involved and active. When my grandmother had the stroke that eventually caused her death, she took my grandfather down to the hospital every day for a year to visit her. And when my grandmother passed away, she spent the next five years visiting my grandfather on a weekly basis making sure that he ate something like a balanced diet and the house was more or less presentable. When her Great-Aunts were unable to continue to host the family reunion, she started doing to keep a promise to the last of the Great Aunts that she would do it as long as my Great Aunt was alive.
After her retirement in the early 2000’s, she and my father built a house on the land they had purchased from my Great Aunt and Uncle. This was The Ranch, a place that she had been coming for most of her life. A house was built to their specifications, and my mother spent many happy years with space to read, sew, scrap book, host gatherings, and supervise my father as he busied himself with cleaning up the property and cutting wood. An added bonus was that grandchildren were within an easy drive and so they were able to support them by attending their activities as well – in person often for my sister’s children or traveling to see Na Clann once we relocated to New Home.
And then, in 2015, the unexpected happened.
My father had let us know that he had noticed my mother was having problems with words. He had taken her to the doctor and the diagnosis, as he told us, was dementia. It was a matter of fact statement, something that was simply happening. It was only years later when my sister and I had access to their medical records that the diagnosis was in fact Alzheimer’s.
The progression of Alzheimer’s is too well documented to need to cover here. Put in my own colloquial words, it is a fire that burns through the mind, leaving nothing in its wake except smoldering ruins that will not never regrow, a forest fire with no renewal. To be given the diagnosis is a long drawn out death sentence.
Even at this, my mother never flinched.
In the intervening years between the initial diagnosis and the time when we had to move her into a care facility, she never once cursed her fate or bewailed it. She did what she could do as long as she could do: addressed birthday cards and kept the books until her writing failed, cooked until she could not, did crossword puzzles, walked and read. The circle of her life shrank, but she as a person never did.
Even in the last year when it became evident that more care was needed than what my father would be able to provide, she still remained the kind and gracious person she always was. She may not have remembered who you were, but she was always willing to engage in conversation.
During the last six months of their time at The Ranch, I had the privilege staying with them and of being working remotely from their house for one week a month. “Remind me about your children” she would ask me as I took her and Dad down to Hometown. We would go through the each of them and where they were. She would smile and nod, look out the window, and say “Remind me – do you have children?”
Even in the care home, she remained kind and cheerful when we would come to visit – again, she might not have remembered who you were specifically, but her innate kindness prevented her from acting as if she did not know us. Her rule of “Always wave to a child if they wave at you – even if you do not remember when you had them in a class, they do” held to the end.
By the end – 8.5 years after the diagnosis and 3 years after we had moved her into a care facility – her body was there, but she was not. For the last few visits, she would simply look off into the distance, seeing something beyond the view of the rest of us that were in the room.
My mother quietly held her faith in God. She believed, even in the face of circumstances that said she should not. This, perhaps, was her last act of quiet faith and defiance, to stare the destruction of Alzheimer’s in the eye and look beyond it to what lay beyond then razor-thin wall of the next world.
We all take away things from our parents, whether intend to or not. Like any child, I too have borne away things from my mother that in my case have served me in good stead up to this day and will, I have every reason to believe, continue to serve me through the years that remain.
The first is a love of reading Рlike my mother, I am a reader and like my mother, I have so many that they are not just items I read and re-read, they have become d̩cor. Reading is not just a hobby for me -like my mother, it is a way of life. I love reading because I had the example that reading was not only fun Рit was important and a legitimate way to spend time. And my books, like hers, are not just items that I have read: they are old friends, some of which I have had almost all of my life, with stories to remind me beyond what just lies in the pages.
The second is a willingness to keep learning – my mother was always learning. She took up piano with her mother in her mid-thirties. When electronics became all the rage in the 1990’s, my mother upgraded her manual typewriter to an electronic word processor and then a computer. She took classes at the local Adult School and carefully kept her books and notes on how to send e-mails and print documents. She took up scrap booking after years of just keeping pictures to allow her to tell stories. And almost to the end of her time at The Ranch, she tried to do a crossword ever day – maybe the same crossword, but a crossword none the less.
The third is kindness.
My mother was a kind person – when I say kind, do not mistake it for a marshmallow sort of kindness that is always crumpling under the will of others. She could be stern if she needed to be. But even within that sternness, there was an overwhelming kindness that demonstrated itself in interactions: Do not treat people poorly or disrespectfully. Do not publicly bring up someone’s faults – do it in private, where there is no public embarrassment. Always be kind to animals. We may not always remember what people say or do to us, we will always remember how they made us feel.
I use all of these points in my life, but the last one – kindness – especially in my work life. I try to practice it. I put it on any sort of department values or goals that I am associated with. I use it in interviews as one of the traits that I value the most in myself and others.
“My mother was a schoolteacher” I say when I get what has become the usual follow-on question or quizzical look about kindness as a principal value. “And you should always do what your teacher says. Especially if they are your mother.”
