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The eulogy I delivered at Mom's memorial services on February 1st, 2014: First of all, I want to thank you all for your presence today. It is a great comfort to me and it was to my mother as well; you represent the communities that made her life a happy one. My name is Patrick; many of you I know and many of you I don’t. If you knew my mom, though, you have probably heard about me. What you have heard I have absolutely no idea, but my mom was a proud mother and she may have, on more than one occasion, spoken to you about something I was doing that may or may not have been interesting. I beg your indulgence; she was, she was a happy and proud mother, mother-in-law, and, in the last couple of years, grandmother.
When she was hospitalized over the holidays, neither she nor
I thought that her life was near its end. But I did make sure that she knew how
much I loved her. What I didn’t find the moment to tell her I will tell you now:
I was enormously proud of her as well. She grew up in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a
place that my poor San Francisco-born wife thought looked eerily like a Norman
Rockwell painting when she first saw it. She was a mayor’s daughter, the first
girl of twelve, and so had a kind of co-parent role for many of her younger
siblings. Kenosha is on the border with Illinois, not far from Chicago, and at
a regional mayor’s conference, she once told me, her father and then-mayor
Richard Daley worked on business while she had the responsibility for
babysitting Richard Jr. – who went on to be the mayor himself. But my mom was
never going to be a mayor-- careers were just beginning to open up for women,
and though my mom got excellent grades and a degree from an excellent school in
Marquette, she didn’t quite have a profession. Part of that was by choice. She traveled
the world, learning transcendental meditation and teaching it to others. She
married my father at 25. My father never wanted to settle down, and could pack
up and move every few months. I was born seven years later, in Santa Cruz,
California. Not so long afterwards, they moved to Santa Barbara. And a few
months later, to Fairfield, Iowa.
My first memory is there, and my mom is stuck in the snow. I
was looking out a window. She was trying to drive a car up the hill, and
several people had gone out to help push her out of the rut she was in. I think
I remember the wheels spinning. I had never seen anything like it. For the next
16 years, with one short interruption, she and I lived here in Iowa. She was a
creative and dedicated mother. The best way that I can describe my childhood is
enchanted. My mom did not draw firm lines between imagination and reality. I
lived on a farm where there were cows – and, when you think about it, how much
more implausible than a cow is a dragon really? I loved gnomes, so she left
little notes around the house for me to find: under the couch from the couch
gnomes, under the stairs from the stair gnomes. But she encouraged me to learn
too. Childhood TV was Mister Rodgers, nature documentaries, and, for reasons
I’ll never fully be able to understand, repeated viewings of Stanley Kubrick’s
2001: A Space Odyssey. In the evenings she spent hours reading books to me.
There were days that I would come home to find the kitchen table turned into a
series of science experiments. I remember that the large magnet that would hold
sewing needles would show me the power of magnetism by tying a weight to a
string and a paperclip, so that the paperclip would be suspended in air by the
strong sewing magnet. My life was so full of enrichment that it took me years
to learn that we were not at all rich.
After the end of her marriage, my Mom spent a decade devoted
to making things okay for me. We had been living in University of Iowa graduate
student housing while my dad worked on his Ph.D.; in order to stay in there, in
the cheapest apartments in the city, Mom enrolled one class per semester. A
couple of years later, we moved across town so that I would be able to stay
with the cohort of friends from my elementary school. Her job then did not pay
well, but it did support her to take classes for professional advancement, and
over the course of a decade during which she balanced work, school, and
parenting a teenager I can describe from experiences as intermittently
tolerable, she earned a degree in library science that changed her life. Finally
she was able to have a professional career, and a home here at Cornell College that
took full advantage of her talents. The last dozen years of her life were among
the best. She found a job that used so many of her talents – not just as a
librarian, but as a human being. My mom was open and accepting to new
experiences and new people. Instead of worrying about her interactions with
people of different backgrounds or life experiences, as some might do, she
truly treasured diversity. She always wanted to learn, and wasn’t intimidated
by what she didn’t know. She had a ready smile for the people who came into her
life. She was one of the least judgmental people I have ever known, not because
she was not discriminating, but because she directed her attention to what was
good in people, and she found much to love in almost everyone. So I will say
now what I never quite told her: I’m proud of what she did with her life, how
hard she worked to get it, and the legacy that she will leave. She may have
sprung from a Norman Rockwell painting but she developed a global outlook, and
there are people all around the world that loved her and will miss her.
There was one contradiction in my mom’s personality.
Although she was the kind of person who allowed you to be yourself with her,
and who accepted people for who they were, she could be quite hard on herself.
She had an internal voice, as I do, and as many of us do, that tells us that
what we have done is not good enough. We knew that she was wonderful, but she
sometimes didn’t. She knew that we were wonderful, though we sometimes do not.
My mother is no longer with us, and I miss her terribly. I haven’t known many
people with her extraordinary capacity for accepting us as who we are. But she
is no longer with us to do that. And so we are going to have to do it for
ourselves. Not that we stop trying to live with peace and care. But that when
we feel the strains of self-judgment, we might stop for a moment and see us not
as we see ourselves in that moment, but as she would have seen us. To focus loving
attention on ourselves and others, and accept that we can be good people
without being perfect. If we can do this for ourselves and for others, my
mother will still be with us. I will try my best, and I ask you to try to do so
as well, in memory of her.
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