In a few hours it will be the 5th anniversary of my Mom's death. I was just going through some documents on my computer and found something called Mom2 and being curious, opened it up. It was the rough copy of the eulogy that my sister Karen gave at Mom's memorial service. She was chosen for this "honor" since she had a better chance of holding it together than I did! And she did a wonderful job, Mom would have been proud of her. Reading this over made me smile with remembering and cry due to missing her so much. Here it is...
"I was a teenager when a group of women held a roast to mark
my mother’s ascendancy as the first woman President of the local United Way. One of
the women, unknown to me now, told me something about my mom being perfect.
Perfect. Well, yeah, I could she how this woman might think so, even if she was
exaggerating just a bit. But her comment intimidated me enough that I could not
get up and deliver my one joke about boys I dated being scrutinized about their
donating habits – completely untrue, by the way.
But this woman saw my mom as perfect because for a woman in
that time, she had it all. She was pretty and powerfully smart. She dressed
very well, had a handsome and sweet husband who adored her, co-owned a
successful business, lived in a beautiful home she designed herself, and had
two children that had not been arrested. She was opening doors for women all
around her – she was always the leader and had a lot of “firsts”.
But perfect? Well,
no.
My mother could not sing. She sang all the time, of course,
but she couldn’t find the right key or keep from going flat for the life of
her. But she loved to sing, and she did it anyway. She would sing silly songs, road songs, and
camp songs with my dad. He actually has a very nice singing voice, but he’d
always sing along in the same style as my mom. Loud and joyful. Every birthday,
my mom and dad would call around breakfast and bellow out the Happy Birthday
song. It is our most precious birthday ritual, and we will miss her voice
terribly.
Mom traveled the world, and often told me how lucky she felt
for having the opportunity to do so. When money was tight but love was plentiful,
our family started camping. Many of my absolutely favorite childhood memories
came from our family trips and travels. When money was less tight, Mom and Dad
traveled not quite to every continent, but close.
So she traveled the world, but she could not find her way
across town. She had the worst sense of direction of anyone I have ever known.
If Mom said to go right, you knew you should go left. Dad equipped her with the
best maps and directions. She did not let her total lack of direction stop her
from going places, but she always had to leave extra time for getting lost. She
was ahead of her time – the perfect customer for Mapquest and GPS systems
before they were around.
She was a gourmet cook. She followed Julia Child’s career,
and we spent many a childhood dinner trying the newest creation. She read
Gourmet magazine and cookbooks for fun. For us girls, she made the cutest
little salads that looked like mice using pears with clove eyes. She was
inventive, healthy, and rarely made the same thing twice except the family
favorites. But she was patient with Bon who wanted one meal a year,
Thanksgiving dinner to be the same, year after year after year.
One of my favorite
gifts to give my mom when I was little was fresh watercress. She taught me how
to identify it, and she knew how much I loved what we called fiddling creeks.
The thing about watercress is that it grows in cold water. Really, really cold
water. So I would bring it to her with frozen little fingers and she’d accept
it as if it were the most precious morsel on earth, which perhaps it was.
She also canned foods, making jams and pickles and
provisions for winter storms. She called it “keeping the wolf from the door”,
and it worked. Who knew wolfs were adverse to pickled peaches?
Mom had a birthday a couple of weeks after I moved to Maryland. As her
present, I boxed up a huge quantity of steamed Maryland Blue Crabs on ice, then
hightailed it the 12 hour drive back to Michigan
to surprise her. We covered the table
with newspaper in the shore tradition, got our little wooden mallets together,
and started whacking crabs. At the end of the feast, my dad had a respectable
mound of shells in front of him. My sister had no shells in front of her
because they were looking at her so I had to pick her crabs, which made my pile
was pretty big. Then there was my petite Mom, sitting behind an ENORMOUS pile
of shells, licking her fingers.
But was she a perfect cook?
No. There was one time – yes,
just ONE time – that she oversalted the stew. She was disgusted and threw it
out. And we’ve been teasing her about it ever since.
My mother dressed beautifully.
She read Vogue and knew fashion, and although conservative in style, she was
always fashionable. I remember one day
looking at two gowns she had bought for a major dinner party. They were the
fanciest things I had ever seen – the skirts swished when she moved. When she
got dressed up, I thought she was a fairy princess come to life. We’ll always
think of Mom when we smell Chanel #5
But there was another side, too.
We were up at Bayview once
summer when Bon was little, and the Bayview School was having a “Dress Up Like Your
Mother Day”. She had these really cool plastic high heels, all glittery and
shiny. Right before she was to go, she broke the heel off one of them. She was
in tears. Aunt Jeanne came to the rescue by saying “That’s OK honey, your mom
always goes barefoot!”
She was a good – no a great –
mom. She sewed us matching dresses –
much to Bon’s embarrassment and Kare’s delight. She read us stories every
night. She helped us with endless crafts and in the care of a parade of
animals. She packed picnics to the Lake and Townsend Park.
When we skinned our knees, she would draw flowers on them in Mercuricome.
But was she a perfect mom? No. I
can recall two times she made a mistake, and my sister, being older, can recall
three. It would be impolite to name them here.
Our mother was a perfectionist.
She set extremely high standards for herself, and met most of them. But one
thing we loved about her is that those standards were for herself, and she did
not impose them on us or anyone else.
She did not raise her daughters
to be perfect – and she succeeded in that, since we fall far short of
perfection.
So today we celebrate the life
of our mother, the most perfect imperfect mom we could ever imagine."
