Eulogy For My Mother, 12/2014

[I do believe that, just before I read this to the congregation, I noted to my Aunt Fran and Uncle Jim that there was not a cloud in the sky and I was not struck by lightning, yet again. See here for context.]

One weekend afternoon in the mid-eighties, when most of my siblings and I still lived in the area, my brother(-in-law) Bob called my brother Pat from my parents’ house to ask if Pat was going to be there for dinner.

Pat asked, “why?” - not to be rude, but to set Bob up for the punch line.

Bob replied, “because Mom wants to know whether to make too much food or WAY too much food.”

My parents’ house on Pitcher Hill was named the Momcat Inn because of this hospitality. My mother was born there in 1935 when it and the surrounding area were her grandparents’ farm. After Mom grew up, the farm was sold, subdivided and developed. My mother went to secretarial school, worked at Carrier, got married, had children and moved to Taiwan and back only to return to that house with her young family and husband in 1973. She started a small garden, stocked the kitchen and settled there for 42 years.

Whenever you visited her you found my mother in either of those two places. If she was in the kitchen, she was doing anything from canning tomatoes to peeling fruit to shelling walnuts to baking pies to making spring rolls to stirring fried rice - whatever culinary opportunity the seasons and the market afforded her.

This time of year, it was cookies. Boxes and boxes of Christmas cookies. Way too much cookies. The inventory would tower in the back room, tall as a man stands, seemingly inexhaustible. The cookies were as varied as they were uncountable. They weren’t just delicious, they were elegantly crafted and visually pleasing. She would wrap them up in decorative trays or tins and give them to me to run next door and give to the neighbors - even the family that hated us. To her, it was the right thing to do; our bounty - however meager at times - was meant to be shared. There was always a plate for a stranger, and there was always room for seconds. It taught us all about giving something real of oneself for the benefit and delight of others. If you want to hear another funny story, ask my friend Ken what happens if you refused seconds.

If Mom was in the garden, she was hard at work weeding, culling, planting, harvesting - doing the neverending, regular, necessary chores to keep the garden verdant and productive. It was more a genuine passion than a vanity, yet it is no stretch to say the garden grew famous. When explaining where we lived, I only had to say, “The house on Bailey Road with all the flowers”. One time at school in Oswego I was watching the evening news when I noticed the background for the weather report looked familiar - it was a video of my mother’s garden - tulips swaying in the April wind. Something called her to grow things. It bred in us the sense that good things come from hard work and patience and require constant upkeep - things like gardens, children, home. Love.

Mom had many other talents as well. She could draw, paint, and sew. Her portfolio from a high school design class lives to this day and is full of flawlessly executed assignments on proportion and aesthetics. Paintings she did in Taiwan show her ability in Chinese style brushwork. The clothes she made for us looked finely tailored.

She loved to read. At the lake, where we rented a cabin for a week or two, you would find her underneath a tree on the patio burning through a romance novel or some nonfiction work like Mary, Queen of Scots.

She loved to spend cool summer evenings with her family and friends around the kitchen table sharing laughs and stories and sipping drinks. To this day, if I catch the scent of certain cocktails I am transported back to scenes like this. It is the feeling of being secure within the bosom of a large extended family.

After we grew up and some of us moved away, Mom spent the 90s babysitting grandkids and visiting her far-flung children, who are now transplanted elsewhere from Skaneateles to California. At the turn of the century my parents slowed down and traveled less.

If you visited them in the last ten years you’d swear Mom wanted to kill my father. The tension was palpable but the threat was empty. Rummaging through the house recently I stumbled across a card from Mom to Dad. Inside it read, “I can’t live without you; you mean everything to me.” And so this year, a little over 16 months from my father’s passing, she left this world, mere yards from where she entered it. She joins people that she missed dearly in her final years - Ella Mae, Tootsie, Cookie, Rocky, Ed, her parents. My father.

We all take a part of Mom with us.  In many of our yards something grows that came from her, and just about everyone here is sporting a few pounds courtesy of her.