First of all, thank you for being here as we honor my mom. I am deeply touched and honored by your presence as I know my whole family is.
It is fitting that we’re here. The city of Woburn, her hometown, is the right place for us to say good bye. Being here at Trinity is right. This is the place where my mom celebrated all her sacraments. This is where her father was confirmed on the day she took her first communion. This, right here, is where she had me baptised.
It was here in Woburn, where Mom’s childhood was filled with the love of her cousins – the Durgin’s & Fitzies and Pollocks, of aunts Marion and Carol and Ann and uncles John and Harold and George, of her Nana and Papa and of the friends and neighbors Walter and Phyllis made part of their family along the way.
As she grew up in the little cape at 13 Mayflower Road she was the apple of her father’s eye, and her mother’s sidekick. She was very smart, sweetly funny, painfully shy and incredibly bookwormy. She was a princess, a daddy’s girl, and every year her father would take her out for a daddy-daughter date to a fancy restaurant. But she was just as close to her mother. She cooked with Phyllis, she sewed with Phyllis, she painted with Phyllis. I think it is safe to say Phyllis was her best friend.
At least until my Dad came along. Well, maybe not right when Dad came along. Mom was 7 or 8 the first time she met dad. Uncle Walt brought him home from 4H band. Over the years, Ron knew her as Fitzie’s bratty kid sister. When Mom was about 13, Dad joined the Navy and for the next 5 years, he wasn’t around much.
That is, of course, until he came home on leave in late 1969, the beginning of Mom’s senior year. She was 17 and dad a seasoned 22-and=a-half-year-old sailor. She was dating some other guy, some other guy that Phyllis didn’t like very much.
“Ronnie,” she said,”could you take Cindy out on a date and maybe distract her from this boy she’s seeing.”
My father, being ever-accommodating said “sure.” By early 1970 things were serious and by summer they were married.
This began the greatest adventure of my mother’s life, raising a family with the sailor she loved more than all the world. From the time Jen and Kate and I were little, I remember Mom putting her view on marriage into a snarky little bit of wisdom, “If all three of you want chocolate ice cream and dad wants vanilla, we’re having vanilla because when you’ve grown up and moved away, we’ll still be together.”
She always knew dad and she were forever, and she always made sure we knew we were loved more than anything… except dad.
This is truly one of the great gifts Mom gave me. From the moment I was born, until the moment she died – and to this moment here – I have never doubted for one instant the depth of my mother’s love for me, and the absolute certainty of her love for my father. Our home was filled with love – a love that was certain and stable and true.
As we grew, Mom and Dad’s sense of adventure kicked in. More than 30 years ago, mom and dad took Jen and Kate and me to the Republic of South Africa, stopping on our way back and forth between here and there in many countries. This was one of the most exciting times in Mom’s life, and it was something that mom was aware would change her children. As we wandered the world, she was adamant that we be immersed in the art and culture wherever we went.
We also took long treks around South Africa, drives to Lesotho, swimming at the southern-most tip of the dark continent, and sipping wine at the wineries of the Cape Province.
On one of the trips back and forth we drove the alps and saw heidi’s house, a book mom was adamant that I read before the trip. (I thanked her years later because my familiarity with the story was helpful when my four-year-old son fell in love with Shirley Temple in her movie Heidi )
While we were living abroad, the three of us kids learned two vital things, one was how to spend hours in a bookstore fondling books. CNA was basically borders and barnes & noble a decade before we saw them here in the US, and the second was how to wander aimlessly in search of interesting things to enjoy. One of my favorite little gems were the many Sunday trips the weekly art market in Zoo Park in Johannesburg. We spent afternoons talking to the local artists and appreciating their skill and craft. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all three of us love to travel, have a low regard for planning the minutia of trips, and appreciate all forms of creativity and art.
All of that is certainly a great gift, but there was something else that happened in those years that might have been more important for the three of us. We wandered a country struggling in the midst of Apartheid, and were exposed to horrifying racism, cruelty and injustice in the midst of spectacular beauty and truly good and loving people.
I could not be more proud of how, without any political slant or subtext, my Mom used every new experience as lesson to highlight the goodness in others and remind us how we should treat everyone with kindness and love, regardless of their creed or skin color. It was a great example to all three of us, how during that time of civil unrest in a foreign land, she and my dad did everything they could to help the black folk in their community without putting our family at risk. By example, they showed me exactly how to combat prejudice and bigotry – with the good and quiet acts of an open heart.
When my Dad’s dad died in 1982, we returned to the States, the five of us changed for the better. We slipped back into the regular life and as we grew, mom’s pride in all three of us was boundless. She made her share of mistakes (what parent doesn’t), but she never gave up on any of us – if we had a struggle, she would fight fang and claw for us.
Wait a second, oh geez, can you believe I got this far without mentioning the most important fact of my mother’s life? Yeah, tooth and claw.
But I’m pretty sure there is no one who has ever loved animals more than my mom. Growing up she had dogs Toby and Ranger and Fluffy the cat. When she got Married, I’m pretty sure when she negotiated the pre-nup they didn’t have she had an entire addendum requiring a minimum number of pets. When we left for South Africa, she left her Shetland Sheepdog Rusty in shared custody between Nana and Grampa Anstey and Nana and Papa Fitz, but believe it or not, we took the darned cat. Sam – who had been (ironically enough) Sambo until a few weeks before we left she gave birth to a litter of kittens and became Samantha – went with us. Yes, my mother shipped a cat 11,000 miles across an ocean.
This was how much a part of my mother’s life her pets were. I think I lied earlier when I said she loved Dad most of all, then her kids – No, I’m pretty sure she loved her pets most of all. Brandy the collie when I was little, then RUsty, Sam, Molly, Muffin, Winnie, Jack, Abby, and finally BO. This is just a partial litany of the creatures first and foremost in her heart. Many-a-time Jen, Kate and I rolled our eyes at how ridiculous she would be about those furry pains in the butt, but now I can tell you, it was a window into the softness and tenderness of my mother’s heart that I’m grateful to take with me the rest of my life. When she loved, whether it was my dad, my sisters, me or her pets, it was absolute and without holding anything back.
I think that’s why it always amazed me she was able, over the course of a few years when when got back from Johannesburg, to foster 17 newborns prior to their adoption. Every time a baby came in, she’s fall in love, and every time the baby would be adopted, she’d be crushed. She showered each of those babies with boundless love. Today, they don’t know it, but each of them lost a mother when she died.
How she was able to do that – how she had that strength and courage to love when she knew the coming pain – I’m not sure I’ll ever completely understand. But I can tell you this, the reckless abandon of her heart is something I truly admire. It was something of a double-edged sword though. Her whole life, my mother struggled coping with loss. That reckless heart of hers left her fragile at times.
Yesterday, as we visited Nana & Papa’s grave in Reading, I reflected on how much of my mother’s heart and soul were buried with Nana all those years ago. It is impossible to know my mother without remembering that loss, that unbearable hurt she bore like a splinter in her heart all the rest of the days of her life. In fact, you hear echoes of that in the hymns today – Amazing Grace and How Great Thou art were her mother’s favorites, played in this church back in March of 1988.
The loss of her mom led to a lot of family turmoil and some of those wounds never completely healed. But, she somehow brought herself back together with the help of Bonnie Tuohy and Dad, and I think the advent of her grandkids. Emily, Cameron, Nikki and Megan became the light of her world. A beacon of hope that pushed her on when she grew ill over the last decade.
Diabetes and Parkinson’s made my mother’s life far too short, but it was full. It was wild and passionate and ripe with all the things that make a person fully human. The painfully shy little girl, most blissful in a land of books, grew into a mother who did her very best to raise kids who knew right from wrong, the power of faith in daily life, the strength of love to help one endure hardships and pain.
Two last little stories, one, because it happened here and mom loved to share it over and over. When I was little, maybe 3-4 years old, after a Saturday night at a chinese restaurant I sat in a pew in this church with Mom, Jen, Nana and Papa – and as the service started, I said, “I knew it.”
Mom hushed me.
“I knew it,” I whispered.
Mom hushed me again.
I muttered it one last time, “I knew it.”
“What did you know?” Mom whispered.
“God’s not here again.”
Mom smirked, “God’s here. He’s a spirit, we’ll talk about this later.”
A few days go by, and mom said she was feeling some relief, she didn’t have to explain a spirit to a tiny little boy, when of course, right before bed one night, I said, “Is God REALLY a sparerib?”
SO yes, for a week, I believed God was a sparerib. Thanks Mom for that.
The other story, started on the day I was born. After Mom had me, she was wheeled into the recovery room, and she said the first song she heard was the Carpenters, “Close to you.”
Every time that song came on when I was a little boy, mom would belt it out, and I would wonder why, with such a beautiful voice, she wasn’t a professional singer.
Once, sitting in a brown Oldsmobile station wagon on a bright sunny summer afternoon, I even asked her. She just laughed.
And that is why, for the rest of my life, I’d ask if you forgive me when that song comes on and I shed a tear and long to be close to Mom.