My Mother passed away from pancreatic cancer on April 15, 2022. I delivered this eulogy at her memorial service on May 6th, 2022.
The first thing to know about our mother is that she believed in a pre-existence and that in advance of her birth, she would have chosen the life she was to lead here on Earth. So by extension, it stands to reason that she would’ve chosen to know all of you. And I can’t understate how honored she would have been for each of you to be here with us today. On behalf of both her and our family, we thank you.
Choosing her life would’ve meant that she selected the challenges that came with it. Whether it was all preordained or not, it’s no less beautiful that the life she chose was one largely led in service of others. She didn’t choose to spend years sipping Mai Tais in the Caribbean, she chose to be inland in Guatemala teaching farming and nutrition to the Mayan Indians with the peace corps.
She didn’t lead a life in search of fortune. She placed a premium on experiences, the arts and volunteering, which are just some of the things that she believed had more value than money. In fact, like most English majors, you might even say that she hated money.
In spite of all of the things she may have chosen, the trait she was probably most well known for was an innate one that I’ll refer to only as…The Laugh. This would have unquestionably been one of the first things you noticed when you met her. Given that we grew up in the 90’s, I was always on the lookout for a stray ‘Yo Mama’ joke about her laugh. “Yo Mama laugh so loud, she made a deaf kid cry!”
A little known fact is that scientists have studied The Laugh due to fear that it was rerouting bird migrations. Of course, The Laugh is what I now recognize as unbridled joy, but when I was young, all I could see were strangers staring at our table at restaurants. But to this day, it’s the single thing I hear most often brought up about her. How lucky we are to have heard it, even if it echoed through our eardrums in the womb, likely damaging our hearing forever.
It makes sense that The Laugh had admirers because she took great pleasure in pleasing others, which for better or worse, likely started at a young age. As a child, she was made to curl her hair, wear big dresses and too small shoes every single day, even when she didn’t feel like being fancy.
Those who knew her best would also describe her to be a very private person. Sometimes that privacy was to protect herself. And sometimes it was to protect others. This was likely another byproduct of her upbringing. When she was in college, she got a beautiful 1965 Ford Mustang on the condition that she live at home and that her father would always check the mileage. (Life 360 doesn’t sound so bad now does it kids?) Eventually she returned the Mustang and moved out of the house, perhaps symbolizing her own transition from a pony to a wild horse. (Crashing the car may have also played a factor, but somehow through history, those details never quite bubbled up to the top.)
It would’ve been shortly after moving out of her home that she began dating our Father. The Summer of 1967 is famously known as the “Summer of Love” and although our parents never made it to Haight-Ashbury that summer, they nonetheless spoke of a comparably formative season they experienced that same year, with our Mother studying in Mexico and our Father interning for congressman John Bell Williams in Washington, D.C. This was a time when the precipice of change was palpable both in the country and in their personal lives. College was over, they were entering adulthood and our Father would soon be deployed to Vietnam.
Our Mother described that fateful summer like this, “Although troubling times were brewing, they would wait until this wonderful summer was over. I am so grateful still for that summer because it was the last time that either of us would ever again be so carefree.”
The next years took our parents coast to coast living everywhere from Norfolk, Virginia to Vallejo, California, to a naval ship with ephemeral locations, a stopover in Oxford, Mississippi then New Orleans and back to Dallas again. Despite it perhaps sounding like they were hustling to escape a past life, these moves were all in service of various obligations and certifications.
After the aforementioned stint in Guatemala with the Peace Corps in the 70’s, they returned to Dallas as new parents having had Erika abroad and found re-entry into regular life challenging. They longed for something closer to their old life, the one in Guatemala. They wanted a misnomer of American culture. A place where children and pets ran through the streets. Where auto insurance was more of a suggestion than a law. Where Mexican food was more of a law than a suggestion. And where their children might trade a traditional book education for a heavy dose of street smarts. So they settled in McAllen, Texas, a place they had driven through once and thought, “this seems fine.” That’s where Kelsey and I entered the picture, and that’s where we all grew up.
I can remember being younger and longing for a more traditional upbringing, but I of course now wouldn’t have had it any other way. Our childhood was filled with spontaneous border crossings for family dinner in Mexico. A household in which free exploration was nurtured and encouraged. A revolving cavalcade of characters and animals that typically entered our home unannounced. But above all else, there was a home with lots of love.
Things of course became more complicated once our Father became ill. To quote our Mother once more, “As you know, he faced his illness with great courage. He rarely complained about the terrible pain and discomfort that he suffered.” She wrote those words years before receiving her own terminal diagnosis, unaware that one day the same would become true of her.
It’s no surprise that she would’ve had such a tender framing. In addition to being a fantastic writer, she had a way of plainly stating things elegantly and succinctly, with perhaps no better example as when she gathered the three of us together in the Fall of ‘93 to tell us, “Daddy’s in Heaven now.”
It was at this point that she became a single parent during a crucial period in our lives as we all entered adolescence, something that’s often a thankless job even on the best of days, frontal lobes being what they are and what not.
As we stand here today, it’s hard not to think once again about that time in our lives when we faced one of the most painful moments of our existence, losing a parent. But I reach across time to our younger selves as we navigated an uncertain world, returning to school, going to practices, hanging out with friends, finding the laughs with one another and today in spite of my grief, I feel as though I can gain permission from my 10 year old self to experience whatever the day calls for…a groan, a cry, or maybe even a restaurant stopping laugh.
I also gain strength from the example that our Mother set, marching on and doing what had to be done to make sure the needs of her children were being met, sometimes even at the expense of her own.
When I flash ahead to more recent times, I think about how even as she faced the brutality of her diagnosis, she made sure she met her student’s tutoring obligations. She continued narrating books for the visually impaired through the Talking Book Program at the Texas State Library every Saturday. She fielded our calls and our questions, joking that in some ways when you deal with terminal illness, it’s as if the entire family becomes the patient.
To put it simply, our Mother never victimized herself and so I refuse to either. Almost exactly three months ago on Saturday, February 5th (I noted the date at the time because it felt significant), I was talking to our Mom on the phone shortly after she was put on hospice care and I remarked how at no point in her illness did I get the sense that she was feeling sorry for herself. And she said, “You know, I really don’t. Because things could always be worse.”
This was after two rounds of chemo and radiation. A brutal surgery that re-arranged her insides, rendering her to subsist mostly on crackers, bananas and tea. Morphing into a frail 90 pound bag of bones without hair. Unspeakable pain. The energy level of a sloth. Being told the violent truth that she had three months to live. And just for good measure, another round of palliative chemo right after getting her hair back. But even with all of that, a smile and the idea that things could be worse still.
She spent her last Saturday wearing her favorite Guatemalan dress to a crawfish boil with us, our spouses and all of her grandchildren. She even managed to put back some corn and potatoes, because why not?
And on Sunday morning she got up and she sat for a magnificent hour on her favorite bar stools that we got for her two birthdays ago, where she wrote tender goodbye cards to the three of us. And then we all visited for several hours, my 2 year old son making her listen to “Neon Moon” by Brooks & Dunn 7 times in a row because somehow he seems to have been inhabited by a 55 year old southerner with lonely alcoholism. (Father, perhaps we should chat about this later.)
By Monday morning she could no longer speak. She laid in that state in her own room, just as she had wanted, for several days, surrounded by loved ones, mostly my two sisters, and in her room were a lifetime of photos and the meaningful things she had collected. Like trinkets from the travels of her youth and pine cones from park visits with her grandchildren. She had been so proud of how she decorated her room when she moved into her place that she had even done a video tour for us where she explained the significance of everything. And I’ll concede that it was beautiful to take in during the quiet, contemplative moments of her last days.
Then shortly after midnight on Good Friday, she took her last breaths and she was gone. She always liked to be the first to arrive at a place, so perhaps it’s fitting that she may have bested Our Lord and Savior in time of death by a fair margin.
This was our Mother. She was fierce and she was strong and she was a single mom that read to the blind and she was always on time and she may have crashed some cars but she refused to break because things could always be worse.
I want to close with an excerpt from an essay she wrote on the meaning of life.
“Since I've been sick, I've come to realize that life is actually much simpler than we frequently make it. There are things that inevitably will occur even when we don't invite them or be caused as a result of our own careless or thoughtless behavior. The reality of impermanence also is an unavoidable part of life that can have both positive and negative consequences depending upon how we view and act upon the changes. The point for me is that we individually have much more control over our actions and reactions than we often realize.
I am a fan of haikus, the Japanese poetry that usually follows a 5 syllable format in the first line; 7 in the second, and 5 again in the third. I like them because they have an uncanny way of boiling something down to its lowest common denominator and then ending with a surprising or humorous summary statement. The following is my haiku stating what I believe is the meaning of life:
Each day is a gift
The details of which we write.
Don't waste a minute!”
Thank you.
The first thing to know about our mother is that she believed in a pre-existence and that in advance of her birth, she would have chosen the life she was to lead here on Earth. So by extension, it stands to reason that she would’ve chosen to know all of you. And I can’t understate how honored she would have been for each of you to be here with us today. On behalf of both her and our family, we thank you.
Choosing her life would’ve meant that she selected the challenges that came with it. Whether it was all preordained or not, it’s no less beautiful that the life she chose was one largely led in service of others. She didn’t choose to spend years sipping Mai Tais in the Caribbean, she chose to be inland in Guatemala teaching farming and nutrition to the Mayan Indians with the peace corps.
She didn’t lead a life in search of fortune. She placed a premium on experiences, the arts and volunteering, which are just some of the things that she believed had more value than money. In fact, like most English majors, you might even say that she hated money.
In spite of all of the things she may have chosen, the trait she was probably most well known for was an innate one that I’ll refer to only as…The Laugh. This would have unquestionably been one of the first things you noticed when you met her. Given that we grew up in the 90’s, I was always on the lookout for a stray ‘Yo Mama’ joke about her laugh. “Yo Mama laugh so loud, she made a deaf kid cry!”
A little known fact is that scientists have studied The Laugh due to fear that it was rerouting bird migrations. Of course, The Laugh is what I now recognize as unbridled joy, but when I was young, all I could see were strangers staring at our table at restaurants. But to this day, it’s the single thing I hear most often brought up about her. How lucky we are to have heard it, even if it echoed through our eardrums in the womb, likely damaging our hearing forever.
It makes sense that The Laugh had admirers because she took great pleasure in pleasing others, which for better or worse, likely started at a young age. As a child, she was made to curl her hair, wear big dresses and too small shoes every single day, even when she didn’t feel like being fancy.
Those who knew her best would also describe her to be a very private person. Sometimes that privacy was to protect herself. And sometimes it was to protect others. This was likely another byproduct of her upbringing. When she was in college, she got a beautiful 1965 Ford Mustang on the condition that she live at home and that her father would always check the mileage. (Life 360 doesn’t sound so bad now does it kids?) Eventually she returned the Mustang and moved out of the house, perhaps symbolizing her own transition from a pony to a wild horse. (Crashing the car may have also played a factor, but somehow through history, those details never quite bubbled up to the top.)
It would’ve been shortly after moving out of her home that she began dating our Father. The Summer of 1967 is famously known as the “Summer of Love” and although our parents never made it to Haight-Ashbury that summer, they nonetheless spoke of a comparably formative season they experienced that same year, with our Mother studying in Mexico and our Father interning for congressman John Bell Williams in Washington, D.C. This was a time when the precipice of change was palpable both in the country and in their personal lives. College was over, they were entering adulthood and our Father would soon be deployed to Vietnam.
Our Mother described that fateful summer like this, “Although troubling times were brewing, they would wait until this wonderful summer was over. I am so grateful still for that summer because it was the last time that either of us would ever again be so carefree.”
The next years took our parents coast to coast living everywhere from Norfolk, Virginia to Vallejo, California, to a naval ship with ephemeral locations, a stopover in Oxford, Mississippi then New Orleans and back to Dallas again. Despite it perhaps sounding like they were hustling to escape a past life, these moves were all in service of various obligations and certifications.
After the aforementioned stint in Guatemala with the Peace Corps in the 70’s, they returned to Dallas as new parents having had Erika abroad and found re-entry into regular life challenging. They longed for something closer to their old life, the one in Guatemala. They wanted a misnomer of American culture. A place where children and pets ran through the streets. Where auto insurance was more of a suggestion than a law. Where Mexican food was more of a law than a suggestion. And where their children might trade a traditional book education for a heavy dose of street smarts. So they settled in McAllen, Texas, a place they had driven through once and thought, “this seems fine.” That’s where Kelsey and I entered the picture, and that’s where we all grew up.
I can remember being younger and longing for a more traditional upbringing, but I of course now wouldn’t have had it any other way. Our childhood was filled with spontaneous border crossings for family dinner in Mexico. A household in which free exploration was nurtured and encouraged. A revolving cavalcade of characters and animals that typically entered our home unannounced. But above all else, there was a home with lots of love.
Things of course became more complicated once our Father became ill. To quote our Mother once more, “As you know, he faced his illness with great courage. He rarely complained about the terrible pain and discomfort that he suffered.” She wrote those words years before receiving her own terminal diagnosis, unaware that one day the same would become true of her.
It’s no surprise that she would’ve had such a tender framing. In addition to being a fantastic writer, she had a way of plainly stating things elegantly and succinctly, with perhaps no better example as when she gathered the three of us together in the Fall of ‘93 to tell us, “Daddy’s in Heaven now.”
It was at this point that she became a single parent during a crucial period in our lives as we all entered adolescence, something that’s often a thankless job even on the best of days, frontal lobes being what they are and what not.
As we stand here today, it’s hard not to think once again about that time in our lives when we faced one of the most painful moments of our existence, losing a parent. But I reach across time to our younger selves as we navigated an uncertain world, returning to school, going to practices, hanging out with friends, finding the laughs with one another and today in spite of my grief, I feel as though I can gain permission from my 10 year old self to experience whatever the day calls for…a groan, a cry, or maybe even a restaurant stopping laugh.
I also gain strength from the example that our Mother set, marching on and doing what had to be done to make sure the needs of her children were being met, sometimes even at the expense of her own.
When I flash ahead to more recent times, I think about how even as she faced the brutality of her diagnosis, she made sure she met her student’s tutoring obligations. She continued narrating books for the visually impaired through the Talking Book Program at the Texas State Library every Saturday. She fielded our calls and our questions, joking that in some ways when you deal with terminal illness, it’s as if the entire family becomes the patient.
To put it simply, our Mother never victimized herself and so I refuse to either. Almost exactly three months ago on Saturday, February 5th (I noted the date at the time because it felt significant), I was talking to our Mom on the phone shortly after she was put on hospice care and I remarked how at no point in her illness did I get the sense that she was feeling sorry for herself. And she said, “You know, I really don’t. Because things could always be worse.”
This was after two rounds of chemo and radiation. A brutal surgery that re-arranged her insides, rendering her to subsist mostly on crackers, bananas and tea. Morphing into a frail 90 pound bag of bones without hair. Unspeakable pain. The energy level of a sloth. Being told the violent truth that she had three months to live. And just for good measure, another round of palliative chemo right after getting her hair back. But even with all of that, a smile and the idea that things could be worse still.
She spent her last Saturday wearing her favorite Guatemalan dress to a crawfish boil with us, our spouses and all of her grandchildren. She even managed to put back some corn and potatoes, because why not?
And on Sunday morning she got up and she sat for a magnificent hour on her favorite bar stools that we got for her two birthdays ago, where she wrote tender goodbye cards to the three of us. And then we all visited for several hours, my 2 year old son making her listen to “Neon Moon” by Brooks & Dunn 7 times in a row because somehow he seems to have been inhabited by a 55 year old southerner with lonely alcoholism. (Father, perhaps we should chat about this later.)
By Monday morning she could no longer speak. She laid in that state in her own room, just as she had wanted, for several days, surrounded by loved ones, mostly my two sisters, and in her room were a lifetime of photos and the meaningful things she had collected. Like trinkets from the travels of her youth and pine cones from park visits with her grandchildren. She had been so proud of how she decorated her room when she moved into her place that she had even done a video tour for us where she explained the significance of everything. And I’ll concede that it was beautiful to take in during the quiet, contemplative moments of her last days.
Then shortly after midnight on Good Friday, she took her last breaths and she was gone. She always liked to be the first to arrive at a place, so perhaps it’s fitting that she may have bested Our Lord and Savior in time of death by a fair margin.
This was our Mother. She was fierce and she was strong and she was a single mom that read to the blind and she was always on time and she may have crashed some cars but she refused to break because things could always be worse.
I want to close with an excerpt from an essay she wrote on the meaning of life.
“Since I've been sick, I've come to realize that life is actually much simpler than we frequently make it. There are things that inevitably will occur even when we don't invite them or be caused as a result of our own careless or thoughtless behavior. The reality of impermanence also is an unavoidable part of life that can have both positive and negative consequences depending upon how we view and act upon the changes. The point for me is that we individually have much more control over our actions and reactions than we often realize.
I am a fan of haikus, the Japanese poetry that usually follows a 5 syllable format in the first line; 7 in the second, and 5 again in the third. I like them because they have an uncanny way of boiling something down to its lowest common denominator and then ending with a surprising or humorous summary statement. The following is my haiku stating what I believe is the meaning of life:
Each day is a gift
The details of which we write.
Don't waste a minute!”
Thank you.