Mum Says (a eulogy for my mother)

 

Beginnings and endings are never so simple as we would wish. Few things are, are they? We wish for simple things: a simple solution, an easy answer, an easy birth, an easy death. We are seldom granted any such. More’s the pity. 

Instead life is harder - and richer  - than we could ever have imagined when we were young. Even the simplest life; the most honest, straightforward existence is fraught —and full. And yet, “No one is so old that he does not think he could live another year,” said Cicero. We hope to die, when we come to it at last, “in a good old age, full of days.” Another wish not often granted. 

And even when it is, it is seldom enough. It is not enough now. How could it be? How can we be satisfied when life is all we have, all we’ve ever known, all we leave behind when we go?

Ninety three years our mother was here. Full of days. Still, not enough. How could it be? If you knew her, if you loved her as we all did, as she loved all of us, present and absent, how could it be? 

I’m grateful for the time we had.

What would she want me to say now? That she looked good. She’d want me to mention that. That she has her eyebrows on. A nice outfit. Her hair done. This was not vanity. She was proud, but not vain. There was effort put forth, right to the end. It mattered to her, the effort; that she looked good, that her clothes looked pretty, not expensive but nice, that her husband was proud to be seen with her. She liked color, pattern. She had taste. 

She would want someone to say that she didn’t look ninety three years old — even now. That she couldn’t possibly be that age. That delighted her every time it happened and it happened a lot.

What else?

She loved flowers. She arranged them beautifully. She made pretty things from paper, scraps, paint. It mattered that there was beauty, all around her pretty things, even as her world grew small, her eye was on all of it — that things were… so. “Not where that goes. That looks better.” It mattered. What she couldn’t find that was bright or cheerful or right, she made, made better, made brighter, made right. In a long life she’d seen enough ugliness, hurt, pain. She fought against the dark with the tools she had to hand: color, pattern, scissors, paint, furniture. And of course she could see in the dark, couldn’t she? ”Owl lady.” She needed but a very little light. She used what there was.

“The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.” - Garcia Marquez

When the love of her life died after sixty two years together, she knew a new solitude. To be so alone at last was hard. They had been everywhere and always together. One never thought of one but with the other; Jerry and Stella — almost one word for 62 years. And then not. She filled the quiet as best she could. She was never left entirely alone — and for that she would want me to thank again and always my good brother and my amazing sister-in-law who between them made her life and home possible, and kept both my father and mother alive for years longer than either might otherwise have lived. I will never be able to thank them enough.

What she knew best was love, in which she was lucky and knew it. And what she had she gave away, always: food, affection, care, kindness. In this above all else she fought against not just the dark but the false light of being seen to do good. She despised the lie of public piety and ostentatious good deeds. She said once of a neighbor of my grandmother’s, “She’d be happy to stop and help — but she had to get to church.” Wicked little woman, was Stella. Funny.

“I guess I wasn’t very nice,” she’d say afterwards — when she’d been a bit sharp. Sometimes I’d agree. Didn’t much like that. “You not supposed to agree, damn you.” And then she’d call me a “smart ass,” and we’d giggle.

What she did mostly she did because it was right, because it was what you did, how you do, because that’s what you do if you aren’t awful. She could not fathom people being awful. “What on earth do they get out of it?!” she’d say with hurt astonishment, genuinely mystified by evil. Knew it when she saw it though it might take her a very long time, and even then she’d shake her head at what must have brought someone to be so cruel. 

She intended us all to always do better if we could, when and where we could. She did not understand people who wouldn’t or don’t. She always felt the need to see good in others. She was often disappointed. Never stopped her. 

To love is to help where help is needed.

“You don’t have to like it, and they don’t have to deserve it. Just do it anyway.”

From when we were very small and she was our world to when in the end she was small and we were hers, she never didn’t pay attention. There was great humility in this, and a greater good. “Do what you can.” She never claimed to know the answers to large questions. She could not explain much of the wider world, or why people did as they do. She knew we all might do better, and that she might, and that that was not always enough — to know that and to keep trying — but that it would have to do.

When I was mourning another loss she told me, “Just do what you can, then see if you can do a little more.” She said, “That’s all I know to do, all I know to tell you.”

And a hundred times she’d tell me she was done. Very seldom true. She just might try again.

And so she did. And so we do.

But then all our mothers are saints when they die, at least in the newspapers. She laughed to see so many perfect marriages memorialized, such stainless reputations and sterling characters — if only in the obituaries she always read first in her newspaper. She was particularly amused at the idea of everyone automatically becoming a sweet little old lady if they lived long enough.

She’d read or hear about someone having been “a blessing to all” or “a gift to all who knew her,” and she’d say, “Not really,” or “not that I ever noticed,” and smile. Wicked little smile.

She told me years ago, “Whoever you are already, old age just makes you more so.”

Old age took much from her; her husband, a grandson, but it left her nearly all she had always been, to very nearly the end. She was funny, sharp tongued, self-deprecating, kind.

“If you can’t do anything else,” she told me time and again, perhaps because I particularly needed reminding, “you can at least try to be kind.”

I try. I will try. 

She also taught us what it was to be useful, to work, to help, to be proud, to fight, to survive, to defend one another, and to laugh — specially at ourselves.

She’d say, “Don’t you laugh at that,” when she was mad or foolish — and then she’d laugh.

“That’s all I know to tell you,” she’d say. “It will matter more,” she told me, “that you tried.” Even if it mattered only to her, if only for her. “That’s for you, not for anybody else. You do that for you.”

“You’ll want to know you tried.” 

And so we do, don’t we? We try. I am trying. And so we shall.

Thank you, my sweet, tough little mother, our Stella, our North Star, for all you taught me, all you gave all of us. I promise. We will try.