A belated eulogy

Today would have been my mom's 72nd birthday. However, she suffered a stroke on June 24, 1999 and died two days later. She worked as a secretary at our local high school for more than 20 years and was generally liked by nearly everyone. Her funeral was on a cold, rainy day, but it was still standing-room-only in the church. There's an old saying that goes something like this: "It doesn't matter how good or how bad a person you were in life, the attendance at your funeral will be determined largely by the weather." Apparently my mom was an exception to that.

Let me tell a story about her, and although it may seem like a bad one I promise it gets better by the end.

When my incredibly handsome twin brother Ron and I were seniors in high school, my mom wanted us to get a class photo together, in addition to our individual ones. So she arranged for our photo times to be back-to-back. Since we didn't really want to take one together, we just refused to do it. (It was not one of our finer moments.)

As you can guess, mom wasn't pleased, and she refused to speak to us. For an entire week, she would tell our sister things like, "Would you tell them it's time to eat if they feel like eating?" Since we were sitting in the same room as our sister, it wasn't really necessary for her to pass that on. After the first week, my sister told our mom, "Don't you think it's gone on long enough?" Apparently not, because for the next week she didn't speak to me, Ron, or my sister. After that second week, my dad finally told her, "Nancy, would you please talk to someone else? I'm tired of talking to you."

The point is this: of the 30+ years that mom was in my life, that's the one "bad" story I can come up with, and it's really not bad. Growing up, Ron and I played 8 years of baseball, 9 years of football, and 6 years of basketball. We were in the band for 7 years. Of the hundreds of games or performances that we were a part of, our mom (and dad) made almost all of them. She was there to support us even though we sometimes wouldn't even get in the game.

She ran the concession stand at the baseball games and was in the booster clubs for football and band. When we were in elementary school we had to read books to our parents to get gold stars. Dad worked the night shift so she listened to every book twice. Most of all, she exhibited monumental levels of patience in dealing with two bratty kids like Ron and me. Mostly Ron, of course. :)

I miss her every day, but I'm thankful for the time she was here.


P.S. When Ron and I were freshman in college, we had professional portraits done of the two of us, and we gave them to our mom for Christmas that year to make up for not getting senior pictures together the year before. That was one of our finer moments.