I like funny stories, so I thought I’d share one of several stories that occurred over the last two days. I could probably write a book about the last two weeks because so many strange and amazing things happened during the period of time that my mother became ill, entered a hospital, died, and was subsequently buried. Because this forum is primarily focused on non-duality-related issues, I thought that a lot of people here would appreciate and enjoy this story.
After my mother died, I offered to speak on behalf of the family at the funeral service (my younger brother now laughingly refers to me as The Patriarch of the family). My mother had requested that one of her neighbors, a Baptist minister, officiate at the service. I knew that I would have an enormous amount of fun writing and delivering the eulogy, and I assumed, incorrectly as it turned out (ha ha), that if I spoke for a long enough period of time, the minister would only have time to make a few personal remarks based upon his friendship with my mother. I assumed that after I finished speaking, he would make some personal comments, make a few spiritual comments, read a Bible verse, say a prayer, and close the service. Boy, was I ever wrong about that! Ha ha.
AAR, I went to work composing the eulogy. Having spoken at many funerals, I knew what had to be done. First, I had to organize the historical material and stories and write the eulogy, and then I had to practice it again and again, so that I could deliver it under control and without excessive emotion on my part. This is a real challenge when the eulogized person is someone close to you. A certain level of detachment is necessary, so that the eulogy can be delivered with just the right kinds of nuances. From my POV a good eulogy combines stand-up comedy with pathos. It incorporates lots of personal stories, a general history of the person’s life, humor, poignancy, etc., and, ideally, it should make the audience both laugh and cry in remembering what made the deceased person so uniquely special. The other reason the prepared remarks are read again and again is so that they are committed to memory. This allows the speaker to deliver the eulogy without having to read it.
I always look forward to this task because, for me, it is a kind of performance art (similar to stand up comedy) and includes great fun figuring out how to raise the eulogy to a cosmic level, a la non-duality, without offending anyone. My mother and I were very close, we shared a long period of time together, and I had been her primary care-taker, so it was a greater challenge than usual to prepare and deliver a eulogizing remembrance without becoming too emotional during the delivery.
Because our family had relatives coming from out of town we postponed the funeral for several days, and this gave me some time to get my act together (literally and figuratively). The time pressure was still considerable because we had so many things to arrange and we had many relatives already in town to entertain and deal with. I’m guessing that I spent a hundred hours in preparation, and the last day involved twelve straight hours of writing, re-writing, editing, and rehearsing the finished product.
On Thursday night my brother and his family had dinner with Carol, our daughter, and our daughter’s fiancée, and what happened during that dinner was extremely amusing. My brother and his wife have two children, a 16 year old son and a 12 year old daughter. My brother is an atheist and his wife is a serious Christian. The son’s goal is enlightenment, and he is further along on that path than any other teenager I have ever met. He has read all of the major books that we refer to on this forum and he resonates most strongly with a Taoist approach. His favorite books are probably “Peaceful Warrior,” “Power of Now,” and “Tao Te Ching.”
Carol and my daughter know all about the non-duality game, and my daughter’s fiancée often posts on this forum, so five people at the dinner table were all on the same wavelength. The other three were not. My brother’s son puts a huge grin on his face and asks me, “Well, Bob, are you going to include any isness in your talk tomorrow?”
I grinned back and said, “What do YOU think?”
My brother instantly becomes alarmed and asks what we’re talking about.
Carol, who is in a rather cosmic mood, is up for some fun, so she says, “Bill, do you think Bob could ignore an opportunity like this?”
Brother Bill becomes even more alarmed as he sees four of us grinning from ear to ear. My daughter looks worried, too, at this point and says, “Dad, you’re not going to do any non-duality stuff tomorrow, are you?”
I replied, “Well, hey, I’m the guy doing this, remember?”
She says, “No way! Dad, the room is going to be filled with very conservative people who were in Mom’s church.”
Carol and I become more amused, and continue stoking the fire. My brother and my daughter want to read what I’m going to say. Obviously, I refuse to consider such a thing.
My brother is now really worried, and he begins pleading for me to honor our mother “appropriately.” He says, “Bob, you know that this is NOT what mother would have wanted. She would have wanted a traditional service.”
I replied playfully, “Well, this is exactly what I wanted. Now I’ll have your full attention tomorrow. My goal is to have you on the edge of your seat in fear and trembling. I wouldn’t want anybody to fall asleep.”
By now four of us are laughing hard. My brother and my daughter are NOT smiling and look very worried.
I said, “The people tomorrow may need to expand their horizons a little bit, so I may help them out a bit.”
The conversation continued like this for some time and got pretty hysterical from my POV. I assured my brother that I would not do anything TOO outrageous, and that most of my cosmic stuff would probably fly right over the heads of most people. He and my daughter remained worried.
At that point Carol said to me, “We didn’t want to tell you about this until after the funeral, but today we found a card in your mother’s mailbox that was very unusual.” It was a letter from one of her close friends addressed to the family. The woman wrote that she was probably “going out on a limb” but felt that it was her Christian duty to tell the family that she had had several conversations with my mother about our family. My mother had expressed her concern to her that some members of our family were probably not Christian. This woman therefore felt compelled to explain to the family exactly what was required to be saved and the rest of her letter explained the requirements in detail. After Carol finished saying this, my brother’s teenage son, my daughter’s fiancée, and I all laughed so hard that we almost fell out of our chairs! Everyone else looked concerned at our response. Ha ha.
Ironically, after dinner I sat down in an easy chair and reflected upon my brother’s concern. I wondered if I had gone too far with some of what I had intended to say the following morning. I didn’t have the manuscript with me, and it wasn’t yet totally memorized, so I couldn’t review one questionable section well enough in my mind to verify that it was suitable as written.
The following morning I woke up at 4AM and went straight to my office. I read the final section of the eulogy where I had allowed things to get cosmic and realized that I had probably gone too far. I eliminated two paragraphs and tried to figure out a way to keep it cosmic without going “over the top” into dangerous territory. Ha ha. Soon, I saw a good solution, re-wrote the questionable section, read through it two or three times and then showered and got dressed for the funeral. After two hours of visitation, I got up to do my schtick. Herewith are some excerpts:
“On behalf of our mother and our family I’d like to welcome everyone here this morning and tell you how much we appreciate your presence. After this service we’re going to drive to ___________for internment at ___________. This morning I’m going to speak first, and then Reverend ___________will take over, share some of his remembrances, and close the service. Reverend ___________lived up the street from Mom and he did her many favors over the last few years which our family deeply appreciates.
Let me begin by giving you a little background. Some of you may not know this, but our mother was an incredible scrabble player. As a little girl she lived next door to the town library, and she went there every afternoon after school to read books. Because of her lifelong reading she had a large vocabulary. She also had an amazingly good memory which she inherited from her father. And finally, she was very smart, so after she started playing Scrabble, everyone soon discovered that she was very good at it. By the time she was 90 years old her skill at that game was legendary.
Mom could also be very competitive. A few years ago, she was playing scrabble with ____, her young niece, when _____ was offered some advice by HER mother. Mom got irritated and said, “Don’t give her any help!” _______’s mother said, “Well Mom, she’s only 10 years old. Mom responded, “That doesn’t matter! She needs to learn to play the game on her own!” She wouldn’t cut any slack even for a 10 year old girl when it came to Scrabble!
After one of the last games I played with her, it took me more than a full day to recover from the mental exhaustion I experienced. I went over to her house one afternoon and decided to give her a real battle because she was always looking for someone who could play the game at a high level. I decided to think through every move as if I were in a world-class competition. Of course, I was much slower than she was, and she began to tease me and fuss at me about how long it was taking me to make my moves. While I was thinking, she’d say, ‘Do you suppose I have time to cook dinner while I’m waiting on you to move?’ I ignored her and kept concentrating. After I spelled my word, she instantly made her play. I continued concentrating. After several minutes had gone by, she said, ‘Maybe I should go find a good book to read while I’m waiting on your next move.’ She continued this kind of bantering and teasing, and I contined to ignore he. After about fifteen minutes, however, she suddenly realized that I was playing in a different way than ever before, and she became as deadly serious as I was. She quit making jokes and began to concentrate in the same intense way that I was. If there had been a timer, forcing us to make moves within five minutes or so, then she would have easily won, but because I had decided to take however long I needed to make each move, it turned into a tooth-and-nail knock-down drag-out battle. The score went back and forth. I’d get a few points ahead and then she’d get a few points ahead. Amazingly, at the end of the game, after three hours, we both ended up with only one letter left, and it was the exact same letter! It was incredible! At that point my score was exactly one point greater than hers, but unfortunately for me, it was her turn to play. If she could find a place to play that one letter, she would win the game because she would gain a point and I would lose a point. She studied the board for what seemed like an eternity and finally said resignedly, “There’s nowhere I can play this letter.” In the meantime I had realized that there was only one place on the entire board that her letter or mine could be played, but the word was a word that only a computer user would know. I knew that she did not know the word.
I said, “Mom, you can play your letter,” and I showed her the locoation. She said, “I’ve never heard of that word, so it’s not fair for you to let me win this way.” I said, “Mom, you’re 97 years old, and you’ve never used a computer, so it’s certainly not fair for me to win in this way.” She thought for a few moments, looked more cheerful, and then said, “Okay then,” let’s call it a draw.” Afterwards, I was so exhausted from the mental strain that it felt like I had been run over by a Mack truck. It took me a day to recover, and I think it took her almost four days to recover.
The reason I’m telling you about her prowess at Scrabble is to help you understand something she said a few hours before she died. She was in the hospital because she had gotten dehydrated and lost her appetite. She hadn’t eaten more than a few bites of food in a week. By Saturday the saline drip had rehydrated her, and she rallied, but on Sunday morning she took a turn for the worse, and all of us soon realized that she was not going to ever leave the hospital. She knew it, too, and fully accepted it, and she said loving goodbyes to everyone. She was not in pain, but by early afternoon she was experiencing discomfort as her old tired body systems began shutting down. Her eyes were closed, her heartrate was high, and her breathing was labored when she suddenly opened her eyes and said, “I just realized that the word “funeral” has “fun” in it!”
Even though it was a very poignant time, that statement caused everyone in the room to laugh. She apparently had been thinking about her own impending funeral, and as she saw the words in her mind, she had noticed something strangely ironic and darkly humorous.
So, for me, this is not a funeral. It is a fun-eral, and I doubt that I will ever again think of a funeral in the same way again. They will always be fun-erals. My mother was so smart that I’m sure she was also pointing to something else. I think she was saying, “Have fun, even at my own fun-eral,” and that’s part of her legacy. Today we’re going to do exactly what she reminded us to do--have fun as we celebrate and honor a life well lived.
Mom had a long and interesting life, and she had a positive influence on a great number of people besides her family. She was born in 1915, and grew up in Nashville when Nashville was still a small town. She traveled widely, met her soulmate, our father, got married, and had four children………..etc.
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Our mother and father had a long and happy time together—64 years in all. Mom once said, “I wasn’t smart, but I was smart enough to marry a smart man.” I don’t know if she ever fully realized that she was just as smart as the man she married, but she certainly was. She and our dad had a marriage like that of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, and the love she and my father felt for each other radiated out to her children and far beyond. None of us ever doubted that our parents loved each other, enjoyed each other’s company and conversation, and also deeply respected each other’s intelligence. They provided a good model of a happy marriage, and my mother often told us that in their entire married life, despite occasional moments of irritation, they never really got mad at one another. That’s pretty astounding.
Because her father worked for a railroad and could get free travel passes, by the age of ten mom had been to both the pacific and atlantic oceans. She had been to New York, Florida, and almost everywhere in between. Her father was a history buff, and both of her parents liked to travel, so she got to learn a great deal about American history and geography at an early age…….
She was not a materialistic person. She liked people, and she enjoyed helping people, an activity that she inherited from her father. She used to pick up hitchhikers, and one day I told her to stop doing that because it had become too dangerous. She said, “Well, every time I see some fellow on the road, I think about one of you boys hitchhiking somewhere, and I hope that someone will do the same thing for my sons that I do for them. She was truly a Good Samaritan.
During the last ten years I did her income tax returns, and the amount of her charitable contributions was always a large percentage of her expenses in relation to her income. I used to think, “Gee whiz, her charitable giving forces me to work hard managing her small investments just to pay for all of her donations.” Then, one day I realized that my work made it possible for her to help more people than would otherwise have been possible, and I was happy from then on to be part of her ministry.” She always tithed to her church, but she usually went far beyond that, giving to many of the orphanages and special programs of the church as well as The Rescue Mission,
Easter Seals
March of dimes
Salvation Army
Disabled American Veterans
International Rescue Committee
World hunger fund
Rescue Squad
St. Judes Hospital
Several food banks
The Heart Association, and others, just to name a few.
As the epitome of southern hospitality, she invited lots of people to her home for meals. At one point she got interested in foreign students attending universities in the Nashville area, and she became like a second mother to many of them.
Carol and I were once traveling in Japan when we got extremely sick in the city of Kyoto. I remembered that mom had made friends with a young couple whose home was in Kyoto. She had met the couple while the man was studying at Vanderbilt. I retrieved the phone number list that mom had insisted I take on our trip, called the man’s phone, and the man’s wife rushed to pick us up in a taxi. She took us to the clinic of a doctor who was voluntarily working in a poor area of town, and got us immediately treated. The doctor would not accept any pay for his services. The woman told us that she would never forget my mother’s kindness to them when they were staying in Nashville. That was a typical response of people whom Mom had befriended.
As a child, and later, as an adult, I always enjoyed coming home because my mother made our home feel so warm and inviting. I’m sure that my brother and sister felt the same way. Our parents loved us. They were always happy to see us, interested in what we were doing, and extremely supportive, and no child can ask for much more than that.
Interestingly, Mom didn’t like conflict. Her mother had a hot temper, and she could get mad on a moment’s notice, usually at her husband. My granddad used to tell us that he was the only slave that Lincoln never freed. My grandmother’s temper tantrums probably frightened Mom as a child, so she took on the role of becoming the family peacemaker. This is why she later tried to keep all of our family conversations away from controversial subjects that she felt might lead to any kind of heated argument. She had one technique for doing this that we all felt was particularly funny. Whenever she felt that a discussion was growing too heated or moving in an uncomfortable direction, she’d suddenly point out the window toward her birdfeeder and say excitedly, “Oh look, a bird!” This would totally disrupt the conversation and cause everyone to lose their train of thought, and this eventually became a big family joke. Today, any time one of us wants to change the direction of a conversation, we’ll point into the distance and say with mock excitement, “Oh look, a bird!”
Mom’s discomfort with conflict made her very indirect in dealing with people, and therefore she often used psychological techniques to accomplish her goals. She didn’t want to tell people what to do as much as she wanted them to read her mind. Sometimes this was effective and at other times it was challenging. She would often say, “I don’t need to say what I think because people already know.” And that was true. There was never any doubt about what she thought about something even if she hadn’t spoken a single word.
At one time Dad was making lots of out-of-town trips to legal proceedings by himself. While doing so he stayed in very nice hotels, and when he returned, he would often show Mom a new set of cuff links, tie, or hat that he had bought for himself. Dad liked clothes. After one such trip my Mom looked at some new piece of clothing he had bought, acted surprised, and said, “Isn’t it interesting that fine hotels only have gift shops for men.” Well, dad was no dummy, and he never again came home from a trip without some kind of gift for Mom. In this example she was less subtle than usual, but she always managed to get her message across with or without words. In fact, her personal power was quite extraordinary. Many of us noted that although she only weighed about 83 pounds at the end of her life, the power of her will was almost physically tangible. She was tiny toward the end, but she remained a steel magnolia.
Mom had a great sense of humor, and for me she was an ideal mother. When I was young, she gave me an enormous amount of freedom to pursue my interests and supported whatever interests I had. She did the same thing for my brothers and sister, too. In this sense we were certainly spoiled. Someone who once met all of us together later said, “Wow, how did your mother manage to have four only children?”
Once, as a teenager, when I was sad over a romantic breakup and feeling very lonely, I received an anonymous valentine-like card in the mail with a note that said “From a secret admirer.” This made me wonder which girl in my school was interested in me, and helped pull me out of my doldrums. I had no idea that it was from my mother until twenty years later when she told me about it.
After our father died in 1989 Mom must have been very lonely, but she didn’t show it. As her advancing age and osteoporosis made her frail, we decided to hire someone to help her out two or three days a week running errands and supplying companionship. Luckily, one of the first caregivers who came to help her was _________. She and Mom hit it off instantly, and ________ was a gift from God. They shared the same values, and Mom, who was an only child, once told me that she felt like _______ was the sister that she had never had. She considered _______ her best friend and deepest confidante, and _______ helped care for her during the last eight years of her life.
_________ deserves a lot of credit for how she helped both our mother and the rest of our family because Mom was a powerful personality and could be quite demanding. She was persnickety about how she thought things ought to be done and exactly what she wanted. We all have enormous admiration for _______ and the patience she showed in helping meet Mom’s needs. Occasionally, near the end of her life, I would come over to help Mom on days when _______ was not working, and I quickly developed an even greater appreciation for her work. Fixing food for my mother was a real trip, to say the least.
For breakfast she wanted a cup of chilled (but not cold) orange juice, and it had to be stirred. She wanted two slices of apple bread heated up to a certain temperature but not toasted. She wanted a small dish placed on the warming oven, so that it would be at just the right temperature to set the bread on when it was ready to serve. She wanted tea made with boiling water and one tea bag, and she wanted it poured, boiling, into her empty orange juice cup because she liked just a faint flavor of orange juice in her tea. She wanted to spread butter on her toast so that it would melt in a particular manner. She wanted a glass of water that was neither too warm nor too cold. And so on. And that was just at breakfast! I suspect that _______ is the only person in the entire world who could ever soft-boil an egg exactly like my mother wanted it done. One time when I got irritated at some of her finicky desires, Mom said to me, “I know I’m spoiled, but I was an only child! What do you expect?”
I’m going to end by saying that for me, my mother will always be present, not just in my heart, and not just in my memories, but in a far deeper and more profound way. I’m going to close with 4 readings that point to what I’m pointing to:
The first reading is from the New Testament:
Jesus said, “The Kingdom of God is within you.”
The second reading is from the Gospel of Thomas:
Jesus said, “The Kingdom of God is inside of you and it is outside of you. The kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth and men do not see it.
The third reading is from the Old Testament. It is part of Psalm 19, and this translation is by Stephen Mitchell:
God’s universe is perfect, awing the mind.
God’s truth is subtle, baffling the intellect.
God’s law is complete, quickening the breath.
God’s compassion is fathomless, refreshing the soul.
God’s justice is absolute, lighting up the eyes.
God’s love is radiant, rejoicing the heart.
Let me always feel you present, in every atom of my life.
Let me keep surrendering my self until I am utterly transparent.
Let my words be rooted in honesty and my thoughts be lost in your light,
Unnameable God, my essence, my origin, my lifeblood, my home.
The fourth reading is one of my own poems that was published a few years ago. I’ve only added one line to the poem in honor of this special occasion:
You can’t hide from me now, God,
Because I’ve seen through all of your disguises.
I’ll admit, that you used to fool me,
By lying around on the grass like dew,
Or dropping off the trees like autumn leaves,
Or brushing past me on a crowded sidewalk
Dressed up like an important person.
In the past I often mistook the touch of a brushed sleeve,
For the touch of a brushed sleeve,
Or the chattering of squirrels,
For the chattering of squirrels,
Or trash lying on the side of a road
For trash lying on the side of a road,
Or a mother
For a mother.
Nevertheless, I never stopped trying to find you,
And every so often I’d catch a glimpse of something,
Like the momentary flash of a fish’s fin
Under the surface of a sunlit stream.
.
I kept looking for you, God,
Because I knew that things couldn’t be the way they seemed to be
And that something big was playing hide and seek with me.
You must have felt sorry for me,
Watching me search in all the wrong places,
But finally, you rang a telephone to get my attention.
And in that ringing I forgot everything I knew.
When you revealed yourself,
The sight of you was so mysterious that only you could handle the seeing of it.
After that day, even though I couldn’t always see you,
I knew where you were,
And I waited patiently for you to give more of yourself away.
Finally, my persistence paid off,
And I saw through all of your disguises.
Now, the jig’s up, God,
Because everywhere I look
You are all that I see.
There’s no need to waste any more time
Trying to act as if you were other people,
Or howling around as if you were the wind,
Or playing at insects, elephants, and stars.
It was a good joke, God,
But I see you now,
And I’ll never let you out of my sight again.
My eyes will always be glued to you,
But if my sight ever fails, then I’ll worship the sound of you,
And if my hearing ever fails, then I’ll worship the touch of you,
And if all of my other senses fail, then I’ll worship the memory of you.
I’m sorry to spoil your fun, God,
But if you ever want to play hide and seek with me again,
You’ll have to make me forget to remember.
In between the above excerpts were other stories and bits of family history, and the last excerpt is where the eulogy was allowed to go slightly cosmic.
Humorously, after I concluded my remarks, the preacher got up and launched into a full-blown ultra-fundamentalist church sermon. It was as if he had been asked to officiate at the funeral of Jesus because our mother was only mentioned as a vehicle to emphasize the importance of faith in gaining admittance to heaven. He told the audience that heaven was a real place, constructed with diamonds and other precious metals, that it was a particular size (that seemed rather small to me), and so forth. Carol and I could hardly believe what we were hearing. If I had known the guy was going to do something like that, I would have conducted the entire service alone. Afterwards, Carol remarked, “Well, your mom had the last laugh. She selected the preacher because she knew the guy and knew what he would do. She made one last attempt from the grave to convert you.” We could only laugh in admiration of her last valiant attempt to warp reality to conform with her ideas.
After my mother died, I offered to speak on behalf of the family at the funeral service (my younger brother now laughingly refers to me as The Patriarch of the family). My mother had requested that one of her neighbors, a Baptist minister, officiate at the service. I knew that I would have an enormous amount of fun writing and delivering the eulogy, and I assumed, incorrectly as it turned out (ha ha), that if I spoke for a long enough period of time, the minister would only have time to make a few personal remarks based upon his friendship with my mother. I assumed that after I finished speaking, he would make some personal comments, make a few spiritual comments, read a Bible verse, say a prayer, and close the service. Boy, was I ever wrong about that! Ha ha.
AAR, I went to work composing the eulogy. Having spoken at many funerals, I knew what had to be done. First, I had to organize the historical material and stories and write the eulogy, and then I had to practice it again and again, so that I could deliver it under control and without excessive emotion on my part. This is a real challenge when the eulogized person is someone close to you. A certain level of detachment is necessary, so that the eulogy can be delivered with just the right kinds of nuances. From my POV a good eulogy combines stand-up comedy with pathos. It incorporates lots of personal stories, a general history of the person’s life, humor, poignancy, etc., and, ideally, it should make the audience both laugh and cry in remembering what made the deceased person so uniquely special. The other reason the prepared remarks are read again and again is so that they are committed to memory. This allows the speaker to deliver the eulogy without having to read it.
I always look forward to this task because, for me, it is a kind of performance art (similar to stand up comedy) and includes great fun figuring out how to raise the eulogy to a cosmic level, a la non-duality, without offending anyone. My mother and I were very close, we shared a long period of time together, and I had been her primary care-taker, so it was a greater challenge than usual to prepare and deliver a eulogizing remembrance without becoming too emotional during the delivery.
Because our family had relatives coming from out of town we postponed the funeral for several days, and this gave me some time to get my act together (literally and figuratively). The time pressure was still considerable because we had so many things to arrange and we had many relatives already in town to entertain and deal with. I’m guessing that I spent a hundred hours in preparation, and the last day involved twelve straight hours of writing, re-writing, editing, and rehearsing the finished product.
On Thursday night my brother and his family had dinner with Carol, our daughter, and our daughter’s fiancée, and what happened during that dinner was extremely amusing. My brother and his wife have two children, a 16 year old son and a 12 year old daughter. My brother is an atheist and his wife is a serious Christian. The son’s goal is enlightenment, and he is further along on that path than any other teenager I have ever met. He has read all of the major books that we refer to on this forum and he resonates most strongly with a Taoist approach. His favorite books are probably “Peaceful Warrior,” “Power of Now,” and “Tao Te Ching.”
Carol and my daughter know all about the non-duality game, and my daughter’s fiancée often posts on this forum, so five people at the dinner table were all on the same wavelength. The other three were not. My brother’s son puts a huge grin on his face and asks me, “Well, Bob, are you going to include any isness in your talk tomorrow?”
I grinned back and said, “What do YOU think?”
My brother instantly becomes alarmed and asks what we’re talking about.
Carol, who is in a rather cosmic mood, is up for some fun, so she says, “Bill, do you think Bob could ignore an opportunity like this?”
Brother Bill becomes even more alarmed as he sees four of us grinning from ear to ear. My daughter looks worried, too, at this point and says, “Dad, you’re not going to do any non-duality stuff tomorrow, are you?”
I replied, “Well, hey, I’m the guy doing this, remember?”
She says, “No way! Dad, the room is going to be filled with very conservative people who were in Mom’s church.”
Carol and I become more amused, and continue stoking the fire. My brother and my daughter want to read what I’m going to say. Obviously, I refuse to consider such a thing.
My brother is now really worried, and he begins pleading for me to honor our mother “appropriately.” He says, “Bob, you know that this is NOT what mother would have wanted. She would have wanted a traditional service.”
I replied playfully, “Well, this is exactly what I wanted. Now I’ll have your full attention tomorrow. My goal is to have you on the edge of your seat in fear and trembling. I wouldn’t want anybody to fall asleep.”
By now four of us are laughing hard. My brother and my daughter are NOT smiling and look very worried.
I said, “The people tomorrow may need to expand their horizons a little bit, so I may help them out a bit.”
The conversation continued like this for some time and got pretty hysterical from my POV. I assured my brother that I would not do anything TOO outrageous, and that most of my cosmic stuff would probably fly right over the heads of most people. He and my daughter remained worried.
At that point Carol said to me, “We didn’t want to tell you about this until after the funeral, but today we found a card in your mother’s mailbox that was very unusual.” It was a letter from one of her close friends addressed to the family. The woman wrote that she was probably “going out on a limb” but felt that it was her Christian duty to tell the family that she had had several conversations with my mother about our family. My mother had expressed her concern to her that some members of our family were probably not Christian. This woman therefore felt compelled to explain to the family exactly what was required to be saved and the rest of her letter explained the requirements in detail. After Carol finished saying this, my brother’s teenage son, my daughter’s fiancée, and I all laughed so hard that we almost fell out of our chairs! Everyone else looked concerned at our response. Ha ha.
Ironically, after dinner I sat down in an easy chair and reflected upon my brother’s concern. I wondered if I had gone too far with some of what I had intended to say the following morning. I didn’t have the manuscript with me, and it wasn’t yet totally memorized, so I couldn’t review one questionable section well enough in my mind to verify that it was suitable as written.
The following morning I woke up at 4AM and went straight to my office. I read the final section of the eulogy where I had allowed things to get cosmic and realized that I had probably gone too far. I eliminated two paragraphs and tried to figure out a way to keep it cosmic without going “over the top” into dangerous territory. Ha ha. Soon, I saw a good solution, re-wrote the questionable section, read through it two or three times and then showered and got dressed for the funeral. After two hours of visitation, I got up to do my schtick. Herewith are some excerpts:
“On behalf of our mother and our family I’d like to welcome everyone here this morning and tell you how much we appreciate your presence. After this service we’re going to drive to ___________for internment at ___________. This morning I’m going to speak first, and then Reverend ___________will take over, share some of his remembrances, and close the service. Reverend ___________lived up the street from Mom and he did her many favors over the last few years which our family deeply appreciates.
Let me begin by giving you a little background. Some of you may not know this, but our mother was an incredible scrabble player. As a little girl she lived next door to the town library, and she went there every afternoon after school to read books. Because of her lifelong reading she had a large vocabulary. She also had an amazingly good memory which she inherited from her father. And finally, she was very smart, so after she started playing Scrabble, everyone soon discovered that she was very good at it. By the time she was 90 years old her skill at that game was legendary.
Mom could also be very competitive. A few years ago, she was playing scrabble with ____, her young niece, when _____ was offered some advice by HER mother. Mom got irritated and said, “Don’t give her any help!” _______’s mother said, “Well Mom, she’s only 10 years old. Mom responded, “That doesn’t matter! She needs to learn to play the game on her own!” She wouldn’t cut any slack even for a 10 year old girl when it came to Scrabble!
After one of the last games I played with her, it took me more than a full day to recover from the mental exhaustion I experienced. I went over to her house one afternoon and decided to give her a real battle because she was always looking for someone who could play the game at a high level. I decided to think through every move as if I were in a world-class competition. Of course, I was much slower than she was, and she began to tease me and fuss at me about how long it was taking me to make my moves. While I was thinking, she’d say, ‘Do you suppose I have time to cook dinner while I’m waiting on you to move?’ I ignored her and kept concentrating. After I spelled my word, she instantly made her play. I continued concentrating. After several minutes had gone by, she said, ‘Maybe I should go find a good book to read while I’m waiting on your next move.’ She continued this kind of bantering and teasing, and I contined to ignore he. After about fifteen minutes, however, she suddenly realized that I was playing in a different way than ever before, and she became as deadly serious as I was. She quit making jokes and began to concentrate in the same intense way that I was. If there had been a timer, forcing us to make moves within five minutes or so, then she would have easily won, but because I had decided to take however long I needed to make each move, it turned into a tooth-and-nail knock-down drag-out battle. The score went back and forth. I’d get a few points ahead and then she’d get a few points ahead. Amazingly, at the end of the game, after three hours, we both ended up with only one letter left, and it was the exact same letter! It was incredible! At that point my score was exactly one point greater than hers, but unfortunately for me, it was her turn to play. If she could find a place to play that one letter, she would win the game because she would gain a point and I would lose a point. She studied the board for what seemed like an eternity and finally said resignedly, “There’s nowhere I can play this letter.” In the meantime I had realized that there was only one place on the entire board that her letter or mine could be played, but the word was a word that only a computer user would know. I knew that she did not know the word.
I said, “Mom, you can play your letter,” and I showed her the locoation. She said, “I’ve never heard of that word, so it’s not fair for you to let me win this way.” I said, “Mom, you’re 97 years old, and you’ve never used a computer, so it’s certainly not fair for me to win in this way.” She thought for a few moments, looked more cheerful, and then said, “Okay then,” let’s call it a draw.” Afterwards, I was so exhausted from the mental strain that it felt like I had been run over by a Mack truck. It took me a day to recover, and I think it took her almost four days to recover.
The reason I’m telling you about her prowess at Scrabble is to help you understand something she said a few hours before she died. She was in the hospital because she had gotten dehydrated and lost her appetite. She hadn’t eaten more than a few bites of food in a week. By Saturday the saline drip had rehydrated her, and she rallied, but on Sunday morning she took a turn for the worse, and all of us soon realized that she was not going to ever leave the hospital. She knew it, too, and fully accepted it, and she said loving goodbyes to everyone. She was not in pain, but by early afternoon she was experiencing discomfort as her old tired body systems began shutting down. Her eyes were closed, her heartrate was high, and her breathing was labored when she suddenly opened her eyes and said, “I just realized that the word “funeral” has “fun” in it!”
Even though it was a very poignant time, that statement caused everyone in the room to laugh. She apparently had been thinking about her own impending funeral, and as she saw the words in her mind, she had noticed something strangely ironic and darkly humorous.
So, for me, this is not a funeral. It is a fun-eral, and I doubt that I will ever again think of a funeral in the same way again. They will always be fun-erals. My mother was so smart that I’m sure she was also pointing to something else. I think she was saying, “Have fun, even at my own fun-eral,” and that’s part of her legacy. Today we’re going to do exactly what she reminded us to do--have fun as we celebrate and honor a life well lived.
Mom had a long and interesting life, and she had a positive influence on a great number of people besides her family. She was born in 1915, and grew up in Nashville when Nashville was still a small town. She traveled widely, met her soulmate, our father, got married, and had four children………..etc.
________________________________
Our mother and father had a long and happy time together—64 years in all. Mom once said, “I wasn’t smart, but I was smart enough to marry a smart man.” I don’t know if she ever fully realized that she was just as smart as the man she married, but she certainly was. She and our dad had a marriage like that of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, and the love she and my father felt for each other radiated out to her children and far beyond. None of us ever doubted that our parents loved each other, enjoyed each other’s company and conversation, and also deeply respected each other’s intelligence. They provided a good model of a happy marriage, and my mother often told us that in their entire married life, despite occasional moments of irritation, they never really got mad at one another. That’s pretty astounding.
Because her father worked for a railroad and could get free travel passes, by the age of ten mom had been to both the pacific and atlantic oceans. She had been to New York, Florida, and almost everywhere in between. Her father was a history buff, and both of her parents liked to travel, so she got to learn a great deal about American history and geography at an early age…….
She was not a materialistic person. She liked people, and she enjoyed helping people, an activity that she inherited from her father. She used to pick up hitchhikers, and one day I told her to stop doing that because it had become too dangerous. She said, “Well, every time I see some fellow on the road, I think about one of you boys hitchhiking somewhere, and I hope that someone will do the same thing for my sons that I do for them. She was truly a Good Samaritan.
During the last ten years I did her income tax returns, and the amount of her charitable contributions was always a large percentage of her expenses in relation to her income. I used to think, “Gee whiz, her charitable giving forces me to work hard managing her small investments just to pay for all of her donations.” Then, one day I realized that my work made it possible for her to help more people than would otherwise have been possible, and I was happy from then on to be part of her ministry.” She always tithed to her church, but she usually went far beyond that, giving to many of the orphanages and special programs of the church as well as The Rescue Mission,
Easter Seals
March of dimes
Salvation Army
Disabled American Veterans
International Rescue Committee
World hunger fund
Rescue Squad
St. Judes Hospital
Several food banks
The Heart Association, and others, just to name a few.
As the epitome of southern hospitality, she invited lots of people to her home for meals. At one point she got interested in foreign students attending universities in the Nashville area, and she became like a second mother to many of them.
Carol and I were once traveling in Japan when we got extremely sick in the city of Kyoto. I remembered that mom had made friends with a young couple whose home was in Kyoto. She had met the couple while the man was studying at Vanderbilt. I retrieved the phone number list that mom had insisted I take on our trip, called the man’s phone, and the man’s wife rushed to pick us up in a taxi. She took us to the clinic of a doctor who was voluntarily working in a poor area of town, and got us immediately treated. The doctor would not accept any pay for his services. The woman told us that she would never forget my mother’s kindness to them when they were staying in Nashville. That was a typical response of people whom Mom had befriended.
As a child, and later, as an adult, I always enjoyed coming home because my mother made our home feel so warm and inviting. I’m sure that my brother and sister felt the same way. Our parents loved us. They were always happy to see us, interested in what we were doing, and extremely supportive, and no child can ask for much more than that.
Interestingly, Mom didn’t like conflict. Her mother had a hot temper, and she could get mad on a moment’s notice, usually at her husband. My granddad used to tell us that he was the only slave that Lincoln never freed. My grandmother’s temper tantrums probably frightened Mom as a child, so she took on the role of becoming the family peacemaker. This is why she later tried to keep all of our family conversations away from controversial subjects that she felt might lead to any kind of heated argument. She had one technique for doing this that we all felt was particularly funny. Whenever she felt that a discussion was growing too heated or moving in an uncomfortable direction, she’d suddenly point out the window toward her birdfeeder and say excitedly, “Oh look, a bird!” This would totally disrupt the conversation and cause everyone to lose their train of thought, and this eventually became a big family joke. Today, any time one of us wants to change the direction of a conversation, we’ll point into the distance and say with mock excitement, “Oh look, a bird!”
Mom’s discomfort with conflict made her very indirect in dealing with people, and therefore she often used psychological techniques to accomplish her goals. She didn’t want to tell people what to do as much as she wanted them to read her mind. Sometimes this was effective and at other times it was challenging. She would often say, “I don’t need to say what I think because people already know.” And that was true. There was never any doubt about what she thought about something even if she hadn’t spoken a single word.
At one time Dad was making lots of out-of-town trips to legal proceedings by himself. While doing so he stayed in very nice hotels, and when he returned, he would often show Mom a new set of cuff links, tie, or hat that he had bought for himself. Dad liked clothes. After one such trip my Mom looked at some new piece of clothing he had bought, acted surprised, and said, “Isn’t it interesting that fine hotels only have gift shops for men.” Well, dad was no dummy, and he never again came home from a trip without some kind of gift for Mom. In this example she was less subtle than usual, but she always managed to get her message across with or without words. In fact, her personal power was quite extraordinary. Many of us noted that although she only weighed about 83 pounds at the end of her life, the power of her will was almost physically tangible. She was tiny toward the end, but she remained a steel magnolia.
Mom had a great sense of humor, and for me she was an ideal mother. When I was young, she gave me an enormous amount of freedom to pursue my interests and supported whatever interests I had. She did the same thing for my brothers and sister, too. In this sense we were certainly spoiled. Someone who once met all of us together later said, “Wow, how did your mother manage to have four only children?”
Once, as a teenager, when I was sad over a romantic breakup and feeling very lonely, I received an anonymous valentine-like card in the mail with a note that said “From a secret admirer.” This made me wonder which girl in my school was interested in me, and helped pull me out of my doldrums. I had no idea that it was from my mother until twenty years later when she told me about it.
After our father died in 1989 Mom must have been very lonely, but she didn’t show it. As her advancing age and osteoporosis made her frail, we decided to hire someone to help her out two or three days a week running errands and supplying companionship. Luckily, one of the first caregivers who came to help her was _________. She and Mom hit it off instantly, and ________ was a gift from God. They shared the same values, and Mom, who was an only child, once told me that she felt like _______ was the sister that she had never had. She considered _______ her best friend and deepest confidante, and _______ helped care for her during the last eight years of her life.
_________ deserves a lot of credit for how she helped both our mother and the rest of our family because Mom was a powerful personality and could be quite demanding. She was persnickety about how she thought things ought to be done and exactly what she wanted. We all have enormous admiration for _______ and the patience she showed in helping meet Mom’s needs. Occasionally, near the end of her life, I would come over to help Mom on days when _______ was not working, and I quickly developed an even greater appreciation for her work. Fixing food for my mother was a real trip, to say the least.
For breakfast she wanted a cup of chilled (but not cold) orange juice, and it had to be stirred. She wanted two slices of apple bread heated up to a certain temperature but not toasted. She wanted a small dish placed on the warming oven, so that it would be at just the right temperature to set the bread on when it was ready to serve. She wanted tea made with boiling water and one tea bag, and she wanted it poured, boiling, into her empty orange juice cup because she liked just a faint flavor of orange juice in her tea. She wanted to spread butter on her toast so that it would melt in a particular manner. She wanted a glass of water that was neither too warm nor too cold. And so on. And that was just at breakfast! I suspect that _______ is the only person in the entire world who could ever soft-boil an egg exactly like my mother wanted it done. One time when I got irritated at some of her finicky desires, Mom said to me, “I know I’m spoiled, but I was an only child! What do you expect?”
I’m going to end by saying that for me, my mother will always be present, not just in my heart, and not just in my memories, but in a far deeper and more profound way. I’m going to close with 4 readings that point to what I’m pointing to:
The first reading is from the New Testament:
Jesus said, “The Kingdom of God is within you.”
The second reading is from the Gospel of Thomas:
Jesus said, “The Kingdom of God is inside of you and it is outside of you. The kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth and men do not see it.
The third reading is from the Old Testament. It is part of Psalm 19, and this translation is by Stephen Mitchell:
God’s universe is perfect, awing the mind.
God’s truth is subtle, baffling the intellect.
God’s law is complete, quickening the breath.
God’s compassion is fathomless, refreshing the soul.
God’s justice is absolute, lighting up the eyes.
God’s love is radiant, rejoicing the heart.
Let me always feel you present, in every atom of my life.
Let me keep surrendering my self until I am utterly transparent.
Let my words be rooted in honesty and my thoughts be lost in your light,
Unnameable God, my essence, my origin, my lifeblood, my home.
The fourth reading is one of my own poems that was published a few years ago. I’ve only added one line to the poem in honor of this special occasion:
You can’t hide from me now, God,
Because I’ve seen through all of your disguises.
I’ll admit, that you used to fool me,
By lying around on the grass like dew,
Or dropping off the trees like autumn leaves,
Or brushing past me on a crowded sidewalk
Dressed up like an important person.
In the past I often mistook the touch of a brushed sleeve,
For the touch of a brushed sleeve,
Or the chattering of squirrels,
For the chattering of squirrels,
Or trash lying on the side of a road
For trash lying on the side of a road,
Or a mother
For a mother.
Nevertheless, I never stopped trying to find you,
And every so often I’d catch a glimpse of something,
Like the momentary flash of a fish’s fin
Under the surface of a sunlit stream.
.
I kept looking for you, God,
Because I knew that things couldn’t be the way they seemed to be
And that something big was playing hide and seek with me.
You must have felt sorry for me,
Watching me search in all the wrong places,
But finally, you rang a telephone to get my attention.
And in that ringing I forgot everything I knew.
When you revealed yourself,
The sight of you was so mysterious that only you could handle the seeing of it.
After that day, even though I couldn’t always see you,
I knew where you were,
And I waited patiently for you to give more of yourself away.
Finally, my persistence paid off,
And I saw through all of your disguises.
Now, the jig’s up, God,
Because everywhere I look
You are all that I see.
There’s no need to waste any more time
Trying to act as if you were other people,
Or howling around as if you were the wind,
Or playing at insects, elephants, and stars.
It was a good joke, God,
But I see you now,
And I’ll never let you out of my sight again.
My eyes will always be glued to you,
But if my sight ever fails, then I’ll worship the sound of you,
And if my hearing ever fails, then I’ll worship the touch of you,
And if all of my other senses fail, then I’ll worship the memory of you.
I’m sorry to spoil your fun, God,
But if you ever want to play hide and seek with me again,
You’ll have to make me forget to remember.
In between the above excerpts were other stories and bits of family history, and the last excerpt is where the eulogy was allowed to go slightly cosmic.
Humorously, after I concluded my remarks, the preacher got up and launched into a full-blown ultra-fundamentalist church sermon. It was as if he had been asked to officiate at the funeral of Jesus because our mother was only mentioned as a vehicle to emphasize the importance of faith in gaining admittance to heaven. He told the audience that heaven was a real place, constructed with diamonds and other precious metals, that it was a particular size (that seemed rather small to me), and so forth. Carol and I could hardly believe what we were hearing. If I had known the guy was going to do something like that, I would have conducted the entire service alone. Afterwards, Carol remarked, “Well, your mom had the last laugh. She selected the preacher because she knew the guy and knew what he would do. She made one last attempt from the grave to convert you.” We could only laugh in admiration of her last valiant attempt to warp reality to conform with her ideas.
