(Prior to my mother’s death, I had never considered her life as she must have experienced it. I viewed her only in the distorted context of mother and son, often mother versus son. I instantly regretted my childish myopia when she was finally gone. I wrote this eulogy for her funeral service, my attempt, too late, to understand her on her own terms.)
My mother never liked a fuss, especially a fuss on her behalf. She didn’t feel she was worthy. Indeed, decades ago, during one of her darker moments, she said my father had been the only one who had given a damn about her. I would hope our attentions today, and those of the last decades, would prove her wrong.
William Faulkner defined a hero as someone who rises above what his circumstances compel him to be. Certainly, my mother’s circumstances could have justified a lesser life.
She was born into a classically dysfunctional family. She was the third daughter of an autocratic father who desired ─ most of all ─ to have a son. Her mother was an odd, manipulative woman who bore four daughters, several miscarriages, and the sad knowledge she failed to give her husband what he most desired.
Relative to the times in Depression-era Oklahoma, my mother was comfortable financially. But she was so emotionally deprived and lonely, she ran away from home many times. She once told me, “I wasn’t trying to run away, I was just looking for someone to play with.” (Incidentally, this was typical of my mother. She never waited around, hoping for a solution—or a problem, for that matter. She always went out looking for one.)
Eventually, she found someone to play with — in the person of my father. She married him despite her family’s unsubtle misgivings about one of the Green girls marrying a dirt-poor Okie from Durant. Then she ran away with him to Arizona, where Kev and I entered the picture. Later, she packed us all up and came to California where she seemed to have finally gained many of her life’s desires.
Of course, all that changed in 1966 when my father died.
I can only imagine the crushing fear and loneliness she must have experienced then. All her life she fought a natural-born compulsion toward panic and anxiety. Add to that the very real terror of having to raise her family alone, and you have a set of circumstances that might have crushed most people.
But she wasn’t crushed. In fact, she took to the task with the tenacity and single-mindedness I believe were her defining characteristics. She not only took care of herself and her family, but she gave much more than she ever received, to many people. She was one of the tightest-fisted, yet most generous, people I have ever known. And that was only one of the many contradictions of my mother’s personality.
For better or for worse (and many times, it was both) she was the most influential person in my life. Besides the small matter of my life, she gave me a love of art, literature and drama, a penchant for travel, a fondness for the chaos of financial markets, and a devotion to language, particularly French. (In 1965, when she insisted I start learning it, French was actually considered the “international” language. My, how times have changed.) She also gave me a sense of loyalty, a need for frequent introspection, a suspicion of material things, and a bias toward action in all enterprises except housekeeping and filing. (My mother pursued a personal policy of “Just do it!” long before anyone had heard the Nike shoes slogan.)
Most of all, she gave me an ability to let go, and that is what I must do now. It isn’t easy saying good-bye to someone I have known every second of my life. She was always there. Come Hell or high water, whether I liked it or not, she was always, ferociously, heroically, there.
So, how would my mother have advised me to handle this problem of letting go? I think she would have said, “End all this fuss right now, and get on with your life.”
So I guess that’s what I’m going to do. And I think that’s what we’ll all have to do.