Eulogy for our mother

No matter how much you prepare yourself, losing a parent is one of the hardest things in life to go through. And doubly so when your parent is, was, as magnificent as our mother. But she would not want us to mourn her. She would want us to celebrate her, as she celebrated everyone in her life.

I don’t have a single good memory to share, or story to tell you. I knew her for approximately 18 271 days, or 600 months, or 50 years and nine days. I have too many memories and stories.

One of the things that was hard for me to accept for a long time was that our mother did not belong to me alone. She belonged to all of us, to the world.

Some people collect books, like me, others collect figurines. Our mother collected people. She loved so many people, and they all loved her back.

This disease that took her from us, from all of us, is so cruel in how it isolates the person affected from the world. And our mother, she belonged to the world, to all of you, all of us, and so many others, so the last year was very hard for her as she fell deeper and deeper into this isolation.

It robbed her of so much. And yet, here you all are, to celebrate her life, because it is not about one year, but about a life lived over a many decades and through many phases.

She taught all of us to live life in exuberance. She lived hers with gusto and abundant joy. She loved to eat good food, and to laugh. And her laugh was infectious. You could not help but laugh with her.

She brought passion to every thing she did, a passion that both of us, her biological children inherited, and a passion she inspired in many of the other children whose lives she touched in her years of teaching.

I have had so many reach out to me since she left us, and they all mentioned the deep impact she had on their lives, more so than any other teacher. And many of those completed high school more than thirty years ago.

Along with her passion, she taught us resilience. No matter how many times she was broken down, she built herself right back up, each time stronger than before, and made it look almost effortless.

But most of all, she taught us that love comes in different shapes and sizes, and it is not a finite resource. You can love many people without withholding from one.

In one of my favourite books, Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett, there is a line that reads “Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken? No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away, until the clock wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life is only the core of their actual existence.”

Let us let her ripples last as long as possible.

One song, more than any other, will always remind me of her, The Whole of the Moon by the Waterboys

I pictured a rainbow
You held it in your hands
I had flashes
But you saw the plan
I wandered out in the world for years
While you just stayed in your room
I saw the crescent
You saw the whole of the moon
The whole of the moon

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She loved this poem, and the amazing Michael Sheen delivers it with such power: Michael Sheen performs 'Do not go gentle into that good night' by Dylan Thomas (youtube.com)