Thursday, June 4, 2020
Eulogy to my Mom Annette on her passing June 2, 2020
From my earliest memories, mom is waking me up, dressing me, tying my shoe laces, making buttered toast and OJ before sending me off to school with a daily ham or baloney sandwich (as we ate back then) and an almond joy candy bar. Before that she had already prepared breakfast and lunch for my dad, Harry who left for work in the dark of dawn and would return late in evening, and sometimes days later when out of town. Later in school she would help me with reading, writing and in high school the reports because I was a fumbler at typing.
I was so close to my mom that when I moved out of state to see the world, I was always anxious that she or dad might not be keeping well, especially when dad called one day informing me she had fallen down the house stairs and broke both her legs. She would call me almost nightly in time. After that incident they would come and stay at my house every year for months at a time. This enabled them to leave the cold winters here and also have more company in the dark months. Of course, she made all the meals and attended to the dog, Casey. Poor mom, on one Thanksgiving eve she left the turkey out to defrost and I remarked it was a bad idea with Casey around, so we pushed it to the back of the counter. Around 4am that evening we heard a loud crash. I instinctively hurried over and grabbed the turkey off the floor. I said it will be alright, but Mom was horrified and yells “DON’T TELL ANYONE THIS HAPPENED!” We had the turkey for dinner anyway, sans thigh and leg. Later on a different trip out, she got to experience a 4.9 earthquake there, which was a revelation for her too. I finally returned to the East Coast almost a year after 911 to be closer to them and attend to their needs, like helping dad with the house stuff and got to enjoy her home cooked meals I was never good at preparing.
Mom’s wonderful qualities throughout her life were her persistence, hard work and her humility. She often told me to live for myself and settle down and not worry about her or dad — to focus on my work and life and visit when I had time. I never missed a holiday or Mother’s or Father’s Day with them since. Keeping a clean house and having finances in order was something neither dad nor me were good at, but we both eventually learned from her. Today I’m looking at her framed retirement plaque, given for her 35-year job as bookkeeper and sometimes office manager at the Jewish Community Center of NH. She worked throughout every lunch and probably never had more than a handful of sick days in all the years there.
The most important things to mom were family and faith; when she couldn’t drive to Sunday mass she would never miss the daily Archdiocese mass from Hartford on television and the St. Peter’s masses for Christmas and Easter. She didn’t care for material possessions, except for buying clothes for dad and me when I was younger. In fact, she was known for giving items away for the poor people, something she and her family personally experienced through the 1930s Depression. When I came to collect the mail in her later years, I was amazed at all of the charity mail that came in daily. She donated to women’s groups, fostered children homes, Ellis Island fund, WW2 veteran funds, monasteries and of course, multiple church funds.
I am deeply thankful to her extended family (notably her sister Frances and nephews Joe and Vin and their families) and my parent’s friends and neighbors who often visited her and my dad.
I took this wonderful quote off the internet from Rebecca Solnit on what a mother really does:
“When my friends began to have babies and I came to comprehend the heroic labor it takes to keep one alive, the constant exhausting tending of a being who can do nothing and demands everything, I realized that my mother had done all of these things for me before I remembered. I was fed; I was washed; I was clothed; I was taught to speak and given a thousand other things, over and over again, hourly, daily, for years. She gave me everything before she gave me nothing.”
