Thanks to everyone who attended Mom’s funeral service on August 14, 2021, or sent condolences and memorials. It was a really fine service that highlighted her remarkable life and remembered her in both moving and light-hearted ways.
Mom was an amazing person. She juggled raising a family with a career, entering the male-dominated federal government workforce in the 1940s and meeting challenges with grace, with style, with a smile. She found time to take her children to activities, volunteer for community organizations, and lend advice that became wiser as we aged. She was nice but tough, gentle yet strong, outgoing but thought-provoking.
She did not have an easy life, especially growing up. Just two days after her eighth birthday, her father died in a coal-mining accident. It was in the midst of the Great Depression, escalating the challenges. Fortunately, she had numerous aunts, uncles, and other relatives who lived in the small town of Shenandoah, Pa., to help. She excelled at school and made her way to D.C. as soon as she graduated from high school. There, she aided the WWII effort, joined the government workforce, and met Dad. Their first child, Sharon, died at the age of nine, likely from Reye’s syndrome. She knew great loss - greater than many have experienced - but she didn’t let that stop her from continuing on and helping the rest of her family prosper.
Of course, not all of her ideas panned out. One summer, she and her kids - ages 12, 8, and 6 - rode on a bus all the way from Texas to Pennsylvania and back. It was 30 hours one way. Dad didn’t want to drive as usual to visit family, so Mom was determined not to skip our annual summer journey back East.
The bus stopped at not just big cities, but many small towns. At each stop, us kids would run off the bus to check the pay phones for coins. We’d also check vending machines and even restroom stalls. Mom would run after us, yelling at us to get back on the bus. She usually had to return and plead with the bus driver to wait until we finally returned. For some reason, that was the last time we took a bus ride like that.
But in time, Mom laughed her infectious laugh as she told that story. It became something to learn from, something to entertain others and make them smile.
I had a friend in college who wanted me to write in my college newspaper column about his theory on why men were somehow inherently better than women. But I never pursued that because, even as a 19-year-old college kid, I knew that wasn’t true. Mom set the bar high, showing she belonged in any situation, that she was as good as anyone else. She did it with grace, with style, with a smile.
After I moved from the Dallas area to the D.C. area in 2003, I didn’t get to visit Mom as much as I would have liked. We’d make those long drives most summers, as I did when I was a kid, to visit. Each journey made me remember something that happened along the way, or a place we visited a long time ago. It was a way to bond despite living more than 1,000 miles away.
But I never took my kids on those journeys by bus; we usually drove and occasionally flew. And there were not many pay phones left.
Love you, Mom, and you’ll always be a part of us.
Kevin
