Eulogy for Mother Examples

If you knew my mother, you knew the sound of her keys in the door before you saw her face. That sound meant dinner would somehow appear and somebody in the house would feel less alone than they had a minute earlier. I want to talk about the woman behind that sound.

Margaret Ellen Doyle was born in a two-bedroom house on Carver Street and never left the neighbourhood, which she'd tell you was a choice and not a failure of imagination. She worked thirty-one years at the county records office. She could find a birth certificate from 1952 faster than the computer could, and she was proud of that in the way she was proud of very few things about herself.

Home was where she was somebody else. Home, she was the person who kept a second coffee pot going for the night shift, because my father worked nights for a decade and she'd decided nobody should come home at dawn to a dark kitchen. Home, she was the person who remembered every cousin's birthday, including the cousins the rest of us had lost track of, and sent cards that said things like "Thinking of you, and also please call your mother."

She wasn't soft. If you came through her door tired, she handed you a plate before she asked what was wrong, and then she asked, and you told her, because there was no way not to. She gave advice you didn't request and were usually better for. She had one rule for arguments in her house, which was that nobody left the table angry, and I can tell you from long experience that this rule produced some very long dinners.

I have a memory I keep coming back to this week. I was nineteen and had failed at something I'd told everyone I would succeed at. I drove home without calling. She was on the porch when I pulled in, though she had no reason to be, and she didn't ask a single question. She said, "There's soup." There was always soup. We ate it and she talked about the neighbour's roof, and somewhere in the roof conversation I stopped feeling like the worst person alive. She never mentioned it again. That was her method. Feed you and talk about the roof. Leave your dignity where it was.

In her last months, the keys got slower. The night-shift coffee pot stopped. What didn't stop was the asking. Right up until the end, when we visited, the first thing she said was never about herself. It was, "How's work? Are you eating?" My mother spent her whole life making sure other people were all right, and she managed it from a hospital bed.

So here's what I'll carry. When someone comes through my door tired, they'll get a plate before a question. The light stays on for whoever's late. As for the roof conversation, I'll try to make it last exactly as long as it needs to, though I'll never manage it as well as she did.

Mom, the keys are on the hook. The soup's on. We'll be all right, because you made sure of it.

Mom never wanted a speech that made her a saint. She said so, more than once, usually while doing something saintly. So I'll try to describe her instead, and if any of you catch me exaggerating, she'd want you to say so, preferably loudly.

Her name was Rosa, and her kitchen was never just a kitchen. It was where problems got solved over coffee and where a hug was waiting whether or not you'd asked for one. The table sat six and regularly held eleven. I have never, in forty-four years, seen that table with an empty chair on a Sunday, and I have seen it after layoffs and after the year my brother didn't speak to any of us.

Speaking of that year. Mom's response to a family feud was to keep setting his place. Every Sunday, one extra plate, one extra fork, nobody allowed to comment. In November he walked in without calling, sat down in front of the plate that had been waiting for him for ten months, and she said, "You're late. Eat." That was the end of it. She never once asked him where he'd been.

She was not a patient woman in the ordinary sense. She drove too fast and had opinions about how you were holding the knife. Once, to my face, she returned a Christmas gift I'd bought her, because "it's the wrong blue and you know it." What she had instead of patience was a kind of stubbornness on your behalf. She would not give up on you. She simply refused. It was, at times, deeply inconvenient.

I want to tell you about the coffee, because everyone here has had it. She left a cup out on the counter before dawn for whoever had the early shift, my dad for twenty years and, last summer, my niece. It was always too strong. Nobody ever told her. We stood in her kitchen in the dark, drinking coffee that could strip paint, and felt looked after. I've thought about that all week. She wasn't saying "I love you." She was too busy making sure you had something warm for the road.

That's the language she spoke. Plates, cakes, cups, an extra chair. It was the only language she trusted, and everyone in this room learned to understand it.

So here's what I'm going to do. The Sunday table stays. There'll be a chair for anyone who needs it, and nobody gets asked where they've been. The coffee will probably be a little weaker. I'm sorry, Mom. I know.

Rosa, you never wanted to be a saint. You settled for being the reason all of us knew where to go when things fell apart. We'll keep the light on in the kitchen. Eat something. You're late.

My mother, Anne, was sick for a long time, and I want to say something about that before I say anything else, because it shaped the last years and it didn't define her.

She was a teacher for twenty-eight years. Second grade for most of it, with a few years in fourth, then back to second by choice, because she said seven-year-olds still told you the truth. Former students are here today. Some of you are in your forties. She remembered every one of you, and she'd want me to say that she was especially proud of the ones who struggled, because she said the easy ones didn't need her.

What the illness took, slowly, was the big days. The trips, the drive to see her sister. What it left her was small days, and she did something with them I'm still learning from. She made a list every morning of two or three ordinary things, and did them, and was satisfied. Water the fern. Call Judy. She never once, in my hearing, said the list was too small. She said it was the right size for the day.

I used to find that heartbreaking. I don't anymore. I think she'd worked something out that most of us never do, which is that a day with a fern and a phone call in it is a complete day, and that the size of a life isn't measured in the trips.

She died on a Tuesday, in the afternoon, after the crossword. Judy had called that morning.

Here's what I'll take with me. A list, most mornings, of things the right size for the day. And her voice, which I can still hear, telling a room of second graders that they'd got it exactly right.

Mom, the fern's fine. I'm watering it. Thank you for the small days.