Eulogy for Mom, March 7, 2019
One of my favorite authors, Terry Tempest Williams, wrote a memoir recently about losing her mother. She was one of a large Mormon clan in northern Utah who developed cancer as a result of the 1950s nuclear testing in nearby Nevada. Williams was shocked to discover that her mother had kept journals. She left her three shelves of beautiful clothbound books; some floral, some paisley, others in solid colors. The spines of each were perfectly aligned against the lip of the shelves. She opened the first journal. It was empty. She opened the second journal. It was empty. She opened the third. It, too, was empty, as was the fourth, the fifth, the sixth – shelf after shelf after shelf, all of her mother’s journals were blank.
What needs to be counted on to have a voice?
Courage. Anger. Love.
Something to say; someone to speak to; someone to listen.***
My mother and I shared a voice that remains un-nameable. It began in innocence like all mother-daughter pairings, then stretched over battlefields that left us both scarred and afraid, but the ending of our story is a love that makes me tremble with gratitude.
My mother left this world with many blank journals on a secret shelf. I will never know those truths. I will never hear that voice. But what I can speak to are the things she did share with me: the narratives that defined her as a woman, as a dutiful Southern daughter, as a kind soul – and as a fierce mother.
Pauline Marie Richards Thomas has told our story hundreds of times, often to complete strangers – beauticians, store clerks, postal employees, even hospital personnel. It’s the same short sentence. She would say, “I had her so young that we grew up together.” And in those 12 years we had with each other, before my sister and brother were born, there were things about her that only a child might remember – recollections that now matter the most.
My mother loved music. She gave me my first taste of something musically different, beyond the scope of my experiences in the rest of my Southern home. She had a record player in our bedroom, at the back of my grandparents’ small house in Fall Branch, and some of the first memories of her are swallowed up in an instrumental jazz piece, powered to #1 in the charts by a middle-aged German trumpet player, named Bert Kaempfert. It was slow and mournful, and it would take me decades to understand why she played it over and over and over – nights that turned into weeks – weeks that turned into years – all because she missed someone, and she never got the chance to say goodbye.
My mother played the piano and paid for 7 years of lessons for myself. We sat on a piano bench most of my childhood, banging out off-key duets and a really bad version of “Chopsticks.” One of my fondest memories is when she visited me in Washington State, and I took her to see the Seattle Symphony perform in Benaroya Hall. It was the night she posed for the picture that rests on the table here this evening, in a gorgeous red dress that paled in comparison to her joyous smile. Another was in more recent years, when Steph and I took her to see a Piano Guys concert in Louisville, Kentucky.
The funny thing about Mama is the fact that very late in life – very, very late in life – she discovered Rock & Roll. I was taking her to a doctor’s appointment, and when I picked her up at home in Greeneville, I had forgotten to turn off the CD that I had listened to all the way from Gate City. When I had Mama secured under the passenger seatbelt and started the engine, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon belted out of the speakers. I reached immediately to turn it off and she grabbed my hand and said, “Wait – what is that music?” So, at age 70, my mother became a Pink Floyd groupie.
Several times I came in the backdoor and couldn’t hear myself think because she had The Great Gig in the Sky cranked so loud that I was surprised the neighbors didn’t call for help. If you are not familiar with that song, the only voice you hear alongside a slow melodious set of piano chords, is a woman, literally “wailing” with the rifts. It was her favorite song on the whole album. I joked with her for months that I was going to play it for her funeral song. She never said “no” – just that sneaky grin spreading across her face. The irony is that I never told her that it’s a song about death and losing someone you love. If I had music to express the pain of losing my mother, it would be that long female wail about The Great Gig in the Sky.
As with her open-mindedness for music, she never saw people in terms of the labels we all sometimes use. She told me once about her friend in nursing school that she studied with for the state board exam. It was the early 1960’s in the South, and her friend was not white. Mama said that one day they studied way past supper time and decided to go to a restaurant downtown and order a sandwich and a Dr. Pepper. I asked what happened, and she smiled and said emphatically, “We sat down, we ordered our food, we ate it, we paid for it, and then we left.”
But, didn’t people give you a hard time?
“Why, every person in that restaurant was staring a hole right through us. My friend leaned over and whispered, “Maybe we should leave.”
Mama looked her straight in the eye. “I don’t know about you, but I am hungry. I’m gonna eat.”
A few weeks later, Mama traveled by bus with her friend to Nashville for the State Boards. All the girls in her class were cramming the night before the test. Mom said she laughed at them, shrugged her shoulders and said, “If you know it – you know it. If you don’t – you don’t.” They left the room and walked the streets of Nashville until late that night, not caring that their skin color didn’t match. My Mama scored the highest in her class on that exam. Her class netted the second highest score in the state that year, and it belonged to Pauline Richards.
Throughout her not-long-enough life, my mother welcomed every person that I ever brought to her table. It did not matter where they came from or their skin tone, nor the type of clothes on their backs, or who they loved. They were the same to her – a soul that was worthy of the food from her hands.
And the food flowed like rain down Grandfather Mountain. I cannot remember a time that my mother was unable to cook. Even if she was in tremendous pain from the twists of her spine that made it hurt to move from chair to the oven – when someone passed through her door, she gave them sustenance. Sometimes it’s difficult to recall a time when we weren’t eating – and our waistlines proved how good she was at filling our bellies, even if we mouthed out loud that we weren’t hungry. She made what she called a “dogger” of cornbread every night. The thought of her broccoli casserole and mashed potatoes and meatloaf make my mouth water. Once a month, we could find her homemade pimento cheese in the fridge. When I was young, she packed the same picnic basket foods for a summer outing: fried chicken, baked beans, potato salad, and deviled eggs. Every morning, long before we all piled in the car and went somewhere to enjoy the sun, she was up cooking for hours before we woke to the smells of her kitchen. And the times that I was sick as a child, and they were often, all I ever wanted was a bowl of mom’s potato soup.
That satisfaction of nibbling on food stuffs compounded with mom’s love of games and puzzles. Often, we sat up playing Phase 10 or dominoes until 4 in the morning, all the while eating our way through laughter and song. Sometimes I would make her flinch, after long moments of silent concentration on the cards or counting dots on the wooden pieces, when I suddenly began belting out Melanie’s Brand New Key or Paul McCartney’s Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey – raising my arms over my head and from side to side – singing ‘hands across the water, water; hands across the sky’. She would try so hard not to laugh, keeping a straight face, and then would say…
“I wish you were on the radio so I could turn you off.”
One of my earliest memories is my mother sitting cross-legged on our bed with a deck of cards in her hands, shuffling them with expertise and rhythm, and filling up a large space of quilt with dozens of different versions of Solitaire. In fact, she taught me how to count by watching her nightly card games.
Pauline Richards Thomas served as an LPN in the Kingsport community for nearly 30 years. She began at Holston Valley Hospital, later working at Munal Clinic and Indian Path. For the last ten of those years, she took care of many souls in various nursing homes in the region. One of the best stories she ever shared with me about her working life was when she worked Private Duty and took care of both the mother and father of Tennessee Ernie Ford. She said her paycheck came straight out of California, signed by the infamous entertainer that was born in Bristol, and that she met the man once while on duty. The hallway had been cleared for his visit, and everyone was told to stay in patient rooms with the door closed. Instead of staying with her patient, Mama was directed to wait outside. When Ford walked up to his mother’s door, he stopped and took Mama’s hand in both of his, smiled warmly and said, “Thank you for taking care of my Mama.” I asked her how it felt to receive such praise from a famous man. She instantly scowled at me and answered, “Why, he was as plain as an old shoe.”
All my mother’s tales were perfectly timed. She had just the right pause before the punchline. She could turn a phrase with the flex of an eyebrow. And she could never be hurried. She always followed her own pace. In fact, just minutes before she took her last breath, while I was given the unique blessing of being alone with her and holding her hand … I kept saying to her, “Mama, it’s okay to go. You’re so tired and your little body is worn out. Everything will be alright. It’s okay to go.” Up to this point, she had kept her eyes closed for hours, although still talking. After the third repetition of this soft coaxing, she suddenly opened her eyes and looked right at me and said, “Stop rushing me!”
That is a story to add to hundreds that my mother told me over the marvelous years that I had her with me. She had a singular voice. It was stronger than any I have ever known. She taught me to love words -had me reading at 4 years old. When I was 8, and back when there were little catalogues that came through the mail to order books, she signed me up in an adult book club. Told me that I could pick anything I wanted to read, and if I could not read the words or understand them, she would read it to me. By the time I was a teenager, I had savored all the classics…Poe, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Thoreau, Shakespeare…and all because my mother said I could.
I don’t know all of my mother’s stories. I certainly don’t know all of her secrets. I suspect she finished her journey with a ton of them. But, I listened finally, late in life, to what she wanted me to know.
The word eulogy comes from the Classical Greek…eu for “well” or “true”, logia for “words” or “text” … combining together to mean “praise.” A piece of writing in praise of a person. As deeply as I love words and all their diction, origins, and syntax, there are none to praise Pauline as intrinsically as she deserves. My mother was not perfect. None of them are. But there is one thing I know to be true of her – always – and that is that she loved us fiercely - sometimes to a fault. Other times tenderly, as when she first held us and said “hello.”
What needs to be counted on to have a voice?
Courage. Anger. Love.
My mother and I shared all three passionately.
What needs to be counted on to have a voice? Something to say; someone to speak to; someone to listen.
My mother and I had lots to say.
We were so lucky that we had each other to speak to. I am the most blessed
human being because she was the one someone in all of my life who always listened.
There is an old saying that a person dies twice. When the body gives out and the last time someone mentions your name.
So, my sweet sister, Amy ~
And Tom, the man my mother loved for 30 years ~
And all the family & friends in this room who came tonight to celebrate my Mama’s life ~
Let us keep her voice alive. Let us keep saying her name.
My precious Mama…
"Pauline"
July 17, 1944 - March 2, 2019
*** When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice ~ Terry Tempest Williams
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