The Battle Is Finished, Now There Is Peace.

My mother had a wonderful Easter. My sister Kathy and her husband went out and spent the Easter holidays with them and they had a great time. It was just as they were leaving to go back to Alexandria that my mother began to show signs of fatigue and illness. What everyone had thought was a simple respiratory infection turned out to the beginning of the end. As the week rolled on, my mother continued to get worse and worse, until, at lunchtime on Friday, she quietly slipped away. I flew out the next day and was able to help the mortuary guy put together a nice slideshow of pictures for everyone to see at the viewings.

This morning we had the mass for my mother and, though my sister Kathy and I had written some comments to say at the service, Father Bob apparently had a tee-time to make at the local golf course or something and he hustled her out of the church right at the end of the mass. It was a bit upsetting, but I thought it'd be nice to put my sister's and my comments here so that everyone could check them out.
I'll do Kathy's first. She wanted to read a selection from a very talented poet, Jilchristy Dee. It's called, "Your Dreams Were All For Us Mom":

Your dreams were all for us Mom, all for us
You traded your own dreams to purchase ours
Willing to accept lesser opportunities
So that we would have every opportunity

Every possibility
Every chance for a good education
Every security and confidence
Everything!

And our dreams became your hopes and aspirations
We knew that we were never alone in our dreams
For you were right there with us

You didn't mind if you didn't get the best education
As long as we were afforded that opportunity
It didn't matter if your work wasn't what you had hoped for
As long as it gave us the means to create our own futures

You willingly accepted all those hours away from us, working long and hard. You were okay with it... as lng as it provided your family with security and stability

So we grew up surrounded in your deep love and in your safety

You provided the room in our hearts for imagination to grow

You took care of the worries so that our hearts and minds could pursue our dreams

You never spent much on yourself

You never enjoyed many of the finer things in life

We were the treasure you invested your life in

And you gave everything you had for us

Everything Mom!

Everything!

And now we have lives that are abundant and full

Blessed with rich memories and cherished opportunities

We are surrounded in the peace and love of family

And trusted, loyal, friends

We have a life that was paid for in advance

Through the difficult and dedicated efforts of a loving mother

Who traded the best years of her own life

To make sure we'd have the best years of ours

Mom, you will never be forgotten!

Your love and sacrifice will never leave us

We will never quesion our own true worth

For you proved our value to us every single day

And now we hope that our lives have rewarded your dreams

Satisfied every dedicated effort you gave for us

Given you every honor

Every sense of pride

Every happiness and peace

Every dream fulfilled

Everything!

You and your cherished legacy will live on forever

In the lives and hearts of your family

For you have truly purchased a better life for all of us

Through everything that you willingly sacrificed

You gave us everything Mom!

Everything!

(copyright 2007, Jilchristy Dee.)

The comments I had prepared are not nearly as poetic, but came from the heart, which is all I could hope for:

I need to start off by saying that I’m up here speaking for two people today. My partner John is NC right now having the giant painful lymphoma-related ulceration on his leg picked at and prodded in room 5 or 6 of the Duke Wound Clinic. So yeah, though it’s hard to imagine, he’d want me to be sure to let you know that there are indeed worse places to be than at a funeral.

Earlier today, John emailed me to correct something I’d written in Mom’s obituary. He’d noticed that I’d written that Mom had lost her battle with cancer, and emailed me to correct my wording. He asked that I point this error out to you today and use the more appropriate word “finished.” My Mom finished her battle with cancer on Friday. John wanted to convey that the idea here is that a good life gone to cancer is not "lost" except for the physical presence of that person to everyone. He goes on to say that Mom will continue to be a beautiful presence in all our lives through memory, tradition, great stories around the dinner table, and inspiration and that there is no loser in that - just moving along. We, in fact, would be the losers if we were to feel that all that goodness is gone from us, forever.

For myself, I feel it necessary to point out that this funeral provides the perfect example for why my family should never, ever gamble, most especially if the stakes are life or death. If someone had come up to us 5 years ago and asked us to bet on who would pass away first, mom or dad, and we’d have all picked Dad. He’d have been the easy-money, the odds-on favorite for a bet like that. He’s had more work done on him than a ’79 Volare and the International Space Station combined. It would have seemed like a no-brainer bet at the time, and we would all have lost our shirts.

It’s often said that funerals and memorials are held to soothe the pain of the living, since those that have died have already moved beyond any pain. In this regard, I can see where it would be easy to stand up here and rail against the unfairness of the timing of my mother’s sickness and death, both having left her precious little time to really enjoy her long awaited retirement with my father. It’d be just as easy to curse God, calling him out as a feckless and mean-spirited thug for taking her away from us like he did.

Yeah, while that would be really easy, it wouldn’t serve the right purpose, it wouldn’t soothe anyone’s pain, and wouldn’t be at all what she would have wanted to hear from me. I believe she’d hope that I would try and find a positive way to look at this whole thing and present it to you. So here goes...

I remember when we were younger, Mom worried aloud to my Dad that she thought she might never live to see us grown up and out on our own, seeing as how her own mother had passed on at so young an age. Well, she and Dad got us all raised and on our own, even helping to take care of their assorted grandkids and grand-dogs and cats.

Once she and my Dad retired to NV, Mom began to worry again to that she’d outlive Dad and, without his retirement income, felt that she would become a burden on us. After she was diagnosed with cancer, she began to worry less about outliving dad and more that she’d go through the same pain her mother went through when she was young.

Through the help of her children and some serious pharmaceuticals, she fought bravely for the last 11 months, but to no avail. With all her treatment options dried up, she decided to return home to finish her battle with cancer in the peace of her home. It almost seemed as if she waited for both my sister and my father to go use the bathrooms so that she could slip quietly and painlessly away. Believe it or not, it was just as she’d have wanted it to be.

You see, a Lady always knows when it’s time to go and my mother was a great Lady.