Eulogy for my Mother

I want to thank all of my Mother’s friends and family for being here today to celebrate her life and to mourn her death. I’m sure she would be thrilled to see all of you here and I know it would have meant the world to her.

I suppose that the way that these things are supposed to go is that I recap her life and tell all of the good things about her and all of the great things she did, and there are many, but I can only tell you about what my mother meant to me.

Everything good that is in me came wholly or in part from this woman. She taught me to love and to give, even when no one noticed my efforts. She taught me the value of hard work and dedication to our passions in life, the things that make us more than just animals. She taught me that there is value in every human life, regardless of how meek or downtrodden. The lesson I would like to talk about today is the lesson of the value of the fight, and to her very last day she continued that lesson.

My mother believed in the fight and she dedicated her life to helping others learn to do it as well. As a dependency nurse and counselor, she helped hundreds of patients who had lost their way in life to try to find something else to cling to, something that could help them deal with life without resorting to drugs or alcohol as an escape. Permanent success was rare, often she would see the same patient again a year or two later in the same position.

When she learned she had Cancer, she organized herself into a one-woman battle squad. Anyone who knew my mother knows that sitting down and letting the sickness take over was just not in her. She took the eighteen month prognosis they gave her , smiled, and threw it out the window. Shortly after her diagnosis,...

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...his day, and I’m absolutely sure that she would love it.

I am standing upon the seashore. A ship at my side spreads her white sails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength. I stand and watch her until at length she hangs like a speck of white cloud just where the sea and sky meet each other.

Then someone at my side says” “There, she is gone!”

“Gone where?”

Gone from my sight. That is all. She is just as large in mast and hull and spar as she was when she left my side and she is just as able to bear the load of living freight to her destined port.

Her diminished size is in me, not her. And just at the moment when someone at my side says, “There, she is gone!” there are other eyes watching her coming, and other voices ready to take up the glad shout: “Here she comes!”

And that is dying.