Brandy and I jointly wrote and read the eulogy at my mom's memorial service. It just seemed right that way. Below is the text in case you are interested in reading it and the pictures that went along with it. Brandy read the bolded text and I read the unbolded.
Brandy and I always joke that it takes both of us to equal our mom. So, it seemed only fitting that we would both write her eulogy. Our eulogy can be summed up by a card our dad got in the mail which captures mom’s loss well. It read:
Because we loved, there will be tears.
Because we laughed, there will be memories.
Because she lived, there will still be joy.
There is little on earth we loved as much as our mom. And there have certainly been tears. But we are not going to focus on that line. We are going to focus on the second two lines. We are blessed with so many memories we had to sit and edit them down to make our eulogy a reasonable length. God gave us our mom for a very specific amount of time. An amount of time that only He knew. And we have faith that it was not one minute too short. We wish it was longer, but really it is for our own selfish reasons that we wish that. She told our dad in the hospital, that she had taught her children how to ‘love life and love the Lord’. So we want our eulogy to celebrate these lessons. We want our eulogy to celebrate the memories we have of our mom – the things she did that made us laugh. And, a eulogy that celebrates the joy that we will continue to have because she lived.
So our eulogy can in essence be titled, “The Most Important Lessons We Learned From Our Mom”
If you are sitting here today, then you know there are very few moments you could be around our mom without laughing. So please feel free to laugh throughout this eulogy, because this would not be a eulogy about our mom if you do not feel like you are going to pee your pants at least one time.
Becky, Mom and I had a morning ritual of calling each other and I can remember every day as I was backing out of my driveway attempting to find the phone in my purse and not hit the neighbor’s mailbox, when I would be talking to my mom on the phone and telling her about all the things I had to get done that day. After I got done telling her my plans for the day, which usually consisted of an 8-10 hour work day, studying for graduate school, making phone calls or attending a Special Olympics practice, getting ready for an upcoming jewelry show, and grocery shopping or cleaning which was always last on my list, she would proceed to give me the run down on her plans. My mother’s busy schedule typically consisted of a hearty breakfast at the local Cracker Barrel, followed by a mani and a pedi, then rushing up to York to meet her next friend for lunch, just in time to get over to get her 1:00 massage, and then she would always finish the conversation by saying ‘and then I gotta get back here and make it look like I did something before your dad gets home.’ Little did she know my dad could track her around town with her debit card. I always laughed at my mom’s idea of a busy day. Yet, every time I was at home I found myself exhausted after a day of breakfast, manicures, lunches, massages, and doing 10 minutes of cleaning to make it look like we had done something that day. So the first lesson is:
There is very little more important than a good cup of coffee with someone you love
My mom made friendships a priority in her life. She went out of her way to fit other people into her schedule. She filled her day by spending time with people she loved because she knew that time was the most valuable thing we can offer a person. If you ever walked in our house, you know the kitchen table was never clean. It was full of stacks of paper, and only Nikole knew where anything was. It was like this from the time we were little. The reason was, breakfast with Bev was more important than cleaning the table. A walk with Patti was more important than doing the dishes. Coffee by the pellet stove with Della was more important than mopping the kitchen floor. And a Bible study with Aunt Dona was more important than doing the laundry. Granted, they probably talked more than they actually studied the Bible because it took almost three years for them to get to the month of November in the ‘Read Through the Bible in a Year’. Sadly, we each only learned half of this lesson. My budget is busted every month by coffee and lunch dates, and Brandy’s house is always dirty. But like I said, it takes both of us to make my mom. She went out of her way to make sure people knew that they were loved. We learned this lesson, not because she told us to love others as we love ourselves, but because she lived it out in front of us. She taught us how to keep from taking our family and friends for granted, and through this loss I’ve learned that these friendships she taught us how to cultivate are what walk us through the hard times.
Hotels were a big deal for my mom. At the first mention of a road trip I would see the glint in my mom’s eye as she began to peruse through her head the hotels she knew along the road I would be traveling. As she reviewed the list of hotels in her head she had very specific qualifications for which hotels she would stay at. Most recently Holiday Inn Express were her favorite hotels, before that it was Best Western, and when she’s paying for me to stay at a hotel it’s Motel 6. I’ll bet few of you can tell me which hotels have the soft and firm pillows for every person in the room. Which hotels serve my dad’s favorite kind of yogurt for breakfast. Which hotels have a pool for Nikole to swim in. And which hotels are located next to a Waffle House. But I know these details, because like I said hotels were a big deal for my mom. Of all the offered amenities by hotels, a continental breakfast was by far the most important one. She always toss out the comment, ‘oh, and they have a continental breakfast, I wonder if they serve biscuits and gravy’. Like she didn’t know if they served biscuits and gravy. In closing I want to draw you a picture to explain to you how important hotels were for my mom. After returning home from the hospital, we found a stack of mom’s items that she would usually throw into a bag to carry everywhere with her. In the stack was a small box of tissues, chap-stick, her prayer journal which Aunt Dona knows only the first 4 pages were actually completed, her planner, her bible and this book. For those of you who can't see what I'm holding it is the Motel 6 guide. Taking this book everywhere we traveled was a family tradition, so our second lesson is:
Every meaningful tradition in my mom’s life started with family. Trips to the beach, holiday dinners, Christmas cookies, and of course eating at our “favorite restaurants” in cities we’d only been in once. In our family, it is a tradition to make traditions. My mom made our family into an example of what a family should be. We loved and we fought; we laughed and we cried. She taught us that unity is not uniformity – we can all be different, but your family is your family and nothing on earth can replace them. When I come back from being at home people always ask what we did, and usually I can’t think of anything specific. Really what we did was just sit around and talk, or sit around and not talk. It didn’t matter what we did, what mattered was that we did it together. My mom’s family was the most important thing in the world to her. She taught us to love through the hard times, that the relationships are worth the struggle, and that families are the most incredible gift God ever gave us.
Everyone on the East Coast remembers the blizzard we had this past winter. Of course that blizzard came shortly after we had completed our bone marrow transplant. Forseeing the bad weather we were going to have, my mom whipped our her hotel book and placed a reservation at the Holiday Inn Express closest to Johns Hopkins – of course this included the soft and firm pillow, biscuits and gravy on the continental breakfast, and the only kind of yogurt my dad eats. The blizzard was worse than we even anticipated and while Becky and I were breaking windows to get the cable to work so we could watch Cake Boss, and while the National Guard was attempting to keep people off the streets and clear the roads, my mother donned her winter cap, her big red winter jacket (I’m sure we’ve all seen her wearing), her toasty winter boots, and headed out with my dad to walk the one mile to the hospital. Now let me preface this by saying, she had already called the hospital and they told her she should call for an ambulance to bring her there. Her response was ‘why would I call an ambulance when I have two good legs on me.’ The nurses didn’t say anything that day, but the following week after checking her chart, the nurse commented on the day she had bloodwork taken…which was the day of the blizzard. When my mom told her she had stayed down there to keep her chemo treatments on track, the nurse responded with ‘oh, yeah, we heard about you, all the doctors were telling the nurses that said they couldn’t get to work that one of the patients had walked in so why couldn’t they.’ In case you were wondering this was at most a week after the bone marrow transplant. My dad just decided to go ahead and walk along with her, because once she made her mind up there was nothing you were going to do to change it. Our third lesson was something our mom always said to us when it was time for us to get feisty:
You’re not just another pretty face
My mom was amazing at teaching us how to do things whether she did them or not. Brandy and I discussed the other day how the idea that we couldn’t do something, has literally never crossed our minds. My mom and dad told us from the time we were little that we could do anything we wanted, and they never made the slightest mention that this wasn’t true for everyone, so why would we question it? They may have questioned their ability to do things, but they never showed us any doubt. I saw my mom go back to school while still caring for a family and raising foster children. I watched her face cancer head on, and not bat an eye. I think part of the shock of her death was that I still had that childlike belief that my mom was invincible. What I came to realize though, was not that she was invincible, but that she was a fighter. She stood up for what she believed to be right, and she did not back down from anyone. Matthew told her one time when he was 16 or so that she couldn’t do anything to him because he was bigger than her. She had him on the kitchen floor with one hand free and one putting soap in his mouth before he knew what had happened. Every time I had a good idea, or finished a difficult project, or came up with a new way of doing something, or even if I just cooked a new recipe, I would call and tell her and she would say ‘See, I told you, you’re not just another pretty face.’ She taught me by believing in me, to believe in myself. And I have learned over the past month that she taught a lot of people this lesson. She believed in people even if they didn’t believe in themselves, just because that was who she was. The older I become, the more I’ve realized that she instilled in me the ability to do this for others. I’ve actually found times when I didn’t want to believe in a person and yet deep down I did. My mom was a beautiful woman, but it takes more than just a pretty face to teach someone how to do that.
I cannot guarantee the validity of the following story, because I am telling it second hand…from my mom’s point of view. She was as feisty with doctors at work as she was with her own doctors regarding her care. The reason was, she cared about how her patients were treated and always wanted to respect their wishes. After advocating for a patient with a doctor, my mom would typically finish her argument with ‘What are you going to do? Fire me? I don’t work here for the money.’ And for those doctors in the crowd if you had looked behind you as you walked away you would have seen a flip of the hand and heard the comment, ‘Get thee behind me Satan.’ At least that’s how the story goes. I don’t know she really said, if anything at all, but I do know that she was devoted to her work. So, our forth lesson was:
Do what you love, and love what you do
My mom taught us how to look at the world and see what we want it to be and then go out and do something about it. She never gave us the option of having an opinion that didn’t mean following it up with action. And she taught us how to find joy in our work, not because we saw the change we were making, but because we were trying. She taught us that we are defined by more than our paycheck. It’s what we do, not what we get paid for what we do that gives us worth. She taught us that we should not measure ourselves by what others think of what we do, but by what God thinks of what we do. My mom taught me to know that I can make a difference in the world, and that I can stand strong in the midst of my weeping by remembering to live every day in love with what I can do in this world. My mom taught us to do the best job we could do, regardless of how well everyone else was else was doing theirs – this lesson was often encouraged by stating, ‘If I did my job as well as them, there would be dead people lying all over the streets.’
My mom could brighten up any room when she walked into it. Usually because she was doing the ‘new earring dance’ or the ‘new shoe dance’…sometimes both. I cannot replicate these dances although I tried. So I know this is blurry, but just sing the tune Jingle Bell Rock in your head as you watch this video. I don’t know when this was taken, but I know that’s when this video was taken. The new shoe dance also typically occurred as she was headed into my Aunt Dona’s for a Bible study. Again, I cannot replicate this dance, but ask my Aunt Lib during the time of sharing because she’s pretty good at it. She danced all the time. And anyone that went to a wedding in the Walker family knows that she would encourage you to:
Dance to your own tune, but that tune should be ‘It’s Raining Men’I remember being woken up to mom singing ‘good morning, good morning, it’s time to rise and shine’, or driving with her in the car and her suddenly busting out the chorus of the song playing on the radio. She always had a song on her lips. Half of the time it was the wrong words, or the wrong tune, or in the case of being woken up, at the wrong time, but that didn’t stop her. She was filled with joy, and it came out in a song. I think she, more than anyone else I have ever met loved life. She appreciated every moment. And she taught us we should do the same. You couldn’t be around her and miss it. I can honestly say that there is nothing I wish I had done with my mom or said to my mom – there are certainly things I wish I could have done or said in the future, but I have no regrets in our past. The reason I can say that is because she taught me to appreciate every day, do everything in that day you can, say ‘I love you’ to every person you love…every time you see them. A lot of people say to do that, but there are few people I have ever met who do. My mom was one of those people, and she taught us how to be one of those people every day of her life.
One of the grand traditions in our household, is the 10 days, yes I said it, 10 days of baking Christmas cookies prior to Christmas day. My sister loves baking Christmas cookies, and I hate it. Yet, I would sit at the kitchen table and talk and probably eat a lot while my mom did her psycho obsessive baking of the perfect Christmas cookies. Every year I heard how the Whirligigs had to be rolled tight, but not too tight. And how the Sand Tarts could be thin and crispy, even though I liked them thick and soft. How I couldn’t help with the Pecan Tea cookies because my thumb wasn’t big enough. And how the Chocolate Roll cookies had to be icinged with the appropriate colors, especially the candy canes which had to have red and white stripes. I cannot even count the number of times I saw an entire tray of cookies dumped into the trash because they cooked for one minute too long. Granny, I know you’re thinking – well one minute, they’ll be burnt. My mom was so crazy about Christmas cookies that she would actually segregate what we were allowed to eat and what would be given away as gifts. So, I never ate a perfect cookie until I moved out of the house, and got them as a gift. In order to get the perfect cookie, my mom had to have intense quality control over the cookie. I want you to take note of the picture up on the screen in which I’m wearing a wedding ring…which means I was married.
This was the first time I was ever allowed to pour the syrup in the Pecan Tea Cookies. Can you see the tension in my mom's face? And the first time I was ever allowed to make Whirligig cookies, we were at the beach house, without her typical cookie utensils, and the chocolate did not melt right. Even though the dough was already made, she was going to throw all of it away and was not making Whirligigs. So, Becky and I took that chunky chocolate, slapped it in some peanut butter dough, and in the words of my mother, ‘we made some pretty delicious Whirligig cookies, if I must say so myself.’ Our sixth lesson is:Imperfection is OK, except when baking Christmas cookies
My mom had this very uncommon ability to make people feel loved and accepted even after not mincing words on what she thought they should do. She said what she felt needed to be said and then let it go. Whoever she said it to (after they got over the shock of what she had just said to them) could take it or leave it, but in the end she still loved the person she knew you would be once you were done making all those stupid decisions. I always loved when she would throw out a ridicioulously inappropriate comment and then pretend to be shocked she had said it outloud. One thing no one can ever say is that they didn’t know where they stood with my mom. She did not have a problem telling you. The incredible thing about her though, was after she told you, she didn’t have a problem loving you anyway. She was able to wake up every day and live a life of love because she knew that one action did not define a person. One experience did not define a relationship. One mistake was one mistake. She accepted imperfection in people, not because she thought it was ok, but because she knew life was a process. She accepted that God’s job was to judge, and her job was to speak the truth in love. Sometimes the truth came out with a little less word-smithing than it may have needed, but deep down you knew she only ever told you what she thought because she loved you. This is one lesson I’m still learning how to do, but I figure I’ve learned how to make perfect Pecan Tea cookies, perhaps I can learn how to perfect this skill as well.
I said hotels were a big deal. They were nothing compared to food. If you notice, many of my stories included some type of food item. Whether it be going out to eat, Christmas cookies or continental breakfast. Not even the bone marrow transplant could interrupt her dining schedules. The night before the bone marrow transplant I was so nervous I was broken out in hives and physically sick to my stomach. Yet mom was doing her food dance because her blood counts were high enough that the doctor agreed she could go out to eat that night. After donning her Darth Vader mask, Aunt Dona, mom, Becky and I headed into McCormick and Schmitz.
After explaining the situation we were sat in an entirely empty room to be away from the crowds. We all know what happened the next day except for me because I wasn’t awake for any of it. But the next thing I remember, I was hobbling back into our little apartment, saw my mom washing dishes and passed out. The next morning, I woke up to mom doing ‘the food dance’ once again. 
Her counts were still high enough for one last meal. It had already started reving up for that blizzard, and with snow on the ground we once again headed out for another meal. This time she planned for us to go to a little breakfast place she saw on Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives on the Food Network Channel. I could barely sit and she had to remove her mask in a packed full room to eat her potato pancakes. Aunt Dona and Becky had to run interference to keep mom from being touched by strangers and me from slipping in the snow. But potato pancakes she wanted, and potato pancakes she had. Nothing was going to stop her from enjoying her food. Our seventh lesson came straight out of mom’s mouth more times than I can count:
A close second on the count would be the number of times she said ‘Lord give me the strength to get through the day – that’s all I ask’. No matter how bad the prognosis got, my mom never allowed cancer to define her. Her life was her life, and even cancer wasn’t going to have a say in that. During the first round of chemo, she, my dad, Brandy and I had plans to go to Belize. Her chemo treatment wasn’t supposed to end until the day we were supposed to leave, so she just took care of it herself rather than going to the hospital. And the doctors let her do it because she wasn’t going to have the chemo if it meant she wasn’t going to go to Belize with us. She worked until the week they put the port in for her bone marrow transplant. She loved her job and a low white blood cell count was not going to stop her from doing what she loved. Patti had to convince her to not go to work the one day that she could barely stand from all the fluid in her legs caused by the graft vs. host disease. ‘Do you think I should call in’ she asked her. Apparently it was still worth asking.
My mom spent seven years fighting cancer, but she never let it get her down. In the words of my dad ‘She had a way of making life’s problems small enough that it was easier to see the big picture.’ When you came in the church you saw all the scarves and the wig she had from the multiple times she lost her hair from chemo. And all the pill bottles of medicine she took every day. All of it so she could spend more time on this earth with us. She knew where she was going when she died, but everything she went through was worth it because she wanted to spend more time with us. My mom taught me how to appreciate the good times, but more importantly she taught me how to appreciate the bad times. We laughed in the hospital as much as we cried. The reason we could do that was because she had taught us that life can be defined by what we choose it be defined by. Hers was defined, not by cancer, but by joy. Although it’s hard to imagine right now, our lives will not be defined by loss, but by joy. My mom taught us that no matter how bad it gets, stand on the word that ‘Weeping may remain for a night, but joy comes in the morning’. I know that my mom would be telling me to get over it. It’s just harder this time because she’s not here to help me.
These memories that we’ve given you are just the tip of the iceberg of the ones we have of her. I’m going to miss hitting my shin on the open dishwasher door, plastic water bottles sitting around the sink, detailed explanations of what she was cooking while I was fasting, getting packages of things that were ‘screaming my name’, googleing something for her because the computer is the antichrist. And I’m really going to miss, after telling all these stories about her, hearing her say ‘I do not do that’. These memories and everything our mom was taught us our last lesson:
We are blessed
Blessed are those who mourn because they will be comforted. I never understood this verse. The reason I didn’t was because I didn’t understand the word blessed. In essence I understood blessed to mean that life was good and everything was going great. What I have learned in the past month, is what my mom taught me every day through her life. We are blessed, not because of our circumstances, but because of who we have with us in those circumstances. I am blessed when I have friends who give up their time to spend with me as I mourn. I am blessed when I have a family who loves me through every trial I face. I am blessed when can stand on my faith alone and know that God is present and involved in my life, even if my life doesn’t make sense. I am blessed because I had a mother who taught me these lessons when she was alive, so I could live them after she died. My mom did not only teach me how to live, she taught me how to die. With dignity and strength, surrounded by those who you have taught to love, and standing in faith that God is in control and loves you even if the circumstances look different. She never wavered on her love or her faith. My challenge now, is to take the lessons she taught me and to do the same.
C.S. Lewis, at the end of the Narnia books, describes the characters as they enter heaven.
"(T)he things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before."
We know that our mom is in heaven, not because she was a good person, but because she knew that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son and whoever believes in Him will not perish but will have life everlasting. Our Aunt Dona said to mom as we were standing by her bed in the last moments, ‘You did a good job Sue, you did a good job.’ Because mom knew who Jesus was and she taught us who He was by her life, we know that when she got to heaven she heard Him say ‘Well done, thy good and faithful servant.’ I can only hope that I love life and love the Lord as beautifully as she did.
“Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom. He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. Even youths grow tired and weary and the young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. The will soar on wings like eagles: they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.” (Isaiah 40:21-31)
