| Notes |
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Words of remembrance about my mom, delivered September 12, 2011
September 13, 2011 at 3:58 PM - Facebook - Kate Matthews
One of my favorite verses of the Bible brings to a close the story of Abraham and Sarah, the ancestors of a large family almost as interesting as my own. To borrow from that verse, we could say this morning that Kathryn Mae Cox Matthews has breathed her last and has died in a good old age, full of years, and has been gathered to her people. My sisters and brothers and I have been comforted in recent days by the thought that our mother is now with her own beloved parents, and sisters, and brothers, and her little baby Ronald Mark, not to mention all those ancestors she loved to learn about as the great genealogical detective that she was.
Still, knowing all that, with a firm resurrection faith, and with full intention to celebrate her long and richly blessed life, we are - still - sad together this morning. While we thank God that Mom’s suffering is over and past, and we have released her into the care of the God who knit her together so long ago in her mother’s womb, still…now is the time for us to feel the full weight of the sadness of saying good-bye.
But a eulogy, you know, actually isn’t supposed to be sad; it’s supposed to be a good word, praise even, for this person we have loved, and who loved us, for so many years. Many of you knew our mother as Mrs. Matthews, as church member, business woman, neighbor - but our dad knew her as his one true lifelong love, Kathryn, and the nine of us knew her as our mom, and her 22 grandchildren knew her as Grandma (or some variation on that), and her 18 great-grandchildren, well, they just knew her as a quiet, gentle presence to whom we brought them to be held and loved and told how beautiful they are, even after she could no longer change a diaper or even feed them a bottle.
My brother Chuck told me about a funny commercial where a young woman worrying about her parents after she goes off to school and leaves them empty-nesters says, “After all, I am their only child - except for my sister, of course.” I too am an only child, well, except for my six brothers and two sisters. And I know we could give nine different eulogies, nine different “good words,” but I suspect every single one of us would talk about… the pies.
Yes, our mom made the best pies ever. She would take the cherries we picked from the tree just outside our bedroom window and bake them into the most memorable of warm cherry pies, that is, after she did our laundry, peeled five pounds of potatoes, helped with homework, and took care of the accounts payable that surrounded the living room chair. I don’t know how she did that, but I remember that even in the thousand and one everyday, repeated tasks, like packing school lunches for six or seven of us every day, she knew each one of us by name. I know this because I close my eyes and see my mother’s beautiful handwriting on the brown bag, naming this lunch as mine, with a sandwich, and maybe some chips, and a cookie or two. Supper was around a table every night - spaghetti on Monday, hamburgers on Saturday, and roast beef for Sunday dinner - and no matter how late Dad had to work, we waited for him and sat down together around that table to share the feast, like a mini-preview of that great feast in heaven, when God will welcome all of God’s children to be fed and loved and asked, “How was your day?”
Every single one of us could tell you a hundred stories or more about Mom, some of them surprising, like the time our most deferential of mothers challenged my second-grade teacher, Sister Mary Julia, who had made the egregious error of giving me a C in reading. Yes, our mother went to parent-teacher night and challenged the nun, who then made the mistake of saying “C is good!” Sister never made that mistake again, and I looked up at my mother and thought some 1958-version of “You go, Girl!” When I remember that Mom - on legs that hurt her most of the time - walked over to West Tuscarawas with me and stood in the hot sun waiting for the bus to go down to the Palace Theatre to see “Sleeping Beauty,” I know that each one of my siblings has a story like that, about a time that Mom looked into our heart and knew that something would mean the world to us, and then did whatever it took to make it happen. I won’t try to tell their stories for them, but I honor their memories and hope they will share them with their children and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren after them.
It’s so hard to pick just one or two things to say about our mother - not just that she could dance and sing (unlike a single one of her nine children) and quote Cicero. In Latin. Stuff that didn’t necessarily make her a better mother, but how cool was she, dancing the jitter-bug up there with Bootsy Parrish at the company picnics, and I stood there and watched, full of awe at how beautiful my mom was.
So many people say that they felt that our mother was special to them, and that they were special to her. Her Christmas card list was as long as my arm, even years after she had outlived almost all of her contemporaries - she just opened up her arms in a wide embrace and kept adding special people to her life. Many of those special people are here today, or have reached out to us in recent days, and we want to thank you for your presence in her life.
Finally, I lift up one more very important thing about our mother, in addition to her long, happy marriage to Dad (we just celebrated their 70th anniversary in November, in case you missed the front page of the paper that day): we remember that our mother loved God’s creatures, the animals that our family took in as pets, from generation to generation, way back to Skeeter the dog and including the horses, donkey, pony, Chinese weeding geese, cats, owls, rabbits (many, many rabbits), raccoons, and so on, right down to the dogs we brought to see her in her last months, and while Mom tried not to have favorites, my dog, Duncan, of course, was the one she loved best (oh, and Libby’s Bear, too) - anyway, even the stuffed animals that surrounded her in the nursing home brought her comfort and delight. Mom especially loved the memory of Hannah, the horse that she and Dad loved and cared for so tenderly in their eighties. Isn’t it appropriate then that their life’s work was focused on the care and feeding not just of children but of animals, too?
I think that’s because Mom was a lot like just about everyone’s favorite saint, Francis of Assisi, who listened when Jesus said to consider the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, Francis, who loved the animals and seemed to speak his own language with them, Francis, who like our mother, prayed for peace: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace, where there is hatred, let me sow love, where there is injury, pardon…where there is sadness, joy….for it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.” Amen.
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Words of remembrance about my mom, delivered September 12, 2011
September 13, 2011 at 3:58 PM - Facebook - Kate Matthews
One of my favorite verses of the Bible brings to a close the story of Abraham and Sarah, the ancestors of a large family almost as interesting as my own. To borrow from that verse, we could say this morning that Kathryn Mae Cox Matthews has breathed her last and has died in a good old age, full of years, and has been gathered to her people. My sisters and brothers and I have been comforted in recent days by the thought that our mother is now with her own beloved parents, and sisters, and brothers, and her little baby Ronald Mark, not to mention all those ancestors she loved to learn about as the great genealogical detective that she was.
Still, knowing all that, with a firm resurrection faith, and with full intention to celebrate her long and richly blessed life, we are - still - sad together this morning. While we thank God that Mom’s suffering is over and past, and we have released her into the care of the God who knit her together so long ago in her mother’s womb, still…now is the time for us to feel the full weight of the sadness of saying good-bye.
But a eulogy, you know, actually isn’t supposed to be sad; it’s supposed to be a good word, praise even, for this person we have loved, and who loved us, for so many years. Many of you knew our mother as Mrs. Matthews, as church member, business woman, neighbor - but our dad knew her as his one true lifelong love, Kathryn, and the nine of us knew her as our mom, and her 22 grandchildren knew her as Grandma (or some variation on that), and her 18 great-grandchildren, well, they just knew her as a quiet, gentle presence to whom we brought them to be held and loved and told how beautiful they are, even after she could no longer change a diaper or even feed them a bottle.
My brother Chuck told me about a funny commercial where a young woman worrying about her parents after she goes off to school and leaves them empty-nesters says, “After all, I am their only child - except for my sister, of course.” I too am an only child, well, except for my six brothers and two sisters. And I know we could give nine different eulogies, nine different “good words,” but I suspect every single one of us would talk about… the pies.
Yes, our mom made the best pies ever. She would take the cherries we picked from the tree just outside our bedroom window and bake them into the most memorable of warm cherry pies, that is, after she did our laundry, peeled five pounds of potatoes, helped with homework, and took care of the accounts payable that surrounded the living room chair. I don’t know how she did that, but I remember that even in the thousand and one everyday, repeated tasks, like packing school lunches for six or seven of us every day, she knew each one of us by name. I know this because I close my eyes and see my mother’s beautiful handwriting on the brown bag, naming this lunch as mine, with a sandwich, and maybe some chips, and a cookie or two. Supper was around a table every night - spaghetti on Monday, hamburgers on Saturday, and roast beef for Sunday dinner - and no matter how late Dad had to work, we waited for him and sat down together around that table to share the feast, like a mini-preview of that great feast in heaven, when God will welcome all of God’s children to be fed and loved and asked, “How was your day?”
Every single one of us could tell you a hundred stories or more about Mom, some of them surprising, like the time our most deferential of mothers challenged my second-grade teacher, Sister Mary Julia, who had made the egregious error of giving me a C in reading. Yes, our mother went to parent-teacher night and challenged the nun, who then made the mistake of saying “C is good!” Sister never made that mistake again, and I looked up at my mother and thought some 1958-version of “You go, Girl!” When I remember that Mom - on legs that hurt her most of the time - walked over to West Tuscarawas with me and stood in the hot sun waiting for the bus to go down to the Palace Theatre to see “Sleeping Beauty,” I know that each one of my siblings has a story like that, about a time that Mom looked into our heart and knew that something would mean the world to us, and then did whatever it took to make it happen. I won’t try to tell their stories for them, but I honor their memories and hope they will share them with their children and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren after them.
It’s so hard to pick just one or two things to say about our mother - not just that she could dance and sing (unlike a single one of her nine children) and quote Cicero. In Latin. Stuff that didn’t necessarily make her a better mother, but how cool was she, dancing the jitter-bug up there with Bootsy Parrish at the company picnics, and I stood there and watched, full of awe at how beautiful my mom was.
So many people say that they felt that our mother was special to them, and that they were special to her. Her Christmas card list was as long as my arm, even years after she had outlived almost all of her contemporaries - she just opened up her arms in a wide embrace and kept adding special people to her life. Many of those special people are here today, or have reached out to us in recent days, and we want to thank you for your presence in her life.
Finally, I lift up one more very important thing about our mother, in addition to her long, happy marriage to Dad (we just celebrated their 70th anniversary in November, in case you missed the front page of the paper that day): we remember that our mother loved God’s creatures, the animals that our family took in as pets, from generation to generation, way back to Skeeter the dog and including the horses, donkey, pony, Chinese weeding geese, cats, owls, rabbits (many, many rabbits), raccoons, and so on, right down to the dogs we brought to see her in her last months, and while Mom tried not to have favorites, my dog, Duncan, of course, was the one she loved best (oh, and Libby’s Bear, too) - anyway, even the stuffed animals that surrounded her in the nursing home brought her comfort and delight. Mom especially loved the memory of Hannah, the horse that she and Dad loved and cared for so tenderly in their eighties. Isn’t it appropriate then that their life’s work was focused on the care and feeding not just of children but of animals, too?
I think that’s because Mom was a lot like just about everyone’s favorite saint, Francis of Assisi, who listened when Jesus said to consider the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, Francis, who loved the animals and seemed to speak his own language with them, Francis, who like our mother, prayed for peace: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace, where there is hatred, let me sow love, where there is injury, pardon…where there is sadness, joy….for it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.” Amen.
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d. 24 Jan 2013, Massillon, Stark, Ohio, USA