Mom

As an initial matter, I’d like to thank all of the Bowmans and Leases and Loughridges and Stickleys and Oberhausen who’ve come a long way to be with us here today. A great regret for me personally is the way in which we’ve all drifted on our own journeys over the years, and we find a blessing in this otherwise sad day that these people we love are all in one place again. Bobby, Katie, and I are grateful for your presence.

I’ll admit with some sheepishness that this week I tried googling “how to give a successful eulogy”. I’ve been trying cases for twenty-six years now, and found myself at a loss sitting in front of a blank computer screen trying to find a way to pay my mother a suitable tribute and perhaps draw a smile from some of you as we remember a wonderful person and a great life.

In the end, google wasn’t much help. “Tell happy stories!” You’ve got to be kidding.

So instead I figured I’d try to capture a little of what Mom meant to me, and maybe what she meant to you, by organizing the memories of my fifty-nine years knowing her into three general topics (did I mention this is how they tell you to organize a presentation as a military officer? Some habits die hard).

Music, Matriculation, and Mutual Support. We can cover much of what was great about Mom in those three silos.

Before I head down this road, I have to admit most of this afternoon’s stories are from a narrow band of time, from the mid-60s when I entered the picture until maybe 1993. I heard plenty of stories I’d never heard before over supper last night, about Mom’s childhood. How she and Uncle Pat tried to burn down the converted German hunting lodge where they lived during the Berlin Airlift. How as the eldest sibling they called her the “General”, and she’d boss around her younger siblings. About how the General also had a habit of bossing around the house staff during the airlift, in German. She was four or five at the time. About Mom as the concert pianist in pigtails when she was in school. You wouldn’t have known it later, when she couldn’t play anymore, but Mom was quite the musician. Then after about 1993 I don’t have a lot of stories, for the very best of reasons. In that year she married Bobby, a solid farm-raised guy who brought a drama-free aura into our sometimes rather dramatic family.

And that was a blessing. Bobby, thank you for the gift of steadiness and predictability. Mom was that way already; she just needed a partner, and found one in you.

So, Mom and music.

Peg often comments on the fact that I can’t remember what I watched on Hulu last night, but can tell you that the Strawberry Alarm Clock had a hit with Incense and Peppermints in 1967. I sing along with Mary Hopkin’s hit “Goodbye”, which likely hasn’t been played on the radio since about 1970. Why? Popular music was a constant in our home, whether AM top 40 playing in the Opel station wagon as we ran errands, or “Hair” or “Jesus Christ Superstar” on the turntable while she was cooking, sort of.

And oddly, Katie and I remember different songs. The last song you’ll hear today, after this service, will be “Someday Soon” by Judy Collins. Kate swears it was one of Mom’s favorite songs. I don’t recall hearing it back then. But the fact that we both associate those days with a soundtrack, even a somewhat different soundtrack, tells you how music played an omnipresent part of our lives.

Sometimes it wasn’t so great. Sometimes we’d be tortured with Joan Baez or Peter Paul and Mary. By “sometimes” I mean almost continuously from about 1970 to 72. Then, as if to pile on, Mom would pull out her Yamaha acoustic guitar after we were put to bed, and sing those same whiny, mawkish hippie folk anthems in an apparent attempt to depress us to sleep.

But after 1972 we never had to guess Mom’s mental state. That was the year we added a 1912 Everett baby grand piano that still sits at our farm. Mom would come home from class or wherever, and sit at the keyboard to let us know how her day had gone. Chopin? A good day, with lots of flow. Beethoven? Proceed with caution—things may be okay, but maybe not. Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King”? Danger, flashing red. A good time to give Mom a little space.

Mom was quite a musician. Hard to picture if you met her late in life, but trust me she was a natural.

Years later I spent seven months in Saudi Arabia during Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm. Mom and I wrote letters, lots of letters, and at some point she asked if there was something I would like for her to send that might survive the journey halfway around the planet. I briefly contemplated assembling a fully stocked bar out of contraband smuggled in shampoo bottles, but in the end asked for cassette tapes for my new Walkman. And what she assembled was so cool, so insightful. There was Jerry Jeff Walker, the Texas Troubadour. She knew he was a childhood favorite of mine. And Jimmy Buffett, my soundtrack to that part of my life. But there was also Basia singing Time and Tide—that album now to me is a conduit to those days in the desert, and it was Mom’s insightfulness that brought it into my life. She paid attention, and she stretched us in so many ways beyond just introducing new music.

But one can’t tell Mom’s story without touching on her educational ride, which was really her call in life. (This would fall under point two: “Matriculation”)

There are a lot of doctors in this room, but probably not many who had to cobble together an education while moving pretty much every year, as she did while we were growing up.

How often did we move? I sound like that Johnny Cash song, “I’ve Been Everywhere”:

We lived in

Joplin

Springfield

Kansas City

Moline

Back to Kansas City

Louisville

Charlotte (I turned five there, to give you a sense of how often we fled one city or another. Katie was only two)

Key Biscayne

Marietta, GA (where Mom finally started back to school at Kennesaw Junior College, then Georgia State)

Roswell, GA

Tustin, CA

Orange, CA (where Mom finally got her bachelor’s degree)

Corpus Christi (three different houses in less than two years)

Richardson, TX (where Dad exited the picture—I was 14 and Katie was 11. We lived back then in a house conveniently literally across the street from the University of Texas at Dallas, where she got her master’s)

Plano, TX

Hemet, CA

San Jacinto, CA

And finally Mojave, CA by the time she finished her doctorate at the end of that ride.

Doing it the hard way. Truly.

While Mom bided her time before getting back to her studies, I benefitted from all those books on history and archeology she carried along from her brief undergraduate stint at KU. As she explained the relationship between societies and their art and architecture to this three-year-old, you could see the gifted educator even back then.

When we were kids in Atlanta, and Mom didn’t have family nearby to babysit her ankle-biters; us; she took us to classes with her downtown at Georgia State, and took us to her meetings of the American Association of University Women. Folks do that all the time these days, I gather. Back then, kids wrestling in the back of the room while the women up front debated feminist pedagogical issues was a little unusual, a sign of how determined Mom was no matter the optics.

During our first stint in Southern California, when Mom was at Cal State Fullerton, she completed an internship in special education, her passion during her early years as a teacher. Wanting her somewhat spoiled kids to learn just how lucky we were, she brought us to sessions working with these challenged kids, took us to picnics, made me come to a dance for all of them. She used her own learning experience to teach us, directly, that every human has value and is deserving of love. I tried never to lose that.

Years later, when I was in my first year of college at USC, Mom drove down from the Antelope Valley once a week to meet with her dissertation advisor, Dr. Stallings. We’d get together those evenings at the Sizzler across the street from the campus, where she’d pay for her starving college undergrad to gorge on all you can eat shrimp while we swapped stories about writing college essays and pulling all nighters to get ready for some big exam. In some ways my best friend on that ride through undergrad was my mom.

When I decided to ditch a successful career in the Air Force to go to law school in 1994, and couldn’t afford a house, Mom was the one who stepped up to cosign on the note and mortgage so I’d have a place to live. When I went through that phase when I thought I’d rather write papers and teach business law than actually practice business law, Mom never wavered in her support for that crazy idea. School and education were always presumptively a good thing.

Much later this focus on education even colored our faith walk. Around the time Mom and Bobby were ensconcing themselves in this church community, I wrestled with call and ended up in seminary. And Mom joined in that journey, remotely from Texas, by learning with me—if I stumbled on some interesting theological cul-de-sac based on a new translation of the New Testament, we pondered over it on our Sunday afternoon calls. I sent her Bart Ehrmann’s analysis of what scripture never made it into the Bible and why. She sent me the works of scholars who didn’t treat these questions of religious faith as such a left brain, analytical exercise as I tended to make it. Her Franciscan to my Jesuit. In the end, her faith walk carried her through some extremely difficult times as her health failed and her world got smaller. Mine led out the church door, I reckon.

It doesn’t matter who got it right. The important thing is that we studied and pondered and debated the ideas that shaped our lives, from the first time she put a book in front of her three year old son through the very end of our time together. It was our common thread.

Which was, I guess, part of our system of mutual support. Mom wasn’t much past twenty when I was born; we basically grew up together. Dad was gone most of every week for work, and to the extent I look back on an ideal childhood it was the time the three of us spent together-Mom, Katie, and me—that provided the memories.

Mom disciplined a little, and loved a lot.

And we had each other’s back (this would be Point Three, for those keeping track), sometimes literally in the sense that she found herself standing between me and danger, and I did the same for her, during some crazy times in our house growing up. We always protected each other, always stood up for each other. In that way, again, I was really grateful when Bobby came into the picture, and I knew Mom was always going to be safe, to be okay.

Neither Katie nor I ever spent much time broke and worried when we first started out in the world, because she bailed us out more than once. With no strings attached.

Perhaps the thing I’m most grateful for, as I look back on our life together, was how she reacted when I called with the rather awkward news that a very long marriage had ended, and I was in love for the first time in my life. Mom had been on the most painful end of a story with some of the same elements, decades ago. How would she react?

Well, how would you expect? She extended nothing but grace and love to me at a moment when I was most vulnerable, then went beyond that by welcoming Peg into the family with open arms and an enthusiasm that wasn’t feigned. She loved Peg, and one of her happiest days was spent a little over five years ago, the day she met Peg and drove her around McKinney and out to a ladies’ lunch in the old downtown. I was afraid of being a pariah; instead, Peg immediately became a beloved daughter-in-law.

That was Mom. There’s a whole soundtrack in my life that will always be her. I’m hoping I picked up a little of the grit she showed to pull herself out of what could have been an early life disaster and ready excuse for a mediocre life, and instead go on to lecture and write books and hug the necks of who knows how many kids she helped become their best selves. There’s the person who was my best friend for so, so many years, who was my sister’s best friend right up until Kate returned the love by helping take care of Mom when she could no longer take care of herself.

I’ve not scratched the surface here of the person we all knew and loved, each with our own story of how she made our lives better. I wish I’d done better up here, but I had to at least try. I owed that to Mom.

-Eulogy delivered 8.26.23 at Trinity Presbyterian Church, McKinney, Texas.