I learned a lot about oneness by watching how my mother lived her life. To follow are words I shared at her memorial service last weekend.
Hi. I’m Tom Miller, Helen’s oldest son.
I’d like to share a couple of
things with you today that I think help portray who my mom was and how she
lived her life.
The first is a story of
something that happened a couple of weeks before her death. She was back home in hospice care at that
time and her condition was deteriorating.
She was very weak, she couldn’t see much at all anymore, her hearing was
almost completely gone, and she could only speak with much effort in very
quiet, single syllable, essentially unintelligible sounds. Kris was in from Seattle then so we had the
whole family available. My dad’s 90th
birthday was coming up so we decided to have an early birthday celebration for
him.
When we were finally able to
communicate this to my mom, her eyes lit up and she immediately began trying to
speak. We struggled and struggled to try
and understand what she was saying, but unlike other similar times when she’d
finally just wave her hand in the “let’s try again later” gesture, she kept
trying to get us to understand what she was saying. Finally, after MUCH back and forth guesswork,
we were able to figure out that she was trying to say the word “ham.” And after much more struggle, we finally
determined that she was trying to tell us to go to the Honeybaked ham store and
get a ham for dad’s birthday dinner. Not
only that, but she went on after much more additional effort to instruct us to
get scalloped potatoes and green beans.
And I won’t even try to describe how much back and forth we went through
before I figured out she also wanted us to get him a sheet cake as his birthday
cake. I went to order the cake and
unfortunately don’t know a sheet cake from a bedsheet, so we ended up with way
more cake than the family could ever eat.
(Turns out a sheet cake and a bedsheet are about the same size.)
But the point of the story is
that right up until the very end, my mom was determined to remain an active,
contributing member of the family. She had
a dedication to her family and to our care that she wouldn’t even consider
stepping away from even in her last, most challenging days.
The second thing I want to
mention is more of a lesson, or a truth, that she embodied and lived from as
deeply and consistently as anyone I’ve ever known. And that truth is that love is all that
matters. For as long as I’ve known her
she’s been totally dedicated to putting relationships first, and showing care
and compassion and kindness and thoughtfulness to not only her immediate
family, but to friends, neighbors, relatives, and pretty much everyone she
encountered. As I said, her dedication
to and concern for her family was unwavering, but it went way beyond that. This truth, this way of being, was so
ingrained in her, and served as so much of the foundation of who she was, that
it’s like it just didn’t even occur to her to act any other way with people
regardless of what else may have been happening in her life. Love is all that matters. And along with that, she lived the truth that
we can always make the choice to love, no matter what our circumstances may
be.
In her last days especially,
as more and more was taken from her – her body was failing, her pain was
increasing, she lost most of the rest of her vision, her hearing, and even her
ability to speak - she never stopped living from this truth. We saw it in the way she interacted with the
nurses and others at the hospital, with all the caregivers that came to the
house when she was in hospice care, and with anyone else who was a part of her
life in any way during this time. As her
vision and hearing and speech faded away, she would still reach out and
physically touch people, again whether it was the nurses or caregivers or
family or anyone else, always in expressions of connection and love and
gratitude for each of them.
It was a beautiful thing to
witness, and a powerful lesson to have reinforced for me. I hope as we leave here today and remember
mom down the road, we honor her memory by also remembering the lesson she so
powerfully embodied - Love is all that really matters, and we always have the
choice to love no matter what’s happening to us or around us.
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Thank you.
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