A Mother's Example

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 90^th 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.