We held a memorial service for my mom two weeks ago at Loudoun Funeral Chapel. Pastor Chip Geissler of Evergreen Church officiated and Julia Kasdorf provided the music. My sister and I both got the opportunity to speak about our mom and were later asked for copies of what we said. I figured the best way to give someone a copy would be to put it on the blog, and I guess my sister did too. Here's what she said.
My comments, which had been composed in a downpour while I sat in a tree stand the evening before, followed a rather heroic Bible reading by my eight-year-old son Nick, who read Matthew 6: 28-34.
"Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34 Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own," Nick's reading concluded.
I started then:
Thank you Nick. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. That's how the last verse of that Bible passage reads in the King James Version of the Bible.
My mom favored the King James, and she gave me a this copy 31 years ago. Some years later, when I was going through a rough time, she printed those words, 'sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,' on a little card and gave it to me.
She later explained that when Jesus said that he didn't mean that we shouldn't plan or shouldn't prepare. But he did mean that we've got plenty of work to do today, and that we should focus on that and not let ourselves be consumed with worry about tomorrow.
This became my favorite part of the Bible, and my mom and I shared some discussions on it during the final weeks of her life. Later, when I was going through my mom's stuff a few days ago, I found at least four references to it on her computer.
Psalm 121 was another Bible reading that my mom and I focused on during those last weeks. She told me it had been read at her own mother's funeral and asked me to read it to her, which I did, first from the King James and later from a newer version of the Bible so that I could understand it better.
When I asked my mom why she liked Psalm 121, she said that it brought her comfort and made her feel like God would protect her.
I was not with my mom when she died on September 26, but I did spend the night of Saturday September 24th with her in a hospice facility in Arlington. A couple times that night I thought the end was near, and I dropped to my knees at my mother's bedside and asked God to protect her, to fulfill that promised that he'd made in the psalm.
Mom rallied that night, woke up and talked to me. She was very sick and confused and not everything she said made sense. At one point she asked me to help her.
"Help you with what Mom?" I asked.
"To get through the door," she said. "To the guy with the truck."
At the time I thought maybe she had had lost track of who I was and that what she meant was to get her out of there, so she could get in her son's truck and go home.
But later I thought about a story that Chip and I and some other friends that are with us here today read once in a Bible study. It was about a guy who went in his truck to pick up day laborers. If you're from here, just picture 7-11 on Plaza Street.
The guy went to the 7-11 early in the morning and said he could take all the workers who would come. He was vague about the pay, but he told them their reward at the end of the day would be great. Some of the day laborers jumped in the truck, but many of them stayed behind, holding out for something better.
Later that morning, the guy came back and said the same thing. Some more guys got in with him but others continued to hold out.
The truck came back at lunch time and again and again throughout the afternoon. Finally, just as it was beginning to the dark, the truck reappeared at the 7-11 a final time. A few workers were still hanging out, and they decided that they had nothing to lose and jumped in the truck.
When they got to the nearby job site, the day's work was almost done. The new guys helped clean up, and when they finished, they got paid. Funny thing was though, that the guys who came at nightfall got paid just as much as the guys who started working at sunup.
The driver of the truck, of course, represented God, and the story illustrates how, now matter how long you wait, He always has room for you in His truck. So I wondered if maybe what my mom wanted help with was to get through the door of the great 7-11 of life, so she could catch a ride on that truck.
But in reality, I don't know what she meant. What I do know though is that in an Earthly sense, even though my mom drove a little car with a funny license plate and Obama stickers all over it, to me she was always the guy in the truck.
No matter how crazy I acted or what kind of bad things I did or how long I refused to accept my mom's advice, she always took me back. There was always room for me in the cab of the truck that was her home and her heart. And the reward--unconditional love--was always the same.
Thank you all for coming today. I wish my mom were here to see and speak to all of you. But since she can't, I'm going to close by reading some things that she wrote herself. The first was written after Jake was born and concerns my mom's first go-round with the cancer that eventually took her life.
"In 1996, at 49 I learned that I had breast cancer. After the surgery, a volunteer came to visit me. She was older but had been my age when diagnosed. She showed no self-pity; she led an active life. She decribed her decision to have reconstructive surgery. We didn't know then what my prognosis would be. 'Whatever you go through,' she said, 'it will be worth it when you hold your first grandchild in your arms.' And on December 20, 2000, I held my grandson and I knew that she was right."
Finally, her is something that Mom wrote about her mother and facing her own mortality.
"My mother isn't here.
"I'm almost 8 years older than she was when she died.
"I felt that all her worries lifted from her when she died.
"'I feel so much better,' she said.
"Though she was leaving my 14-year-old brother, her 3 daughters and 3 grandchildren behind.
"I'm not afraid to die for myself--I think it is the end, and all that we worry about will be no more.
"But I think and worry now--I worry forward.
"What if a grandchild gets sick?
"I won't be there to help my own children.
"And what of their own illnesses, old age, death, pain?
"I won't be able to help them.
"How can I leave them? And yet I have to.
"We need to get used to that."
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