Unwanted adventures in grieving
On a eulogy, mourning in segments, and the secret to beating loneliness (act like my mom)
I’ve been a journalist for 27 years. If I had to guess, I’d say I’ve written a couple of million words in that time. The ones that follow this (long) intro were both the hardest and easiest: my mom’s eulogy.
I was dreading delivering it. I tried to apply lessons I’ve learned adventuring. When I get exhausted, I repeat a mantra: One more step. I can take one more step. As the time to speak approached, I converted that to: One more sentence. I can say one more sentence. The correlation between physical challenges and emotional challenges is not 1 to 1. But it’s close.
She died New Year’s Eve in Michigan. The state was closed at the time, and this past Saturday was the first available date we could gather to celebrate a life stuffed thick with relationships.
I might have more to say on this elsewhere, but let me just say here: Grief in installments sucks. At first I was glad not to have to deal with a ceremony right after she died. Then waiting, and waiting, and waiting for it was emotionally exhausting. Grieve, pause, grieve, pause. Gosh it was horrible. The ceremony was not closure, but it was at least a step away from the present and into the future.
I’m sure there are tons of people like me who watched from afar as a loved one slowly died (I’m in St. Louis, my parents live in Michigan), whether of the coronavirus or something else.
We used to do video chats with my parents all the time, which were always an adventure to get set up. My mom’s computer skills were limited to calling up Facebook and accepting my request for a video chat, and sometimes even that flummoxed her. (My dad can answer his flip phone (!), that’s about it.)
As my mom got sicker, I stopped asking for video chats. It had become harder for her to sustain the strength to set up and/or get through a video chat (never mind the strength to be her.) Plus, she looked terrible, and I couldn’t stand to see her that way. The technology that is supposed to connect us but I didn’t want it to.
The last time we did a video chat was Christmas day. Originally we were supposed to go see her and my dad for Christmas, but my two kids and I had the coronavirus and we couldn’t go. I thought we would go instead in mid-January. When I saw her on the video chat, I knew that would never happen. She wasn’t going to make it that long.
Seeing her is how I knew I’d never see her again.
When she died … and I put it on Facebook … and comments started rolling in … I obsessively checked and rechecked the comments, to see who had written what. One of her friends shared it, and a ton of people I never heard of were talking about how awesome she was. I was uplifted by that like nothing a funeral could ever do; it was all celebration, no awkward greeting/looking at your feet/other weird things we do when we don’t know what to say.
Those hours were among the most – I’m not sure what word to use … fulfilling? pride-inducing? heart-filling and breaking at the same time? – of my life.
Seven months later, we finally got to celebrate her in person the way we did on Facebook. Have you ever been terrified you’re going to screw something up and at the same time 100 percent confident that you won’t, that you can’t? That’s what I felt like before I delivered this.
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On behalf of my dad and brothers, I want to thank you for coming today. I probably know everybody here, but just in case, I am Matt Crossman, the second of Kay’s four sons. She always introduced me as her favorite second son.
My mom didn’t want a funeral, she wanted a party, which was exactly in keeping with how she lived her life, so here we are.
I hope you’ll indulge me as I say a few words about her. I want to share some funny memories and talk about how great she was. This won’t take more than two hours. Three, tops.
We are grateful you are all here. I know how scary it is to go out and about these days. It’s lonely especially now. Loneliness was already an epidemic before the pandemic. And as bad as loneliness was before the pandemic, it’s even worse now, far worse.
But I know the cure to loneliness. I saw it for 49 years: Act like my mom. Remember that old ad campaign Be Like Mike? Today it’s Be Like Kay.
She was the least lonely person I ever met. Her life overflowed with close relationships, friends and people who loved her.
First of course is us – her family. She had four sons, two daughters in law, two grandkids, and was married to my dad for 53 years. She was close with her brothers, sisters in law, brothers in law and nieces and nephews. And anybody who knows her even a little knows how close she was to her own mother, my Grandma Rae. Grandma Rae was my mom’s hero.
After family, the thing I find amazing is how many separate large groups of friends my mom had deep and abiding relationships with. In no particular order—cheer if you are here—there are the camping people, the Clawson people, the work people, the Florida people and last but not least the people here in Shiawassee Shores. Special thanks to them for organizing this party.
My mom’s secret to having so many friends is simple: She talked to everybody everywhere all the time.
If you went to the grocery store with her, you had to allot two hours for the trip. You needed 5 minutes to actually shop, 10 minutes for her to look through her coupon files because that woman never paid full price for anything, ever, 20 minutes to talk to the poor kid just trying to stock shelves, 25 minutes to talk to the cashier and an hour to talk to the manager about her beloved granddaughters, Lily and Jane. God help you if she saw someone in the parking lot in a Red Wings jersey. You might never make it home.
I have a clear memory of my mom teaching me to mingle. When I was maybe 8, our family went out to get pizza with the camping people. I was sitting at the table, bored out of my mind. My friends were clear at the other side of the restaurant. She said, take your glass and go talk to them. I was like, you can do that? And she showed me how. People tell me often I have her personality, and I trace it to that …. Plus the hundreds of times I saw her talk to strangers.
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Now is the point where normally I would congratulate my mom for putting up with my dad for 53 years. That’s the Crossman way. We show each other we love each other by insulting each other.
Not today.
My mom benefitted from being married to my dad for 53 years. He loved her fiercely. No. He loves her fiercely, present tense. For 53 years, he took great care of her.
I consider it a great blessing of my life to have witnessed my parents’ relationship. It was not perfect and of course it had its ups and downs. But my dad modeled how a husband should treat a wife. In the last months of my mom’s life, they each told me separately how grateful they were to have had each other. Those conversations ripped my heart in half and put it back together at the same time.
OK. Enough mushy. Since they retired they lived in a perpetual Happy Hour, it seemed like. No matter where or when I visited them – here in Michigan or down in Florida – they had daily happy hours. Those happy hours started earlier and ended later the older they got. Those Happy Hours involved plenty of laughter — with each other, at each other, with the neighbors, with random strangers who walked by, whatever.
They truly enjoyed each other’s company, whether they were golfing or playing cards or stuffing their grandkids full of sugar. You know how some old married couples finish each other’s sentences? They were married so long, they both simultaneously forgot what they were going to say.
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There is one very, very, very important part of my mom’s life that I’m going to almost completely skip. I can summarize it in two words: Garage sales. You want to talk about my mom putting up with my dad? How about my dad enduring taking her to 27 million garage sales?
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I can speak for my brothers when I say she loved the four of us unconditionally. None of us ever doubted that for a single solitary second of our lives. She loved Mike when he was born with a nose so out of whack my Grandma Rae promised to pay whatever it cost to fix it. True story. She loved Jim even when he got suspended because he mooned the entire band. True story. She loved Bob when he hid in the closet, jumped out, and scared her so bad she cried. Also a true story. I’m leaving myself out of this series because I never did anything wrong. That’s not a true story.
She absolutely loved being a boy mom. She delighted when people would say, “you had four boys?!? You’re a saint! How did you do it?”
She acted like she didn’t care that she didn’t have any girls. I mostly believed her, even though Jim’s wearing a dress in half of his baby pictures.
Then her granddaughters arrived. I have to tell you that story.
First let me tell you she cried happy tears all the time about anything. We bought her a Brendan Shanahan jersey for Christmas one year, and she wept. She would have blubbered if we gave her a bucket of dirt.
Anyway my wife Emily and I called her on a Sunday afternoon in January of 2006. “Mom, we took a test,” I said.
I did not say what kind of test. I did not say what the results were. It could have been a math test for all she knew. All I said was, mom, we took a test.
She started bawling. Just great gulps of crying breaths. If I recall correctly, she was crying so hard she gave the phone to my dad. He did not cry. Finally we hung up the phone.
Emily looked at me – this is my favorite part of the story — and said, “that went pretty much exactly as I thought it would.”
10 months later, my mom and dad came to St. Louis to meet Lily. She walked in the door with her arms straight out like Frankenstein, blew right past me as if I wasn’t there, and ran to Emily to take the baby.
Do you know why grandparents and grandkids get along so well? They are united against a common enemy. My mom thought it was funny to give the girls hot chocolate with M&Ms in it for breakfast every single morning.
Watching my mom play with the girls was like watching a hurricane play with a tornado. She made up a character called Deedo and told the girls endless stories about her. Deedo was an old woman who lived her life doing whatever the hell she wanted. Gee, I wonder who she was based on?
When our visits with my parents ended, two things were inevitable. The first was my mom would call after a few hours and say she was sad the house was so quiet. The second was she would sleep for a week.
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I saved my favorite story for last and I hope I can get through it. It contains everything I love about my mom.
Somewhere in these displays is a picture of my mom in a Cat in the Hat shirt and a Cat in the Hat hat. She wore that because Lily was in a musical called Seussical the Musical.
This happened a few years after her first cancer diagnosis. It was supposed to be terminal. Somehow it wasn’t. She thought it was a miracle, that God had healed her and gave her more time. A few years later, there she was, a walking, talking, living miracle …. wearing a ridiculous t-shirt and ridiculous hat and a smile so big it swallowed her face.
It was one thing for her to think she was a miracle. It was another for her to tell me. But she told everybody. Unprompted. She saw my in laws that week for the first time in years. She said to my mother in law, “Did they tell you about my miracle?”
She carried that miracle with her everywhere she went. She was just joyful about it. That’s how she lived the final years of her life, believing that God had blessed her with a miracle. That miracle bought her five more years as a mom, five more years as a grandma, five more years to make friends, and most important five more years with my dad.
He was both dreading and looking forward to today, as we all were. He told me the other day he felt like we were putting her away. Dad, we are not putting her away. Today we are doing the opposite of that. We are shining a light on her. More than that, we are going to learn from her.
I want to close by asking you to think about this strange time we’re in, and how you’re spending it. If you get home after this, and you’re lonely, I hope you’ll think what would my mom, what would Nana do, what would Kay do do, and go do that. I hope you’ll hug someone or call someone or strike up a conversation with a stranger in a Red Wings jersey.
Thank you.
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