I offered this eulogy (hesped) at my mother's funeral last week:
My mother was a brave woman. She did
things her way. She left home soon after she graduated from high school to take
a look at the bigger world – which for her meant first Detroit, and then
California. She was a single working mom before the term had been invented. She
lived through a tumultuous time with two tumultuous children.
The book of Proverbs asks eyshet
chayil mi yimtza, which we usually render into English as “a woman of valor,
who can find.” Chayil is translated here as valour, but we know this
word chayil is not unrelated to the modern Hebrew word for “soldier” or
“force.”
My mother Marian Harriet Goldish Kiener,
Shivya Masa bat Shayne Bayle ve-Shmuel, was not only an unconventional woman of
valor in the old-time religion sense of the book of Proverbs; she was also a
kind of soldier and she was certainly a force to be reckoned with.
Any child can say this of his or her
loving mother – no one has known me longer, worried for my welfare so
thoroughly, took my side more often, and delighted in my accomplishments like
my mother. My brother and I were rebellious young sons in a singularly
rebellious time period. We defied our parents, and our mother in particular, at
every turn. To paraphrase the GEICO commercial – “that’s what kids do.”
She didn’t understand everything we
tried or attempted, to be honest, we didn’t understand what we were doing half
the time - but the love never wore off. More than 30 years ago my brother
defiantly went off to California for a while to find his fortune, but my
mother, a single woman in a time long before it was fashionable or acceptable,
had already pioneered that path a further 30 years earlier. She acted like she
couldn’t understand our youthful defiance, but she was a defiant youth herself,
going off to Detroit, then to Minneapolis, then to Los Angeles. She was such a
force of nature, a bit of the rebel herself, that even though she played the
part of the baffled matriarch shouldered with two rambunctious and error-prone
boys, she always forgave, and always found a way for us to come back to her
embrace.
She was a soldier. She championed
through a long career at Musicland and then earned her well-deserved
retirement. She then bravely took off to Arizona to live the retirement dream.
And she loved it. But she soldiered through her well-deserved retirement and
outlasted almost every one of her friends, and then returned to the land where
her two sisters lived.
Finally, my mother was a force to be
reckoned with throughout her life and in her last home at Knollwood Place. You
could be the CEO of Bristol-Palmolive or the local grocer - expect a long
hand-written letter of complaint in wonderfully clear cursive script if you
sold her shoddy merchandise or tried to swindle her. She made her expectations
known to all, and had a sharp word for those who failed to meet them. But
people loved her – because my mother had a marvelous sense of humor. She loved
to smile and laugh.
Like a tough, hard-living, fun-loving rebellious
soldier, for entertainment she liked to gamble. She ran the BINGO game at
Knollwood Place, and helped convene the monthly trip to Mystic Lake. I remember
childhood trips to Sioux City where we would bet on the ponies and buy a cooler
full of oleomargarine to bring back to Minnesota. In her latter decades, she
drew great joy from playing adult penny slot video games at Mystic. To paraphrase
the Geico commercial – “that’s what old women do.”
So my mother was a woman of valor, a
strong woman, a discerning woman, and a force to be reckoned with. I would not
be the man I am today without her love and support. My brother can attest to
the same awesome debt we owe her.
Sister to two remarkable women, mother
of two, grandmother to six, great-grandmother to one – it’s really a beautiful
story, a kind of fairy tale. It all worked out. It was a life well-lived.
Eshet chayil mi yimtza “Who can find a
heroic woman?” All of us who knew her knows we saw the real deal. Yehi
zikhra barukh– Her Memory has certainly been a blessing to all of us.
