As most of you know by now, my mother passed away on May 27th and was buried earlier this week. Without going too far into detail, this is a transcript of the eulogy that I read on June 7th:
"For those of you didn’t know my mother, allow me to give
you an idea of the person she was:
Where my father was well-traveled, my mother spent 95% of
her life in or around Downers Grove. She was born at Hinsdale Hospital, grew up
in Downers and Westmont, graduated high school from Downers North, spent 17
years working at the Marshall Field’s at Oakbrook Mall –where, incidentally,
she met my father—and lived nearly her entire life in DG. She did some
traveling, though her idea of a distant, faraway excursion was either Lake
Geneva or the family farm in Coldwater, MI.
My mother was quirky. She was fascinated by rubber ducks,
and when we moved into our current residence in 2004, she gave the hallway
bathroom a rubber duck motif. When the Egg Harbor Café in downtown Downers
started giving away mini-rubber ducks, my mother adorned them all over the
dashboard of her 2010 Mercury Milan.
At the same time, my mother and I did not have a lot of
shared interests. She was fascinated by classic cars, I was not. Her record
collection was loaded with Barbra Streisand and original Broadway cast
recordings, and I had no interest in either. I like baseball and hockey, but
she vehemently hated sports. She liked sugary snacks –she had a sweet tooth—and
I was cautious about what I ate.
Sharon watched a lot of TV, but as I just alluded to, our
tastes in TV shows varied significantly. She liked old school, rural-based
shows like “Green Acres” and “The Beverly Hillbillies,” and even though I don’t
hate either show, the appeal was lost one me. My mother and I did have two
shows in common: “M*A*S*H,” which is an evergreen, but we were both surprised
to discover we both liked “My Name is Earl.” That might have been the only TV
show we made a note of watching together, more often than not. On the other
hand, there was no hesitation deleting “Two Broke Girls” from the living room
DVR. We didn’t have the heart to tell her the show had been cancelled, either.
My mother knew how to push my buttons. Half the time it was
hard to tell if she was oblivious but well-meaning, or she knew precisely how
to annoy me. She had a tendency to forget to tell my sister and I about a
special event like, say, a neighbor’s anniversary or a block party, until the
last minute. If Ma was upset about something, she would make Bridget test me or
call me to tell me she was upset, rather than doing it herself.
Sharon was also a luddite. Her distrust of modern
technology bordered into irrational hatred. Maybe it was because her side of
the family were farmers and mechanics, and had no need for such things, I don’t
know. Regardless, because of her stubbornness we didn’t have a PC in our house
until 1998, we didn’t have the internet until 2002, and we didn’t have cable
until 2008. She had a cell phone, the most basic phone Verizon could make, and
she turned it on maybe once a month, in case of emergency. Ma didn’t even have
an email until maybe three years ago, and it was my sister’s responsibility to
check it once or twice a week.
As some of you know, Sharon had a laundry list of health
issues. She had been in and out of hospitals since was five or six years old.
If it wasn’t one thing, it was another. At one point in the early 1980s, her
immune system failed and she spent three weeks in a plastic bubble. To her, a
hospital stay was somewhere between an annoyance and a diversion. Please
forgive me if I sound like a broken record, but my sister and I were convinced
that regardless of everything she had gone through, she would somehow persevere
and live into her 80s.
The last chapter of her life more or less began in February
2015. She had a cardiologist appointment at Good Samaritan Hospital here in
Downers; during a routine check-up, the doctor discovered 70% blockage in four
of her arteries, as well as an aneurysm emerging in her aorta. They performed
quadruple bypass surgery immediately, but because Sharon was underweight –I
don’t want to say fragile—they held off on treating the aorta until she was on
firmer physical footing.
Earlier this year, my mother was complaining of dizzy
spells and blurred vision. A visit to a prominent neurologist revealed that she
had an aneurysm in the right hemisphere of her brain. In early April, she was
underwent brain surgery at Rush Medical Center on the near west side of the
city; even though it was an elaborated and complicated procedure that only a
handful of neurosurgeons could perform, it has been perfected, and best-case
scenario my mother would have been out of the hospital in three or four days.
Then complications arose. The brain surgery was a success,
but it inadvertently ruptured the aortic aneurysm, so two days later my mother
had heart surgery. She had two stents placed in her body in the span of 2 ½
days. She went home over a week later, but the moment she walked into the
house, she complained of abdominal pain; she couldn’t hold any food down, and
within 2 ½ hours Bridget had called the paramedics, my mother was sent to Good
Sam, and then 12 hours after checking out she was back in the ICU at Rush. She ended
up getting a third stent, connected to where she had heart surgery less than
two weeks before.
After nearly a month at Rush,
my mother was cleared for rehab in early May. The process of getting back on
her feet had its ups and downs, but she did the maximum 20 days covered by the
insurance and finally home –for good, we thought—on May 24th. She
was exhausted and still not holding food down, but she was adamant that she
didn’t want to go back to the hospital. Sharon insisted she needed to get back
into her daily routine at home, and she needed a few more days. I had left for
the Omaha Improv Festival that Friday morning; Mom was “hangry” but moving
about the house. I said “I love you” one last time just as she lied back in her
bed for a late morning nap.
When I was on the road, my sister called to tell me that she
called the paramedics again; she was battling the abdominal pain that she had
six weeks earlier. She spent the night in the ER before going into the Critical
Care Unit at Good Sam. My sister visited her that Saturday; Mom was being fed
through an IV, and she was gradually becoming her normal self again. When my
sister drove home, the physician on duty called to tell her Mom had gone into
code blue. My sister rushed back to the hospital; she had stopped breathing and
suffered significant brain damage. My mother was wired to a phalanx of
machines, and just for a moment she was able to breathe without artificial means.
However, she stopped breathing again soon after, CPR was performed, and in
spite of the nurses’ best efforts she flatlined.
It would be remiss of me to not
mention that Sharon was a “dog mommy.” We have two dogs, Duke (a Maltese-Poodle
mix) and Henry (shorthair Dachshund). The older of the two, Duke was originally
a Sweet 16 present of my sister’s, but soon enough became my mother’s dog. Duke
would follow my mother around, sleep on her bed, and whine whenever she left
the house. With the health issues my parents had, it became too much of a
hassle to take the dogs out on walks. We had no choice but to have the dogs do
their business in the backyard, which was a hassle of sorts after dusk because
that side of the house is very dimly lit. When my mother was in rehab, my cousin
Tom installed a small panel of flood lights with sensors in between the
shingles and the gutters. Even though my mother was home for 2 ½ days after –notice
the recurrence of two and a half in this eulogy—she never had an opportunity to
see the lights. Whenever I’m out with Duke or Henry at 10 o’clock at night, I’ll
look at those flood lights and think of Ma. She would’ve been quite impressed.
Ma, you’re going to be missed. To those of you who attended
today, thank you for coming."
(554)
