Tribute to My Mom

Before she died my mom asked me to speak at her memorial. I must've written and deleted 4 or 5 speeches. I was on the verge of deleting this one but I just ran out of time to write another one and so I went with it. Seems like there are no words that would do her justice and a big part of our relationship had to do with a conflict between her faith and my atheism. If you know for a fact someone is going to hell you do whatever you can to try and save that person if you love them and that was my experience of my mother. I went through a militant anti-theist phase for awhile but softened considerably in the past few years and would go to church with my mother occasionally when visiting her. I'm still an atheist with respect to the idea of a magic person in the sky, but I realize now that this is probably a mischaracterization of my moms faith.

Reading back over this memorial tribute I realize that it is fairly self-indulgent. Its all about my experience of my mother and making sense of what she meant to me. I wish I had the faculties to remove myself from my own grief and give her a proper tribute the way she might have wanted it written, but I can't - not yet. At any rate I'm a better person because my mom asked me to write this. That is probably what she wanted more than anything anyways. Here is the speech I gave at her funeral:

A Tribute to my Mom

A few weeks ago Tena and Sara and I had the opportunity to say goodbye to mom and she was very concerned about her funeral arrangements. She told us that she had some items pertaining to the funeral in one of the bedrooms at home. To our surprise Tena and I found all the items including pictures for a slide show, her own eulogy written out, detailed plans for her funeral – I mean every detail…every song, every singer and speaker including me was planned out by her. It looked like she had been preparing for some time and she had a bunch of her wishes written down in a notebook. And on the first page of that notebook was written these words dated October 17, 2016:

“I feel that I am very ill, I feel that I may not survive for much longer. Having said this, I am not afraid to die – indeed, “to be absent from the body would be present with the Lord.” Also, having said this, I am aware that my weakened condition, ongoing pain produces a sense of hopelessness that there is a cure, or even a diagnosis, of my condition. I am very aware of the presence of Christ, and his presence comforts and encourages my heart. My ongoing prayer is that my suffering is redemptive, praise God! Forgive me Lord for the times I lose my patience.”

Now I have to confess that I am a non-believer. And I make this confession because when I began writing this tribute something my Dad said came back to me. Dad has no time for “nonsense and BS” and while we were talking about funeral arrangements shortly before mom died and he said something like, “I can’t stand funerals, they’re just a steady stream of lies.” Well I think I almost blew my mouthful of coffee out my nose when he said that. I know what he means. I personally would prefer to hear difficult truths than comforting embellishments.

The easy and comforting thing would be to talk about a happy ending. Something like, “My moms in heaven now and her husband and two sons are going meet her there someday.” Now…. that may be true and I’m sure most people here believe it is, but that would feel like a comforting lie in my mouth. And I need to pay tribute with as much unflinching honesty as I can muster. It would be dishonest of me to pretend I share the worldview of my mom, or Pastor Wes or the majority of you here today. What is an atheist like me to make of the words she has written here, that “My ongoing prayer is that my suffering is redemptive, praise God!”

Well, here I am paying tribute with words, as was her wish, suffering and struggling to some degree, wanting desperately to do her will, to not let her down with my words which will never measure up to the woman she was, and I’m hoping that somehow this difficult process can redeems me in some way. So I think I understand what she meant.

I think this phrase summarizes one of the greatest lessons I take from her life. That life isn’t about finding bliss that it is about serving a higher purpose. That struggles and suffering are an inherent part of life and that if we focus on a higher purpose our trials and tribulations and suffering can help refine us, build our character, make us better people today than we were yesterday. Put another way, the path to heaven is through a focus on a higher purpose while confronting the chaos of life the path to hell lies in failing to confront this chaos, or sin, and letting it grow and fest. The fires of life can refine us or consume us.

Mom always had her Bible. Here she is in Jerusalem.

Mom was faithful to her higher purpose, to Gods will, right up until the end. She was suffering greatly and was conflicted about whether she should take pain medicine. When we asked her how we could alleviate her suffering she continually said, “I want to do Gods will, I don’t want to let God down.” It was incredibly frustrating and somehow beautiful all at the same time. It seemed like she was suffering needlessly, but she was serving her higher purpose and refining her character up until her last breath.

There was something more I realized being with her in her last days. Her faith, her upward gaze, didn’t just give her a tool to build her character in times of hardship it lifted her up and it lifted up those around her. Do me a favor and speak out if my mom ever encouraged you or lifted your spirits with a smile or a “God loves you”?

I watched my wife Tena as she was saying her goodbye to mom for the last time and I don’t think Tena would mind me saying that she was sobbing uncontrollably, she was feeling utterly broken. My mom was so weak during our visit that she could barely muster the energy for a whispered sentence the few days we were there. But in that moment she recognized the need to comfort another soul, the need to reach out and connect that soul to a higher power, to that purpose that was flowing through her every fiber. My mom in that moment grabbed my wife with a tight embrace and sang her an entire hymn. This was a woman who had barely spoken in days. She had a smile on her face and a love radiating from her that was frankly awe inspiring.

Her last few weeks on this planet exemplified her life and who she was. Let me tell you a couple other things my moms life taught me.

She got pregnant out of wedlock which no doubt felt like a mark of shame for a Mennonite woman. She was offered a discrete abortion early on by a doctor she worked with. She didn’t have to bear the humility of carrying the obvious mark of her sin around, nobody had to know about her sin. But Mom felt that God had a higher purpose and she often quoted Phillipians 1:6 “being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” So she refused to take the easy way out, she owned her mistake and fully accepted the responsibility that came with it. I’m obviously grateful to have been given life because of this decision. My kids are grateful. My grandkids will be grateful. My daughters are training to become paramedics right now, the hurting and traumatized people they will encounter in their careers will be grateful.

Moms life taught me that taking ownership of sins and mistakes is vitally important if I want to leave this world a better place than I found it. We can’t possibly know the positive ripple effects that will carry on when we take on responsibility.

Another lesson I learned from mom has to do with her marriage. Now this doesn’t get said enough. It feels a bit like an uncomfortable truth for some reason, but I’m going to say it anyways because my Dad didn’t want any BS. Here it is. Dad I love you. I don’t tell you that enough. I don’t hug you enough. Those are the cold hard facts. And I want you to know that I am SOO grateful that my mom brought you into my life. She was very happy as a single mom to me and I’m sure there were times where she fantasized about that carefree life again. But obedience and faithfulness to her husband were very important to her. Marriage wasn’t about achieving a fairy tale ending or bliss it was about commitment to a higher purpose…even when your spouse is being a curmudgeon. Dad knows he can be curmudgeonly. But let me explain why having a curmudgeon in your life is vitally important.

Moms are unending

founts of empathy when you are hurting, they always encourage sharing, they are constantly ensuring the environment surrounding the family is looked after and beautiful, they make sure the least of these, the marginalized, the downtrodden are loved. Dads on the other hand have a different focus. They gather resources for the family, they are vigilant about external threats – for example if a bear is on your porch eating your dogs food they shoot it, they teach and encourage the less capable to become more capable – they are the people that take the training wheels off and run beside you and then most importantly let you go, that is really hard for moms to do, and dads enforce boundaries – “that’s where your mom starts and you stop mister.”

For kids being around moms all the time and getting the immediate gratification of all our needs met and an unending stream of empathy is wonderful, it’s a utopia, but unfortunately it can tend to result in a sense of entitlement and narcissism if there is no balance. Dads are a necessary counterbalance to this. If you look around the world and see entitled, self centered, indulgent brats it is because they were raised without a father like mine.

Marriage isn’t always easy. Often when moms or dads are annoyed with each other you see something like this: dads regard moms as naïve and fostering dependency and moms regard dads as being uncaring and cold.  By the way maybe you noticed that liberals are those people who focus on mom things politically and conservatives are those people who focus on dad things politically. If you want to know why the world seems to be falling apart and becoming more divided you only have to look at what is going on in families. How moms and dads view each other comes to be how liberals and conservatives view each other.

And I see a blueprint for healing a divided world when I look at my moms life and her marriage. She could have easily continued to live a carefree single life and I would have had a very pleasant, resistance free childhood. I would have become a special snowflake, entitled, self-centered, self-righteous. Instead she served God, she stayed committed to a marriage even when it wasn’t easy because it was Gods will, so she never gave up trying to connect, to see the redeeming qualities and the virtues in her spouse. My brother and I are better men today in every way because our dad was in our life and because of our mothers commitment to him and to their marriage.

And Dad, because of moms commitment to you, you have two sons who love you and will be by your side through the rest of your life.

I could talk all day about the lessons and wisdom I have gleaned from my moms life, but I’ll spare you.

Thank-you for indulging me as I sort out my thoughts and feelings about the woman who gave me life, who gave me so much love, who gave me a home, who gave me instruction, who gave me a father.

Here is the point I think I’m trying to wrestle with. It has taken me decades to be able to explain the wisdom of my mother from my secular, atheistic point of view. And as skeptical and downright cynical as I’ve been of my moms beliefs over the years, and as insistent as I’ve been at following reason, evidence and rationality as the path to the truth --- she seems to have had a closer grasp of the truth than I ever have by virtue of her devout faith. Pastor Wes described her faith accurately the other day when he said she was all-in. I had to almost die in a house fire a few years ago to understand my life needs to be devoted to a higher purpose, I had to get a graduate degree to explain to you why prayer is such an important practice, I had to run for Prime Minister of Canada to connect the dots between how a “godless” family results in a fallen world.

Even now I hear mom whispering in my ear “lean not on your own understanding son” and it’s true. Imbedded in her faith was all the wisdom and knowledge needed to live the best kind of life. On her death bed she wanted to make sure I understood the most important lesson she taught me. Forgive me mom for still wrestling with this one, because apparently I arrive at the truth the hardest way possible.

She leaned into me and said, “How do you get to heaven son?”

Looking at me with these sharp, peer-into-your-soul, eyes. “I know mom, the only way to get to heaven is through Jesus.” Any other answer and she would lock eyes with you and say “not good enough” and she wouldn’t let you go until she knew you understood.

By the way if there is anybody here who didn’t meet my mom you might not know that you need to accept Jesus into your heart if you want to get to heaven. One of her last wishes was to make sure people at her memorial knew how to get to heaven.

So please indulge me here for a minute. If my mom is looking down on us right now I want her to be able to hear you answer these questions.

Can you get to heaven by being a good person?

Can you get to heaven by going to church?

Can you get to heaven if you give all your money to charity?

Can you get to heaven by paying off pastor Wes?

People…how do you get to heaven?

The only way to get to heaven is through….JESUS!

My mom wanted us to leave some DVDs at the back of the church that will explain how to find salvation through Jesus. Please make her happy and take one.

Thank-you all for coming.