To Be Seen As We Are

On January 18, 2022, my mother died following a stroke. This came at the end of a year of advancing dementia and increasing health problems. On May 21st we gathered at her family grave site in Loudonville, Ohio, where I delivered this eulogy. I’m confident I accomplished what I intended, as one of my mom’s classmates approached me afterward and said, “I hope one of my children talk about me the way you talked about Linda today.” I hope that for all of us, we all deserve it.

I am deeply grateful for each of you who are here today. Thank you for taking the time to honor my mother, Linda Lee McClain Goodbody Jose.

I’m grateful for the stories some of you have shared with me recently. One of the best things that can come from a funeral is a chance to see someone whole, to meet them new again, or to see them more completely.

I’d like to share two things about my mom I don’t think anyone knew.

First, although my mom always carried a flame for my father, Thomas Perry Jose, the happiest year or two of her life came during her engagement and marriage to her second husband, Robert Pim Goodbody. He actively courted her, wooed her. He called her “Princess.” And it made her wildly happy. Even after anger and alcohol swallowed him completely, she treasured that first year they were together.

Second, my mom would sometimes discipline me by hitting me with a yardstick. It was a really thick pressed board seamstresses’ yardstick emblazoned with the Comstock’s logo. She didn’t use it very often, but on the rare occasion when she hit me with that plank, it hurt.

I don’t remember what I had done on this particular day, but I must have been in 5th or 6th grade or so, as she was yelling at me in the kitchen of the house on Pleasant Street. She grabbed the board and I didn’t back down, so the first thwack wasn’t really a surprise. Then she surprised us both by taking a second swing. Hard. And the yardstick broke. When it hit my thigh, about 16 inches of pressed board pinwheeled across the counter into the dish tray, breaking a glass and sending plates crashing to the floor.

We both stood in stunned silence for a moment.

Undaunted, mom considered her options. She looked at the broken sword in her hand and dismissed it forever. She said as much to herself as to me, “Well I guess I have to talk to you from now on.”

“Mom” and “Child”

Every time I sit down to write about her, I see capital M “Mom” – someone who is locked in a relationship with me, her capital C “Child.” The dependency, the co-dependency, the striving for independence, the letting go, the gathering back together as something like equals.

But in saying that these things are true for my mom, I’m just saying that she was a Mom. These things are true for all moms in their relationships with their children. Everyone here has a Mom, and some of us have lost them. This is a reductive description of her. It limits her unfairly to the scope of my childish vision of her.

This tells you very little about Linda Lee McClain Goodbody Jose.

Linda was a dreamer. She believed in true love. She believed in education. She believed that good triumphs over evil. She believed in the Kennedys. Oh my did she believe in the Kennedys. She believed in the world out there and she set out to find it.

And finally I know that my mom believed in me. She read to me. She bragged about me. She was certain I would change the world.

She sent me off to second grade class one day armed with the word “ubiquitous.” My teacher challenged me first to define it, and then to spell it, and then to write it on the board. Then she checked it against a Merriam Webster dictionary she pulled from a shelf near her desk, the spine crackling from disuse. When she finished reading the entry, she looked up at me with respect.

And in my bones I felt the power of education. This was a gift my mom gave to me.

My mom left Loudonville to attend Ohio State University, but fell in love and abandoned her formal education. Then more than a decade after Linda set off across the country with her husband, she abandoned her efforts to prove true love. She came home to … almost home to Loudonville. She came to live in Ashland. Here she was close enough to home to to see friends and seek the barest amount of support, but far enough away to not have to admit defeat.

My mom believed in Pride too, I guess.

Frailty begets reconciliation

One thing my mom didn’t believe in was family. At least not initially. She fought hard against the rule of my grandmother Genevieve Arnholt and by extension her older sister Jean McClain Koppert Smith, next to both of whom she will rest for eternity. Which makes their eventual reconciliation feel all the more valuable.

My mom was 78 when my Aunt Jean turned 90. Jean’s husband Ted and my cousin Rae threw a big party at the retirement community. My mom started months in advance to give excuses why she could not attend. But, drawing strength from Rae, whose commitment to our family is awe-inspiring, I drew the line. I let her know when I would pick her up, where we would be spending the night before the party, and what to pack. It wasn’t a hostage situation exactly, despite some similarities, and we made it to the party on time.

By this time Jean was advanced in age, and was experiencing precious few moments of public lucidity. Through a series of interactions over the course of a couple of hours, my mom was finally able at this event to see her sister again as a person. Not fearsome, as she had been in Mom’s mind all these years, but fallible. Frail.

On the ride home my mom was unusually cheerful and talkative. Visibly relieved of a decades-old burden. On that day, too late, my mom regained a sister.

A year or so passed without note. Then in quick succession Jean and their brother Frank died. They both are buried here. Mom seemed to age quicker.

The last year of my mom’s life was hard. She was easily confused. This brilliant woman who had worked for the League of Women Voters and the Kennedy campaign, who had been a leader in Junior Achievement and Cub Scouts, and who’d run countless fundraisers in her prime now utterly failed to tell her telephone from her remote control. 10 out of 10 times she’d use the wrong one to do the thing she was trying to do. She needed help to accomplish basic tasks. She failed to take her medicines.

But as she lost this world, she was able to comfortably retreat into another. The world of her past. Here her childhood friends still met at under the pine tree between their homes on Spring Street. Here her husband Tom waited, as in love with her as she was with him. Here was a foreign world where when she said “we” it never meant her and me.

Here was the attractive young socialite you see in her obituary photo and today’s program. A woman I never met before. The woman who never met a stranger. Laughing with friends, a lifetime ahead of her. Smart, beautiful, engaging.

Here her 4th vertebrae was not shattered. Here the medicine they gave her in the hospital did not make her hallucinate and become hyperactive. Here she didn’t look the retirement community aide in the eye and then pull the fire alarm because she was cold. Here, my wife and I did not have to take turns sleeping on the floor of her room to keep her safe on her endless trips to the bathroom or the kitchen between brief moments of not-quite-sleep in her bed.

To be seen

I know this is true: my mom never lost sight of me. To the end, even as everything else slid from her memory, she knew my name. And on my last visit to her, when she was lying in a hospital bed dehydrated and disoriented, unresponsive and agitated, I stroked her hair and kissed her forehead and said, “I’m right here. It’s okay .” And she visibly relaxed, allowing her hands to come to rest on her abdomen. Even as she was lost to this world she could see me. I had lost Mom, seemingly multiple times. But I received a priceless gift.

Through the tears and the sleeplessness, and nights in the hospital and the grief of losing more and more of her over this time, grief and weight which my wife Kathy so courageously and selflessly helped to bear; in these months of driving between Ashland and Cincinnati, of managing her finances, moving her to a retirement community then to hospitals and rehab centers, a precious fruit was cultivated.

For the first time I came to see my mom as a complete person. Her whole self. Not from one angle of merely who she was to me, no longer just “Mom” to her “Child,” but who she fully was.

Linda Lee McClain Goodbody Jose.

Mom: In your complexities. In your strength and your sacrifices. In your victories and vicissitudes. In your yardstick-smashing passion and in your frailty. And yes, in the ubiquitous evidence of your love for me, I will never lose sight of you. I’m right here. It’s okay.