Eulogy for Mom, 11 Years Later
Anna Quindlen writes that “Grief is a whisper in the world and a clamor within…Perhaps that is why this is the least explored passage: because it has no end…This is why it comes as a great surprise to find that loss is forever, that two decades after the event there are those occasions when something in you cries out at the continuous presence of an absence. "An awful leisure," Emily Dickinson once called what the living have after death.”.
When I think of mom, gone eleven years next week, it is always in Eagles Mere that I see her, never on the Main Line. She is in her favorite rocker on the porch of Self Help, the prettiest house in Eagles Mere, gazing out at her lake. Or she’s in her chair in her suite, pretending to be asleep, TV blaring, waiting for whatever is going to happen next. Maybe she’s in the kitchen making endless batches of apple sauce or creamed corn or frying scrapple. Occasionally, she is lurking behind a door to overhear a conversation. The Coo would have made a magnificent spy. She adored intrigue.
Family first. Blood is thicker than water. Peace at all costs. How proud she was of her family--from her grandfather, the railroad scion, S.M. Vauclain, to each of her grandchildren, nieces and nephews. She took great joy in our achievements, sending us off to every challenge with, “Just do your best; it will be good enough.”
She was a schemer from an early age, giving us the sense that anything was possible—just believe and make it happen. When she was 10, she and her cousin, Connie, called up Suburban Hardware and said, “Please have two beebee guns delivered to the backdoor of Broadlawn and charge it, please.” The guns arrived, and Cooie and Connie went out to shoot squirrels.
Her command of genealogy was formidable. After dancing class, she would inquire with whom we had danced, and upon uttering some unsuspecting boy’s name, she would reel off, “So, that’s so and so’s child and they live in Wayne, and his grandparents were friends of your grandparents and they…etc., etc., etc. She loved understanding the web of connections from one generation to the next, and though she was never a reader, she kept up with decades of General Hospital. She taught us to wear slips and taught me to carry a hankie, which I do always…and to keep a stiff upper lip and to pull up our socks and to be good sports.
Our mom loved tennis and fly-fishing and golf. She was a tremendous sportswoman. And not a squeamish bone in her body. She was great with blood or injury—calm under pressure. And when the bursitis got her, she could still play backgammon. Make your bar point. Those famous Vauclain doubles—thank you, Mom.
More than a decade later, I am still on that edge of awful leisure. But Coo Klotz would have no patience with that attitude: “Do something,” she would holler. “Don’t just sit there. Pick up a racquet. Plant some pansies, get out the jigsaw and make something. Weave the webbing through a folding chair; go hit a ball against the backboard; play bridge, scrape some paint, sand something. Use your hands. Fix a clock, find a magnifying glass, watch the stock market, live your life.”
At the very end, when most of the words had left her, the words she could still say were “love” and “please” and “thank you” and “help” and “goodbye.” Of course, she remembered her manners. The Coo was all about love. Not so much a touchy-feely, cuddly love, but an unwavering commitment and ferocity. She loved her life; she loved her family. She faced a lot of goodbyes in her life. When I leave Eagles Mere, I still imagine her waving me off.
“Goodbye, goodbye. Be safe. We love you lots and lots!,” she calls.
In my heart, I see her waving. I am still getting used to the world without her.
