Eulogy for Mom (Teri Decker Parlet)

My mother loved purple and dancing and wildflowers.  She didn’t tolerate BS and couldn’t stand people who didn’t do their job well.  She often communicated more by her actions than by her words, although she had a few choice words for me when I was growing up.

I often heard such things as:

“No, you can’t have that.  It will spoil your dinner.  Eat an apple.”

“Are you wearing that?”

“Go to your room!”

“Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?”  (That one perplexed me for a good long while.)

“Stop making that face.  It’s going to freeze that way.”

“Because I said so!”

And many more times, “Go to your room!”

My mother once asked me as an adult if I knew why she had sent me to my room so often.  She said that it was for my own protection.  She said she was afraid what she would do to me if I wasn’t sequestered in my bedroom.  My brother can attest to the fact that I always wanted an explanation for her decisions, and if I didn’t get one, I demanded a new explanation.  This led to my brother being much easier to raise and, although she would deny it, made Matthew her favorite child.

Once when I was living in Rapid after college, I ran to Albertsons to grab something, and I instantly cringed when I saw my mother coming toward me at the checkout line.  Her irritation and disbelief let loose in a tirade of words.  “Stephanie!  Oh my god!  Your hair is WET!”  I smiled sheepishly and looked down at my clothes.  “And you’re wearing sweat pants!  Oh my god!”  I guess she was so stunned and horrified by my wet hair in public that she hadn’t taken stock of my clothes at first glance.  I never went to the store with wet hair again.  I did, however, wear sweats.

Mom wore a coordinated ensemble whenever she went in public.  Her earrings matched her necklace and complemented her clothing, which was carefully chosen to coordinate with her shoes.  She had a certain look that was her own, and we never passed an earring counter at the store without stopping to search for more earrings.

Mom most communicated love by her actions.  I always had a new dress for Christmas and Easter.  She never missed a piano recital, a band concert, or a cheerleading game.  When my parents divorced, she would sometimes sit tearfully going over the bills, but she always found a way to pay for uniforms, piano lessons, band instruments, a new stereo (that my father would never buy me), and trips to McDonald’s or to a Chinese restaurant.  She took us hiking and Christmas tree cutting and even took us on what I consider now to be a questionable 1,000 mile trip to Arizona.  We would frequently stop at gas stations both there and back, jokingly saying that we were stopping to fill the oil and check the gas, as the Plymouth Duster had an unstoppable oil leak.  I guess she never considered that the car might catch fire and leave us stranded on the highways of Wyoming or Utah.  Or, in her typical nurse’s demeanor, she figured that she would just handle it and find some other way to get to Arizona.

If Mom decided to do something, there was no doubt that she would make it happen.   She came home from work one day and told me that she had sold the Duster and I would be driving a stick shift starting tomorrow.  In her nurse’s scrubs she took me to the cemetery on Mountain View and taught me how to drive a stick, reasoning that in a cemetery I wouldn’t be able to kill anybody.  She gave me dirty looks as we lurched up and down the straight roads of the cemetery while in exasperation I tried to shift gears without killing the engine.  She sometimes slammed her foot into the floorboards of the Toyota, willing me to slow the car as I negotiated a turn while simultaneously downshifting.  At some point she declared me good to go and we went home to have dinner.  The next day was the most terrifying day of driving I’ve ever had, but Mom was unfazed by my tales of near death experiences driving a stick shift through town.  I was now a stick shift driver in her mind, and she was done discussing it.

My mom was always quick with a laugh, the first on the dance floor, and the last to leave a party.   She often intimidated people when she first met them, but she had mastered the skill of looking confident and calm when inside she was nervous.  If you knew Mom at all, you also knew that she was tender hearted and easily wounded by unkind words.

I never once heard her complain about her illness, and I never heard her complain about chemo or radiation.  She did become somewhat irascible at times as the cancer clouded her memory for certain tasks, like the day she demanded that I help her find her Facebook feed on the computer.  I opened her account to her newsfeed and went into the living room to make sure she hadn’t deleted Facebook from her phone.  As I sat in her recliner, she hollered from the next room, “What are you doing?  Don’t touch my phone!”

I replied, “Mom, you’ve always had Facebook on your phone.  I’m just trying to make it easy for you to find.”

“Stop touching my phone!” she yelled from the next room.

I looked over at Gordon and circled my finger around my ear, making the international sign for “crazy person” and whispered, “I’m going to put Facebook back on her phone.”

She immediately responded, “I can hear you!  I told you to stop touching my phone!!”

Gordon and I looked at each other and I rolled my eyes.  He yelled back to her, “Well, it’s a good thing you haven’t lost your hearing through all of this!”

I never saw my mother cry except for her last days in hospice.  As she said goodbye to people she freely wept, and although she could no longer speak, through nodding her head she told me that she just wasn’t ready to leave.  Mom always lived life fully and straight ahead.  I don’t think she was done living.  She was just done with cancer.

As I picture her in heaven, I imagine that she is at the center of a party.  She is making someone feel welcome.  She is explaining to the new guy how to get around, and I am pretty sure she is dancing in a field of wildflowers or lying out on a perfect beach with a book in her hand and a drink beside her.

She no longer has pain.  She no longer forgets the things you told her just a few minutes ago.  She no longer has to wrangle with her wig or a head of curly chemo affected hair and she is no longer tired or full of steroids or worried about seizures.

She is perfectly at ease, using her strong and able body, maybe working in her flower bed or growing tomatoes.  She is waiting for us and will be the first one to wrap her arms around us when we arrive at our next destination.  She is perfectly herself as she has always been, and I can’t wait to see her just like that again.