This is the eulogy I delivered at my mother’s memorial on November 6, 2021.
My mother gave me many, many things, including the gift of life. But, I’ll start with one thing in particular. She taught me how to swear, and she led by example. She had a mastery of the blue register of the English language. So, she’d be the first to say: this is shit.
The love we felt for her is equal to the grief that we suffer from her absence—and we could all really use her to help us get through that suffering. We all feel the lack of Kathe in our lives.
She connected with everyone, from friends in grade school to her hospice social worker, who said she was a model for him of how to be at the end of a life.
After she died, even people who I hadn’t met before contacted me with their condolences. Boyfriends from college, ESL students, artists and gallerists, roommates, landscapers, babysitters, financial planners, relatives, neighbors, and on and on and on. Her personality was so concentrated that it didn’t take much exposure to forge a lasting impression.
She connected to people because she saw them, down to their core. And they knew it. So they felt a deep kinship with her, even if she didn’t necessarily think of them afterward. But when she was with you, she saw you, no matter how big or small a role you played in her life at that moment.
Among our friends and family, we would joke about the excited noises she make when a server at a restaurant brought her order. Not just for entrees—appetizers as well. When the food appeared, she’d say, without fail: “Oooooooo.” Some people think service is supposed to be invisible, but she saw it and was thankful for what she was given and for who gave it.
She saw the men and women picking apples in the orchards by her house, and wanted to find a way to improve their lives. She saw a person battling Multiple Sclerosis and wanted to help, just by talking on the phone. She saw kids, who she spoke to as if they were adults, and dogs, who she also spoke to as if they were adults.
When she saw you, it wasn’t always pleasant. I know what she’d say about this eulogy because I heard it from her often: it could have used a better editor. It’s probably true!
But she saw because she cared. The worst thing Mom could be towards anyone was indifferent. If she was mad at you, or said something that cut you to the quick, she was still thinking about you and loved you, even if the message was that you should just get over yourself or that you could do better.
And she saw me, too. She saw me my whole life. Which is why, when things were bad, I called. Because I knew she knew how I felt.
I called when my father took me, one of a long line of Jewish sailors, on a three-day boating trip that I could only tolerate for one day.
I called when I couldn’t stand another second of sleepaway camp. Two different sleepaway camps.
I called when I saw a plane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center from my dorm room window.
I called from my first assignment for the New York Post, in Albania, and spent three times more on roaming charges than I earned from the article.
I called when I broke my ankle.
I called when I broke the other ankle.
I called before and after I asked Ashley to marry me.
I called, and I called, and I called. And she picked up.
She picked up to celebrate. She picked up to ease my anxieties. She picked up, even if she thought I wasn’t making the right choice, or that I was being a pill, or that I was being hasty or lazy or cynical. She saw me and she was proud of me and she picked up. During the conversation, she might also hang up a few times, or deploy some of that aforementioned swearing, but we’d still talk again.
She saw others, but she herself didn’t always want to be seen. She struggled with feelings of not being worthy. Not being enough of an artist, enough of a wife, enough of a friend, a partner, a mother, a teacher. That push and pull between seeing others and not wanting to be seen herself, is what made her who she was.
It’s why, despite working as a model and an actress, we have countless photos of her flipping off the camera. As if she were saying, take a look at that.
It’s why she loved the solitude of her house on the hill in Clintondale, sitting on the porch with Vlad, digging in the garden with Ace and Rosie, or sequestering herself in her bedroom with a book.
It’s why she loved her cottage here in Portland. She was about as close as she could get to Ashley and myself on a daily basis, but she still didn’t have to actually see us on a daily basis, unless she chose to.
It’s why she loved her secret garden behind the cottage, and why she wanted a door directly to it. So she didn’t have to be seen if she wasn’t feeling up for it that day.
But I am so glad for the days she did want to engage, because her love was an education. She had a million nicknames for me. All of them were silly. The one she used most, though, was Biff, straight out of Arthur Miller. Perhaps comparing your only son to a golden child who doesn’t amount to his promise isn’t a good parenting strategy, but it certainly was educational.
On her last night, Ashley and I sat by Kathe’s bed and we played songs from musicals for her. They were so much a part of her. I still cannot watch an old Law and Order and see Jerry Orbach without exclaiming, “The original El Gallo from the Fantasticks!” even if no one else is around.
There was always something to learn. Theater to appreciate. I doubt my peers cared about Gilbert and Sullivan or the Threepenny Opera as much as I did, which is to say, at all.
She didn’t just love art, she taught me to love art. She didn’t just love reading, she taught me to love reading. She taught me TO read. She taught me to love reading so much that I made writing my career. And she taught me to love animals, even if it disappointed her that my love extended to cats, in addition to dogs.
And, thank goodness, she taught me to laugh. Because in the past four months, I’ve needed it. We’ve needed it. She was deeply, deeply silly. She saw that life is inherently ridiculous, so how could you not laugh at it? Whether it was a failure of a birthday cake, or calling a dog’s cone after surgery his “Elizabethan Collar” or describing the long, tragic history of appliances that did not survive her care, every story had laughter in it.
I thank her for those gifts that she gave me. I will carry them for the rest of my life. It really is shit that she’s not here, but her love, her education and her humor will live on, in me and all of the other people here and not here who she connected with over the course of her life. I’ll quote what she said to me so often in her final days, because I feel it acutely, after forty years having her as my mother: “I’m so lucky.”