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Eulogy For My Mother
By Ethan M. Lewis
December 12, 2025
Good afternoon, and thank you for coming. As I’m sure you will hear a lot today, my mother was a very special person, and we will all miss her for a wide range of reasons. Since her final hospitalization right after Thanksgiving–and the rapid decline that led to her passing on– I know that I have had a raft of memories race through my brain. I won’t talk for long here, but there are some things that I do want to make sure get said.
My mother was the definition of “family first”. Rebecca and I were sheltered from the worst of my parents’ financial struggles in the early 80s, after my father’s health made it impossible for him to work. I remember saying to her once “well, at least we never went without food”, and my mother said “well, you and Rebecca never did….” Years later, after a sojourn in New England following my father’s death, my mother opted to return to Warminster to help care for my grandmother. Fortunately, Mom-Mom lived a very long life, but that meant years of my mother doing her mother’s laundry, chauffeuring her to appointments, and being her sounding board. My mother was also a bulwark of support to my Aunts Lisa and Karen, and was especially helpful during my Uncle Mark’s battle with cancer and when we unexpectedly lost my cousin Danny.
I moved to college in 1988, and after the summer of 1989 never really came back home except for short visits, so I didn’t get to SEE my mother all that much, but she never failed to tell me how much she loved Becca and me, how proud she was of us, how wonderful and talented our spouses are, and that no matter how bad SHE might be feeling, knowing WE are ok made her happy. It was always a foundational truth for me that no matter what, my mother believed in me and supported me, and I will miss that very much.
In the obituary which you may have read I mentioned my mother’s hard work and how that work ethic has always inspired me to want to work longer, harder and better. Another aspect of that is how inspirational I have found my mother to be in continuing after my father died. I think about this a lot, especially because next July I will officially have lived longer than he did, and like my parents, Courtney and I have been married for over three decades. I cannot possibly imagine living on my own and continuing to improve myself without Courtney, but my mother spent nearly 27 years on her own, “putting on her face” as she would put it, and not just facing the world, but being an important contributor in making it a better place by teaching countless babies and toddlers and preschoolers. She and I talked about this in October, and I think it surprised her, but made her happy to have had that effect on me.
My mother was also something of a prototype, a preview, if you will, of the modern world. Long, long before there were signs everywhere about peanuts and allergens, my mother acquired a VERY serious allergy to corn and corn derivatives (co-incidentally, right around the time that corn syrups and other products became widespread). If you ever had the pleasure of dining out with my mother, you could doubtless recite her lengthy interrogation of the waiter about cooking oils, the presence or absence of “maltodextrin” etc. Of course, it was really a life or death matter, and everyone in our house became well-versed in reading ingredient labels. When Courtney and I first got together over 30 years ago, one of the first things she noticed was how avidly I consulted ingredients while shopping, and the behavior is catching, because earlier this week Courtney said that she always consults recipes to see if they would be “Mommy safe”.
You have, perhaps, heard of the expression “helicopter parents”, to describe modern parents who are deeply involved with their children’s educational and extra curricular activities? My mother was to those people what Leonardo DaVinci’s aerial screw drawing was to an Apache gunship, the earliest conception of something that became much more powerful. I vividly remember my mother criticising our second grade teacher Mrs. Shanbacker (my mother called her Mrs. Shincracker) for wasting time in class with a lesson playing Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi”; something I reminded her of all the time when I was a high school history teacher playing songs for my students to study. Or contributing to get my sixth grade teacher Mr. Slikes (who was definitely past his prime, and abusive to students) removed from his job. Or complaining to his successor Mr. Stremme about the “Lithuanian dance performance” he made me do with Debbie Wancio (it was actually a lot of fun). Or complaining to our high school principal when Becca’s knee injury kept her from attending class and they didn’t want to provide a homebound instructor. Or, how she wouldn’t let Rebecca ride a bike in the street, or let us play with friends in the street, or let us sit in an unmoving car without seatbelts. I could go on, but you get the picture. While sometimes this attention was embarrassing or frustrating, it came from a place of love and [over?] protectiveness for the people for whom she cared the most.
I also want to say something about my parents’ unswerving support for us. In 1987 I spent a lot of time on my college applications; understand that I eventually became a college counselor, and I know pretty much everything about applying to college NOW, but as a teen-ager, with naught but the Peterson’s guide and Colleges That Change Lives I was working in an information vacuum. Ultimately I only applied to two schools: Hampshire College, an alternative, new college (slightly younger than me) and the most expensive in the nation, and Marlboro College, a farm in Vermont with less than 200 students where every class was an independent study. My mother tried hard to convince me to look at more conventional options closer to home, or less expensive (or preferably both), but I was adamant in finding a college smaller than William Tennent High School, without organized sports or Greek life, where they got lots of snow, and where I could watch Red Sox games on TV.
I vividly remember a lunch at Peddlar’s Village where she practically begged me to apply to Temple, but I was adamant, and she and my father committed whole-heartedly, taking out PLUS loans to help pay for my education at Hampshire (I was accepted at both colleges, but Hampshire gave a better aid package). They both became huge advocates of Hampshire’s unorthodox methods, and without their support, EVERYTHING would have been different. Of course Rebecca also went to Hampshire a year later, where one of her good friends was Courtney, with whom I eventually got snowed in at Hampshire during the blizzard of the century in 1993 and married 51 weeks later. Becca’s other great friend from college, Shana Davidson, traveled a long way to be here with us today, which we appreciate greatly.
One final topic is hard to avoid, especially considering recent events. My mother was probably the most accident-prone person I have ever met. Leaving aside the injuries and broken bones she had as a youth, who can forget the time that my mother (who was about 5 feet tall and about 100 pounds) “slipped on a Cheerio”, and skidded across the kitchen floor gouging a yard-long track in the linoleum floor? Or the time she went out to get the trash can from the curb on a windy day, and, at the exact moment she held the lid aloft, a gust of wind lifted her bodily from the surface of the earth and flew her backwards, resulting in a torn rotator cuff? Or the time she mysteriously slipped on carpet and shattered her ankle, resulting in surgery, hospitalization and a long stay in a rehab center?
Sadly, that example from a decade ago was its own kind of foreshadowing. In September of this year, my mother mysteriously fell again, on the same carpeted floor, fracturing her left arm from shoulder to elbow. This time she didn’t need surgery, but the stay in the rehab hospital (as the most left-handed person ever, she couldn’t live alone with her arm in a sling) weakened her; due to my mother’s dietary restrictions, she was pretty much on a daily diet of steamed white fish and pallid steamed veggies and she lost a lot of weight. She also became rather depressed, with the only silver lining being her decision, after years of our petitioning, to finally move to Virginia to be closer to Becca and Jimmy and Courtney and me. Courtney and I swiftly obtained an apartment six miles from our house and had lined up movers for next weekend, but unfortunately my mother contracted an infection in the final days at the rehab hospital. She looked quite diminished when I last saw her in October, and Becca says it had only got worse by Thanksgiving.She was only back in her apartment for two days before having to be taken by ambulance to Abington Hospital, where she rapidly declined and died.
I don’t know if I will ever get over the feeling that my mother was cheated of her future by this final broken bone. I am so full of sadness that my mother didn’t get to live out another decade near her children! I wish that I would have been able to help her with chores and shopping and doctor visits in Richmond, and just general visiting. Most of all, I am haunted that at the end, while suffering delirium, she kept saying “they are going to let me go home soon”. Unfortunately, that didn’t exactly happen, but it gives me solace to think that she may have meant that metaphorically, and that she is reunited with my father, and her parents, and grandparents, and my uncle and my cousin and with so many others she held dear. If my mother’s theory of the afterlife is accurate, she and they are, like in Return of the Jedi, young and happy and watching over all of us forever.
Thank you.