My mother was not
who you think she was.
Just kidding. My mother was exactly who you think she was. But there is a twist, and we'll get to that.
I could say many things about my remarkable mother—how
she was from Winthrop, how she lost her mother at age 10, how her father wasn’t
around, how incredibly adventurous and brave it was when she spent the year in
Israel in 1948 when she was just 18, how after she came back she worked for
Abba Eban at the United Nations, how my dad passed away when she was 38, how she was present at the formation of
Hampshire College, how she graduated from college at age 51, her many roles at
both Hampshire and at Tufts University, how in 1982 she bought a 15-room
Victorian in Boston and then shamelessly tricked her children into living in it
with her and raising the grandchildren there, her time volunteering at the
library at the Mozart School in Boston, her epic trips with her grandchildren
and her friends Rubylee and Jody, the Seders for 40 people, her love of Scrabble, The New York Times
crossword puzzle, and Agatha Christie, the fact that she built a rehearsal room
in the basement of her house so the band that Maire Anne and I had had
somewhere to play (I mean, who does that?)—but
none of that is who she was. The defining quality of my mother was that she was,
quite simply, the best person I ever met, or ever will meet. More than that, she was the best person many of you ever met, or ever will meet. I
remember once saying “my mother, easily the best person I’ve ever met” in front
of someone who did not know me well. It was like her title, an integral part of
her name: “My mother—easily the best person I've ever met.” This fellow said,
somewhat dismissively, “Rob, everyone feels
that way about their mother.” I thought, “you poor schlub, you don’t know my mother.”
Many of you who knew my mother, who she helped through
difficult times and challenging decisions, referred to her in glowing terms. Anne
and Martha called her “my guardian angel.” Lauren called her “my Mary Poppins.”
Many referred to her as a saint. She was legendary for dropping everything and
driving to New York or getting on a plane at a moment’s notice to help a friend
or family member in need. But for the record, my mother was not a saint. She
was better. I doubt that saints have the humanity that my mother had. Or the
patience.
My mother possessed an astonishing combination of
intellect and kindness, reason and an innate sense of fairness. She was the
gold standard not only for significant ethical questions, but also for trivial
ones. If this sounds like “What would Bernice do,” yes, that’s it, exactly, and
many of you sought her advice over the years, as did I. We once called her from
vacation to settle an argument we were having while playing Trivial Pursuit. The
question itself was, well, trivial (it had to do with whether the word “Arena”
was actually part of the title of a sports stadium), but the point was that
everyone playing the game was completely willing to accept her phoned-in
judgment. And, if memory serves me correctly, she ruled against me.
Although people who knew her professionally called her
Bernice, most family and old friends called her Bim. When I was old enough to
spell, I decided it must mean “Bernice is my mother.” What else could it have
meant?
My mother collected people her entire life. Amy and I
were her biological children, but there were others: Anne, Martha, Lauren,
Glenn, Abby, Lisa, and the Hampshire College students—Vanessa, Shelley, and
others. Speaking of Hampshire College, sometimes it takes us a lifetime to
appreciate the significance of certain events. I now understand that the steady
stream of Hampshire students traipsing through our house while we lived in
Amherst when I was in junior high school—people we didn’t see when we were growing
up in lily-white Long Island, people of color, people of different sexual
orientation—was the most significant, meaningful, and broadening experience of
my life. Years ago, I asked my mother how she knew to do that, why she thought
it was important to expose Amy and me to that beautiful radiant cross-section
of humanity. I expected a rational explanation, but she simply shrugged it off.
The fact that, when I sent out an e-mail from her account telling people that
her passing was near, four of the first five people who responded were former
Hampshire students from this group, moved me to tears.
(And regarding those emails, my mother, Amy, and I
were astonished at their depth and breath. Amy and I read every one to my mother,
and she remembered every one of you.)
Regarding having her as a mother, what can I say? Amy
and I were privileged to be her children. She was every bit as good as you’d
imagine she’d be, offering boundless love and support. I recall her only ever
raising her voice to me in anger only once. And boy did I deserve it. I recall
her punishing me to teach me a lesson only twice. And boy did I deserve it.
My mother’s wisdom was legendary. In my early years in
college, she gently tried to correct the cavalier attitude I’d begun to display
toward my family. The way she phrased it was remarkable. She said: “I see how much
you love your friends, and how well you treat them. That’s great, but you
shouldn’t treat your own family worse than you treat your friends.” It was
astonishing that she had to say it, and even more astonishing that it worked.
Years later, when our kids were born, she gave me the single best piece of
parenting advice I ever received: “If your kids show interesting in something,
treat that like a flower, because if you don’t, you’ll kill it with neglect, or
worse.” So, to my children, you owe much of that to her.
My mother used to say that, no, life isn’t fair, but that’s why we try to
make our own corner of it as fair as possible. Words to live by.
My mother once said that if she ever ran a personal
ad, it would say—and I love this—“basically
reasonable person seeks basically reasonable person.” She said that appearance,
money, even political differences could be dealt with, but lack of reasonability...
that was a deal-breaker.
A number of years ago, someone asked my mother why she
never remarried. She replied, in an offhand way, that she’d had several
opportunities. My jaw dropped, as I’d never heard anything about this. She then
said, very matter-of-factly, “The question wasn’t whether I could’ve gotten
married again. The question was: Would it
have improved my life? I decided it wouldn’t have.” Classic my mother.
In addition to her wisdom, the defining aspect of my
mother was her sense of kindness. She was the queen of kindness. She was kind
before kindness was cool. She was unfailingly kind to people, both old friends,
new ones, and complete strangers, but she wasn’t above remonstrating someone if
she thought they were doing their job badly (that was the professional
administrator in her) or abusing their position. The only person I ever heard
her speak badly of was a Boston building inspector who was giving her a hard
time about some trivial aspect of the planned modifications on the house. Well,
and certain Republican politicians. And the physical therapist who was trying
to get her to use the cane. And there was
one nutritionist she wasn’t crazy about. But it was lack of kindness that
drove her crazy. She’d say “It’s so easy. And it costs nothing.”
People say that they want to have their wits about
them when they go, but I can tell you how heartbreaking it was to see her aware
of her end. That was, however, what she wanted. About six weeks before she
died, when I came to the house, she joked, as she often did, “Did I know you
were coming?” I said, as I often did, that no, she didn’t; I was just checking
in on her. She didn’t mind talking about her death. She was alternately
matter-of-fact and deeply philosophical about it. On this visit, she began by
saying that it wasn’t her intent to involve Amy and me in her death. Then she
launched into this incredibly detailed description of a book she’d read in her
20s, “The 40 Days of Musa Dagh,” a piece of historical fiction about the
Armenian genocide in Turkey. She described the story, about a town had
relocated itself to a mountain top to escape the Turkish troops, and how the
social situation in the town decayed. But she had the most passion behind the
description of a young man, a resistance fighter in the town, who became sick.
When he was captured, he was so sick that he wasn’t even aware that he was
about to be executed, that this was the end of his life. She said that she’d
remembered the story and this character her entire life, and how profoundly sad
it was to her that he wasn’t cognitively there for his own death, and how glad
she was that she was there for hers. This must’ve been very important to her,
because she told Amy the same story. I sat there, astonished. What do you say
to this?
I said “Well, ma, regarding the first issue (being
sorry to involve Amy and me in your death)… what did you think we were going to do? Stick you on an ice floe and leave you
to the polar bears?”
“And regarding the second issue… when your son comes
over just to check on you, you can just
chit chat or play Scrabble; you don’t necessarily have to go on for 15 minutes about how you want to be there for
your own death.”
But it was a microcosm of my mother—deeply practical,
deeply philosophical, and worried more about her family than herself.
A number of years ago, my mother put together a little
hand-assembled book for Amy and me. It was called “Your Father and Me, and You
and You (by me).” It described their individual histories, their courtship and
marriage, how he came to the marriage largely fully-formed while she was still coming
into focus, his sickness and death, and her regrets. Obviously, it was sad. But
it was more than that. It made me realize that my mother, who showed a
relentlessly cheerful presence to everyone, carried an undercurrent of sadness beneath
the surface for her entire life and didn’t show it to anyone, not even to Amy and me. She and my dad
had only 13 years together. While she moved forward from his passing in July
1968, and did brave amazing things, raising Amy and me as a single mother,
moving us from Long Island to Amherst and then to Lexington, expertly balancing
all of our needs, a part of her always remained with my dad.
When my mother went in the hospital in April, she took
a photo of my dad with her. As we talked about her mortality, she said “I don’t
believe in an afterlife, but I do
believe that, when I die, I’ll be reunited with your father. And if that’s
self-contradictory, I don’t care.” I loved that her rationality did not extend
to this.
About a month before she passed away, my mother wanted
to go to a specialist appointment, even though she was in hospice. She was
weak, and getting her in and out of the house was logistically involved. But
she really wanted to take the appointment. She explained that it wasn’t false
hope. She said “I’ve thought about how and when to take risks my entire life.
Now, I have only one more risk left to take. Why wouldn’t I want to take it?” So
she did. Genius, that woman.
My mother wasn’t in pain, but was very tired. She had
periods where she’d be completely lucid and carry on detailed conversations with
Amy and me, but with her eyes closed, and talking slowly and softly.
Remarkably, she could still be very funny. Once she said “Call my friend
Rubylee… and tell her… she should skip this part.” She also said, with a touch
of Erma Bombeck, “If you write a book about me, call it “I always thought I’d
die of something I knew the name of.””
She was, of course, joking (at least I think she was joking), but my mother did
not have an easy life, and I began
wondering where she came by this well of kindness. I consulted The Book of Bim,
looking for clues. This was the closest I got: “[Your father and I] were
driving somewhere, and passed a house that had been painted a deep shade of
pink. I commented on how awful it looked, and daddy asked me why I cared; why I
needed to say something negative about another person’s decision that didn’t
affect me at all and wasn’t harmful to anyone. This has become very much part
of how I think, and I am bothered by the need that people have to criticize
that which is completely unconnected to them and whose comments can be hurtful
to others.”
Then I found it, the diamond in the dust, the
life-long lesson extracted from something trivial: “Your father and I rarely
argued, but we did occasionally get angry at each other, almost always it was
me angry at him. I probably told you this story, but it’s a good example of his
ability to get at the essence of an issue. Once we were expecting friends to
come for the evening. I had a head cold and was feeling lousy. Daddy was
sitting in the living room reading the paper and I was busy vacuuming in that
room, while sneezing and coughing at the same time. He didn’t offer to help.
Finally, I said “How can you sit there while I’m busy and feeling so lousy?” He
immediately got up and started to vacuum, but said something to me to the
effect of: why are you cleaning up; you feel sick; these are just our friends
who are coming; they don’t care what the house looks like; what do you want to
be remembered for—being a good housekeeper? I was furious. For at least two
days. Partly I was furious because, although he was helping me, he was also
criticizing me, and partly because I knew he was right—at least right in his
philosophy, but wrong in his approach. It took me years for this powerful idea
to become part of the way I looked at things. What is it we want to leave behind
when we die? Our afterlife is in the hands of our children, but
the memories we leave them, [those] are in our hands.”
Wow, right? It gives “Thanks for the memories” a whole
new meaning. I think that, as someone who knew so much pain, she not only came
to understand the value of salving other people’s pain with kindness, but also
the value of the memories this would leave. Is that why she did it? Administered all that kindness over all those
years? I don’t know. But I think this shows that this was who she chose to be. Sure, some of it she was
predisposed to, and some was underpinned by her Judaism, but I really think
that she chose to become the
superhero that we knew and adored, and that makes it all the more remarkable.
When I was a kid and was honest to the point of being
hurtful, my mother would sometimes say “you sound just like your father.” When
she said it in this way, this was not a
compliment. I have certainly become more like her in the second half of my
life, absorbing the elixir of kindness through her ceaseless examples. She
lived by something a friend of hers, Norman Kotker used to say: “The highest
value is kindness.”
My mother used to say that she’d inherited the gene to
function under all circumstances. I thought I had too, until the final few
days. My sister, Amy, on the other hand, displayed a combination of grace,
love, and fortitude that was stunning, though not in the least surprising to
those who know her. Truly our mother’s daughter.
My mother would scoff at the idea that she has something
as weighty-sounding as a legacy, but we all know that she does. And it’s not
only the dissemination of kindness, but of “tikkun olam” (repair the world),
and of performing mitzvoth. My son Ethan called my mother “the Ted Williams of
mitzvah hitting.” If there’s a mitzvah hall of fame, she’s a shoe-in to get in
on the first round. Choose to be
kind. Choose to do good. If she could
instill these teachings in me, the wicked of the four Passover children, she
can, even in passing, instill them in anyone.
I’ll leave you with one final story. During one of her
hospital stays, I wanted to bring Scrabble, but all I could find at my house
was Junior Scrabble, which had a board with large squares with pictures on
them, no double and triple word scores, and no points on the letters.
Nonetheless, we played, one point per letter. It was a beautiful way to spend a
few hours in the hospital. And I was aware that it might be my final
opportunity to beat her, which I had never
done. I thought I had her, but then, even on this junior board with no
points, she did one of those moves with putting in one letter that made three
words, and zoomed ahead of me. I steadily caught back up. At one point, I had
to take a phone call. I came back to see that she’d put a word starting with
“S” at the end of the word “pink” to make “pinks.” “PINKS?” I said. “Yes,” she said, “reds, greens, blues… pinks.” What,
you think I was going to argue with
her? Again I caught back up, but only because twice she pointed out
opportunities I’d missed that were still there on my next turn. At the end of
the game, I’d edged her out by two points, but because she’d pointed out those two
words to me, I wasn’t sure I deserved it. We discussed it, folded in the
controversy over “pinks,” and agreed to call it a draw. It was the reasonable,
kind, and fair thing for both of us to do.
[Bernice Siegel, ETBPIEM (easily the best person I've ever met), 2/28/1930 - 7/12/2019]
