I love reading over Dave's speech from the celebration of life, so I've included mine below:
My mother was an incredible person.
She had an incredible knack for making a positive impact on your life through her upbeat and positive attitude.
Growing up though I called this her way of torturing David and I - Almost every morning without fail she would wake us up by coming in our rooms and with the biggest smile and her patented cheerful voice loudly say “Good Morning, Rise and Shine!”. As I’m sure all of you can imagine as a teenager the last thing mornings were was “good” and you generally did not want to “Rise and Shine”. However, as an adult I find myself doing the exact same thing to my sons (and sometimes my wife), even on mornings where things are rough I do it because of how much I love my sons and how happy I am to see them. I can only imagine that was the same reason mom did it.
Of course she did not limit sharing her upbeat and positive attitude with just my brother and I. She was bound and determined to share it with anyone and everyone that she met or saw walking down the street. Mom’s hellos would generally result in a 5-10 minute conversation about how you were doing, how your family was doing and how your niece’s play that you told her about a month ago went. She made it her mission to sincerely get to know everyone that she saw on a regular basis, people that most people walk by or just exchange pleasantries with, she took the time to get to know on a personal level.
I remember asking her about this one time and her response was that you never know who that person is, what interesting life experiences they have had, how they may help you or how you may help them unless you talk with them and get to know them. More importantly, though she reminded me of how much you could brighten a person’s day and life by simply saying hello to them and making an effort to get to know them. From stories that I have heard from those in this room, I know the real reason she befriended people of all ages and backgrounds in her quiet, unassuming way was to make their lives better.
Now I would be saying a little fib if I said she always did it in a quiet and unassuming way - as she was not afraid to let you know what was on her mind - even if it was something that you did not want to hear or something that someone else may not tell you. In fact, as some of my younger cousins may attest when they were younger there was a fear that if you misbehaved or for no reason at all you might be sent to Aunt Betsy’s cousin camp. Which generally meant you got to spend an entire week at my house with my mom - where she would make you spend time with her, garden with her, pick vegetables and fruit, play outside and worst of all make you eat whatever was made for meals even if you didn’t know what it was - other than to only assume that it must be a vegetable!!! I remember us swearing at one point that mom was trying to poison us by making us eat flowers that SHE grew in her garden!!! What makes me smile about those times even more now is that my brother, my cousins and myself now love vegetables, gardening and flowers just like my mom.
Growing up my brother and I played soccer, which is I think is an understatement as it was year round traveling club soccer. Even though my mother was not a very big sports fan, she was our loudest cheerleader - often to our embarrassment. Sporting events were like horror movies to my mom and she often tried to watch them through her fingers. Not only would I hear cheers while playing, but large gasps of Oh No!, Eeek!, Yikes!, Watch Out!, and Ouch! whenever there was any kind of physical contact.
Two qualities of my mom’s that she built up in me to make me who I am today are her incredible patience and confidence. The patience to listen to people, in order to help them, and the confidence to take on battles to help people. The qualities that my mom passed on to me have brought me to gain great friends, form an incredible life with my wife, Jennifer and become the father that I am.
Of all the experiences that I have had with my mom, some of my favorites involve the legal world. I often joke that I grew up in a law office and learned how to bind an appellate brief at the age of 5 - mom never disputed this as it wasn’t too far from the truth. My brother and I were often enlisted to help at her old office in Urbana through bribes of eating at the Courier cafe or getting a glass bottle soda from the office’s old soda machine. Additionally, as many of you know my mother was not a night owl – this led many of our bedtime stories growing up to be morphed into legal story tales in which Briar Rabbit or Curious George were arguing legal cases in front of juries or an appellate court.
While I swore as a young kid that I did not want to become an attorney, as I got older I started to realize it was a calling that I wanted to follow. My mother encouraged this calling, talked me through law school, and made me my first job offer as an attorney. Working with her as an attorney was one of the best experiences I have had and it has positively shaped my career ever since. She gave me the tools that I needed for success as a child and now as an attorney. More than anything else though I loved talking with her about the law, recent court opinions and issues that we had faced – to my father’s chagrin these conversations often took over the dinner table and our time together. If there is anything that I will miss the most it will be those conversations.
My mom lived an incredible life – she married the love of her life – she traveled the world – she made a difference in an incredible number of people’s lives – she had a successful career and legal practice – she started her own personal botanical garden – she found her own personal Shangri La – and she saw my brother and I grow up and have children. While we can say that her life was cut short by cancer, she never allowed herself to see it that way and neither will I. She lived a wonderful and full life filled with incredible people – Thank you for being a part of her life, a part of my family’s life and a part of my life.