Remembering Lenore

Eulogy for Lenore Farrell by her daughter Francesca Hampton

Land of Medicine Buddha, Soquel CA.  February 9, 2020



My mother had a favorite word she taught me several times and often used herself. The word was serendipity. And when I think back on her life, I think there is no word that sums it up better.  I never knew anyone who had the capacity to find joy in people and beauty and the little things all around  as much as my mother did. On every walk she would stop, mesmerised by the smell of a rose or the appearance of a friendly cat  long after everyone she was walking with was calling back at her to move on. She would start long, startlingly intimate conversations with workers in grocery stores or waitresses in restaurants. These tendencies of course had a down side and there was another theme in mom’s lfe of people getting mad at her for being late or not finishing projects on time.  For someone waiting for her beyond the checkout line, or other friends at her restaurant table the long delays could sometimes create tension. She arrived late to almost every class, every deparing bus, every theater. It was a major part of the two divorces in her life. When I was a teenager it often left me banging my head against a wall in frustration. 

Only gradually as I grew up and learned patience did I  come to understand that my mother prioritized her life much differently than most people. She could not help it. It was who she was.  Much later, at a teacher training, I learned about adult ADD and realized that she did indeed exhibit many of its symptoms, but this different way of looking at the world was not an illness.  It was simply a difference, one that also had so many gifts both for her and those of us who loved her. When my mother talked to you she gave you her whole self. She didn't have in the back of her mind a waiting list of other more important things she was supposed to be doing. Those waiters and workers would sometimes came up to me later and tell me her complements and loving interest in their life had made what had been a difficult day into a much better one for them. When in my twenties and her fifties, we traveled together in Europe, it was mom who reached out and made new friends constantly.  She started us on adventures i would never have found my way into without her. When her apartment grew disorganized to the point she could not manage, she hired Mikki Bethany to help her declutter and organize. The result of this was she not only got a a tidier apartment, but she also gained some of the best friends in her life, in Mikki, in her daughter Samantha and later in her son James and now his wife Lani and their whole circle. When she became a teacher, she absolutely would not move on until every one of her students had mastered whatever topic she was teaching them. For a decade after she stopped teaching, her former students would stop me and tell me with real emotion about what  Lenore had done for them and how much they still loved her. 


 Lenora Patricia Joint was born in Fresno California in 1923.  Her mother's side were recent immigrants from Scandinavia. Her father's people came from Scotland and England via Canada  That she lived to the age of almost 97 in amazingly good health is remarkable since her first years where a near thing. She was born at home in a breach birth that came within a breath of killing both her and her mother, the doctor trying one last time to revive her mother only when her father burst into tears and begged him not to stop. Later, as a toddler, Lenore spent almost a year as an invalid recovering from undulant fever. She was the youngest, the most vulnerable and everyone looked after her. 

Mom grew up literally in a house with a white picket fence with two adoring and adored parents. She had a brother, Don, and two sisters,  Virginia the oldest and Barbara just 13 months older. It was Barbara who was tasked with staying by Lenore’s side everywhere she went, even when the two of them got lost one day only a block from home. Of course all the women in the neighborhood knew all the children and got them back home, but she never forgot it. Barbara was her special mentor all her life.  As she grew up and grew stronger, she told me how beautiful her life in Fresno was. Imagine a time before smog when the Sierras were visible from her house beautiful and white-topped every afternoon and the lush gardens and farms of the central valley were all around her. The smell of roses from her mother's gardens filled the air and in the warm nights giant fascinating June bugs would land on the screen doors and her parents would sit on their front porch as Lenore and her siblings climbed the two giant Sycamores in the front yard. Together they all listened to the weekly radio  broadcast of classical music performed by the Mormon Tabernacle choir. Sometimes, Her father would take the family to swim in the canals and he would go upstream and float serenely past them with his hat over his face as they tried to get his attention. Every Sunday he would take the family for a drive, and spread their picnic blanket under whatever tree looked most inviting. Even during the Great Depression, although her father had give up his lumber business and to go to Richmond to work during the week, his family never knew any deprivation. Mom only remembered her mother serving sandwiches to the homeless who came to the door. She never knew want herself. 


As she grew older,  Lenore she found she adored school. At Roosevelt high school and later Fresno State she  literally ran to every class with such enthusiasm that one of her professors nicknamed her Seabiscuit after the most famous race horse of the day. She was pretty and sweet-natured and so popular she was elected, to her astonishment, to be president of one club after another.  She studied world history and geography with a record of straight A’s. Boys found her enchanting and suffered when she started going with one lucky one named Buck. They told her so when, many years later, she went to her high school reunions, how this one or that one had secretly been in love with her all those year ago. Buck himself wrote her love letters until his eighties. 

In December 1941, however, this idyllic world was shaken. On one of their afternoon drives one Sunday, their chatter froze into silence as the car radio announced the bombing of Pearl Harbor.  Mom was in college then at Fresno State. She remembers how within a couple of weeks all the Japanese students in her classes disappeared and almost all young men followed soon after. News of their deaths in battle began arriving with terrible frequency. Her graduating class was almost all women.

 But it was also because of the war that my father came into her life. Ralph Hampton  had been a radio man on the Battleship West Virginia before he finished his first enlistment. He was undergoing retraining after re-entering the military because of the war when she met him  on day leave in the Fresno College Library. The two began a delightful flirtation conducted on long bike rides whenever he could get away. The unit he was in had little to do in those weeks,  waiting for an assignment overseas. One weekend my dad took the chance of going briefly AWOL to hitchhike home to his family in Long Beach with the connivance of a friend who was to to call immediately if there were any news of  a call-up. Their scheme failed though when the actual call up did come that very weekend. The whole unit of men was pulled out before his friend could even get to a phone. My father later learned they had been sent to stop the last German effort to turn the war in the Battle of the Bulge. Most of the new recruits he had trained with died there in the winter forests of Ardenne fighting against veteran soldiers. Ralph Hampton became a displaced and disconsolate soldier posted to man a telegraph station in Tucumcari New Mexico as the last months of the war raged on without him. And yet without that decision to go AWOL he would not have gone on to marry Lenore or have me and we would not be here today. 

After the war Lenore and Ralph moved to Los Angeles to live on the beach strand in Redondo Beach. They were so poor at first that they slept on the couch of his sister Bernice and her husband Harry (whose daughters are here today)  yet in so many ways they had a rich life. They rented a place of their own right on the beach and covered its walls in homemade bookshelves filled with books on history and literature. Classical music played constantly -Shostakovich and Beethoven and Rimsky-Korsakov.  It was a life that was also rich with friends and there were volleyball parties every weekend. But the struggle to find regular income began to stress their marriage. They had to work different shifts after I was born and rarely saw each other. Ralph complained that she was always late cooking their dinner. They often didn’t eat until 11 p.m. Lenore bitterly charged that he flirted far too freely with other women at the parties. When I was four, they separated although, fortuitously,  they did not divorce properly for many more years. It made a huge difference to her finances in these last few years. 

In the mid 1950’s,  Mom began the chapter of her life that I call single motherhood. Though he took me out for weekend adventures, my father offered  little help to Lenore in those days. He was still struggling toward his master’s degree, working part time and always late with his support payments  and sometimes could not make them at all. Lenore found a job at Hughes aircraft in the Personnel Department and she and I moved to Hermosa Beach. Yet, she did so well at making me feel loved and safe  in those years. I never for a moment felt deprived of anything. She and my dad remained wary friends and I would go back and forth between them as the mood struck me but I lived mostly with her. I remember the two of us going  out to root beer drive ins for a nightly hamburger, singing songs in the car as she rolled her long red brown poney tail around her finger to make it curl. And at Christmas time there was her extraordinary effort to give me every gift I ever faintly yearned for.  I received dolls and dresses and books and crayons and often even a bike, parked as a grand finale in one of the bedrooms. One year I counted 29 presents. She would ask friends or relatives to pretend to be Santa Claus to make those days even more magical and I remember huddling with her in a bedroom  her arm around my shoulders, feeling awestruck that Santa was really actually in the next room. I could hear the jingles on the bells she and my father had made an uncle wear. 

 Her mother and father helped us a lot during this time and I remember flying with her to Fresno with Don Kendall,  her now well-to-do brother, in his small airplane or other times taking the train or the bus to go see my grandparents with Mom. She began to date again.  And then, working one day at Hughes,, she met Charlie Farrell, a respected young engineer. she was shy to date him at first since, from his personnel file, she knew he was 7 years younger than herself, but Mom was still the most beautiful woman most men are ever likely to meet.  When he found out her age it didn't faze him at all. They began to date and eventually they had a child together, my brother Chris Farrell. There were serious complications though, for Charlie Farrell was from a strict Catholic family and she was a divorced woman. For two years they made appeals to the Catholic Church for permission to marry.  Mom was living in Santa Monica at the time and she sent me to live with my father, for in her apartment there were storms and tears she did not want me to see.

 in the end though, they prevailed. Their dispensation was granted  and they got married. Mom began studying to become a Catholic convert and they moved to Malibu to start a whole new life. At Charlie’s insistence she also gave up work.  From now on she would be a middle class housewife and so she was. For almost 17 years they lived in in a procession of three beautiful houses in Malibu. In some way they were good years for mom threw herself into being a great mother for me and Chris and did her best to please Charlie.  I remember she organized the most amazing surprise birthday party anyone could ever want when I was 17. It was a grand treasure hunt that must have taken her weeks to organize with me and my friends charging off in our cars up and down several miles of Highway 1, to follow clues that lead to different friends who would give us riddles to help us find the next clue. I remember one was an actor who had us try to recite Shakespeare to earn it. 

Lenore also studied Catholicism with real passion at first, taking classes with Our Lady of Malibu’s priests. She enrolled Chris in Catholic School. She worked with Charlie to host his co-workers for BBQ's on the weekends and became famous for personalized limericks she wrote about each person. She made good friends among of many of the neighbor  women around us. She helped organize multi-family expeditions to Yosemite or down the Green River and the Colorado in canoes. She drove Chris and his friends  to surfing beaches all up and down the Malibu coastline. But gradually she became uneasy in this life. She smoked at this time, trying repeatedly to stop,  and like Charlie, and all the couples around her, she drank a too much and finally recognized it and stopped. More and more her relationship with Charlie began to fray. Some of the same themes came up. She still had trouble with being late but also now with following all his rules. And Charlie took her “failings” to heart even more than Ralph had.  They both suffered terribly and started to have fierce arguments and visited counselors. At last, when Chris was 17, they filed for divorce. I had long since gone to live with my father. 

The painful battles with Charlie at first left her very depressed and with a lack of self-confidence. It was so long since she had been allowed to work or steer her own life.  But somehow she found her feet again, and her courage, and she then did something extraordinary. She bought a motorhome and she traveled alone all the way across America in it.  In Wisconsin, she paused to take a course in Buddhism with me, meeting Tsong Rinpoche and Lama Zopa Rinpoche. When I went back to California, she continued east to visit an old friend in North Carolina and decided to stay.  George was a builder and over the next year, he helped her build a beautiful 3 bedroom house in a forest by a lake that she paid for by renting rooms to young people who were attending the local University in Chapel Hill. Once again, she made marvelous friendships with those around her, one of them with a young  man named Michael Evans. For two years,  when his classes were not in session,  the two of them drove off on wacky adventures and called themselves the new Harold and Maude. Let me read something that he wrote when he heard that she had passed

Thank you so much for your email about your mother.  I have so many great memories of her, in NC and CA as well.  She and I had a special friendship that I will treasure always.  We could really make each other laugh--often hysterically. I've had so many adventures with her.  Here are some remembrances of them...

Once  we took a trip to visit Dorothy's son Ross in Palm Springs...he sort of poked fun at us, and we just thought it was funny.  She and I spent an entire day just talking about everything in his house (in our pajamas!) while he was at work. We just kind of had the same "free fall" attitude with no particular agenda.  This let us live in the moment and really enjoy our time together.

There were all the trips to Nepenthe and Big Sur--one of her favorite spots in the world.  I loved riding with her in that '79 Volvo station wagon that she'd had since she lived in Chapel Hill.  When we rounded the bend approaching the Bixby Creek Bridge, I'd just about lose it! What a spectacular, and a little scary site to behold. 

Lenore and I went to see the movie Harold and Maude in Raleigh one time when she was here.  She'd seen it and wanted me to see it. There were crickets chirping in the theater! We got a charge out of that.  Now I've seen it many times and think of her every time.

Lenore was an adventurer always up for a trip or something new.  I loved her energy, she had a youthfulness, and always a sense of curiosity about her, that just drew people in.  You couldn't help but just LOVE her! The thing about her passing is that I knew without a doubt that she loved me...she was so forth coming about it.   She often referred to me as "sweet darlin.' " She was definitely like another Mom to me and a confidant. She had spoken with my own mother during my college years and vowed she'd look after me...and she did.    

I regret that I haven't been out to see her in the past few years...but she would call me and we'd talk on the phone for long talks.  I have all the cards and letters she sent me over the years. Those calls sort of tapered off as she got older. I have already missed her, but will miss her now even more.  One of my favorite quotes that seems fitting for this occasion is: "Don't be sad because it's over, be happy that you got to experience it." I'm lucky I knew her...her spirit really was magical...and I totally got her and she got me.  

I will try not to be sad because I'm happy that I got to experience her.

 in the mid 80s mom decided to come back to California.  She drove back and sold her motorhome and she and I went looking together for a place to rent with my father  who was not doing well in Los Angeles and wanted to come and live with us in Santa Cruz again for awhile. In 1985, we rented an apartment together on Alice Street in Live Oak and laughed to call ourselves nuclear housemates. Mom was at loose ends for a while going through the last of her money from her divorce and the sale of her house.  She tried a semester as a student again at the elders in Residence program at UCSC and made several great friends from the program. She even had her own radio program on KZSC for a while! But her income continued to decline. She moved into a Buddhist center i was setting up, Maitreya House on the west side where she made lifetime friends of Jeanne and Janice Hart who set up much of the food today. She also went back to work, trying out home care for the elderly but then at the age of 65, when most teachers are retiring, she made another extraordinary change of life.   She went up to San Francisco and entered an intensive 6-week British training program on how to be an effective ESL teacher. With that certificate in hand, and her BA, she got a job as an ESL teacher at the very school where I had been working in Watsonville. It proved to be the career she was born for. At last her hyper attention to detail and her genuine love of people were just the qualities that were needed. Her students adored her. She still arrived late and cause more than one administrator to pull his or her hair, but the staff at the school loved her as much as the students and some of them are here today. 

 I think it is very possible she would have gone on teaching far into her 80s; she loved it so much, but fate had another challenge in store for her.  At 75 in 1995, trying to cross the big Highway at Green Valley Road and Main in Watsonville Lenore was hit by a car and knocked 40 feet, so hard she left her shoes behind and landed on her face.  The car sped away and was never found. She was not unconscious and didn't break a single bone to the utter astonishment of doctors who saw her in the Watsonville Hospital, but she did suffer a terrible concussion which affected her for a year, as well as double vision that lasted for months and a shredded knee.  She had to abandon the apartment she had set up in Watsonville and return to live with Ralph and me in Santa Cruz. It was a long slow year of recovery though she managed to work a few months more, just enough to to bring her to the 5-year mark. But then she suffered a second accident, tripping in a gas station and knocking out her front teeth. At last she agreed to retire. Because she had made it those five years, she received lifetime disability retirement and she also got $100,000 in an  insurance settlement from the accident. in some ways that year was the hardest of her life but in others it was a life changing gift for it left her with a comfortable retirement check she would have fallen far short of without it. We laughed that that was one hell of a way to put together a lifetime savings account but it did make such a difference in the last chapters of her life.

When she was able, she moved into the senior residence on Tremont Drive in Live Oak, only a block from my apartment.  Here she had a delightful one bedroom apartment and made more friends. One was her erstwhile employee, but soon best friend Micki Bethany who came regularly demanding to know what Lenore had done with her apartment to mess it up so much since her last visit!  She was the only person who could make Mom laugh about her own failings as a housekeeper. Another woman, a good friend to all our family, Kathleen, helped her out with shopping and chores for several years until I took over, often working for free. Kathleen had been taking care of my father who ironically also lived  in the same complex by then, the third time in their life that the two had shared a roof! 

Mom stayed  almost 20 years  at Tremont Street. She was fine at first, charging up Highway 1 in her Volvo to listen to rock and roll. Or enthusiastically driving down to Monterey to take Mikki’s son James Bethany, recovering from a serious illness, to the theater productions there.  But little by little I began to notice a decline. She was having a harder and harder time keeping up with the chores of daily life. I began to help her pay her bills and do her shopping. but when I came and found her still half dressed one night, with a bowl of half-eaten cold breakfast cereal, sitting in the dark, I knew it was time to bring her to live with me 

When she was 90 years old there was one last wonderful landmark in her life.  Far-flung relatives from all over the western United States made the effort to come to her birthday party.  One last time the descendents of those Scandinavian immigrants had a grand family reunion in her honor. And then she moved to my apartment on Alice Street.

 And there she was to live her last seven years of life. it is an apartment with a view of the sea and almost always shared with several resident cats.  My brother Chris sent a large check every month to help with her support. She had her own bedroom and her beloved queen size bed. And the constant company and care of a daughter who loved her and visits from friends and relatives. I won't go into all the details of our life together, but we had some wonderful times and some difficult ones as dementia slowly gathered. Year by year her mind and body lost ground.  Last May she caught a cold from me which turned into a glancing bout of pneumonia. She recovered from that but hospice offered to enroll her in their program and I accepted because she could no longer easily get out of my apartment and down my 19 stairs to go to doctors regularly. Nurses and a social worker began to come by weekly though she remained almost embarrassingly healthy.  

My own health was becoming much less reliable, however, as the stress of caring for her intensified. Friends like Jeanne Hart and my cousins Tricia and George and my brother Chris came to help me through crises. And the wonderful young people in my apartment, Tim and Brenda and Jackie have, for small fees,  helped  with love and good humor and took on much of the heavy lifting this past year. Still, the time I was able to leave mom alone slowly contracted from 4 hours down to only half an hour and it began to feel like living under house arrest no matter that it was with one of the most delightful persons imaginable.  Still, when I look at what others often experience in this chapter of life, I have to shake my head that i found it so hard. My most pressing grievance with Mom was that she would tell me she loved me as many as 5 times per minute when she was on a roll. I would sigh and try to instruct her that it was better to say I love you only when it was really a special moment, but to my mother every moment has always been special and when she felt something, she said it. In her last months, she could not remember our conversations more than a few seconds.

 in October of last year I had a scare in the middle of night that turned out to be a recurrence of blood clots in my lungs. I called the ambulance at last but what to do with Mom? There was no telling when or if I would come back in the morning. I had to ask the ambulance workers to bring her with me to the emergency room and they complied. We returned home okay the next afternoon but it was a wake-up call. At last I acceded to the advice of the hospice social worker that mom be sent to at least try life in Soquel Leisure Villa. This is a residential home in the hills east of Soquel village. It was a difficult decision, one of the most difficult of my life, for by then mom was far too confused to accept the need for it with understanding.

 I tried to make up for that by visiting her every afternoon without fail. She did have some good moments there. The family who runs it were very kind and she even had her own room and a great new bed, but it was not enough. I could see the distress in her eyes every time I left. My visits gradually grew longer instead of shorter and I was terribly torn about whether or not to bring her home. The first week of January she caught a cold. At first I didn't worry much because she had shaken off the one in May. I remember going to see her on the Friday the 3rd of January. She was sitting in the living room in her special lift chair. She opened her eyes and saw me and whispered one last time, “I love you.”

The next morning I found she was still in bed when I arrived. She could not sit up. And so I made the decision to bring her home with hospice’s help, despite the complex logistics. For that one afternoon at home she knew she was back in her own room and the distress went out of her eyes. Hospice provided a motorized bed and their nurses came to give  her medications that eased the suffering of what was clearly now pneumonia. They assured me it would not help to go to the ER to get the hydration I knew she needed by then. It would only fill her lungs faster. And so they offered their magic of morphine and a strong sedative to allow her to leave this world without suffering. I checked on her at 3Am early in the morning of January 5th and found she was still deeply asleep.  I went in to check on her at 6 and she was gone. My brother Chris was already on his way from Oregon with his wife Paulette to help me take care of her. They would arrive too late. 

On that last morning I stood and looked down on my mother as the sun rose. My friend Truus Landau arrived like a gentle angel in response to my phone call and seemed to know everything we needed to do. With the greatest love and gentleness she helped me wash mom and dress her and fix the room so there were no more medical supplies or equipment to see, only peace. Together we sat and recited a long Buddhist prayer on either side of her.  She was able to stay in this quiet room for almost 24 hours before Benito and Azzaro Mortuary took her body for cremation. By then her son Chris was there to help carry her down the stairs. 

Buddhism teaches that  there is more to come. That dying will actually be like an experience of waking from a dream you have been having, with the impression that now you are awake and before you were asleep.  We have all heard stories of people who experience remaining in the vicinity of their body for some time after science has ticked all its end of life boxes. Or traveling down tunnels and meeting kind beings. And some have even returned to tell us about it.  Some people, including myself, did dream of her wandering the apartment in the days that followed. My cousin Tricia had a powerful experience of my mother being present in her own apartment across town on the morning of her death before she had even heard the news of her passing.  There are so many mysteries about where we come from or what comes after. But I believe in the power of love to reach through those veils. And surely Lenore Patricia Joint Hampton Farrell is much loved by so many of us here. if there are any of you who would like to come up after I sit down and share a memory or thought about her you are more than welcome, or just share spontaneously. I thank you so much for being here with  with me today to celebrate her good life and unique spirit. May I ask that we can take a minute of silence for each of us to wish her well in our own way, with whatever may be coming next for her. And to remember the affection we all share for her, thank you.