Rector’s Note: Let me introduce you to my mom-10.17.24

This week I’m heading back to Akron, Oh. for my mother’s funeral, which is Saturday morning. The Rev. Bob Brown will preside at St. Peter’s on Sunday, and I know you will show him a warm welcome, as you always do. It’s not easy for me to hand off so many responsibilities, to be honest. But at the same time, this reminds me that church is a place of so many hands, and heads and hearts. Not only does the work get done, but we take care of one another. And I am immensely grateful for the ways you are taking care of me.

I wanted to tell you a little bit about my mother, Patricia Gerber, by sharing the eulogy I’ll be giving at her funeral lunch over dessert and coffee. Her life shaped mine, as a mother’s life does.

As I tried to capture the essence of my mother for this eulogy, I started to list all the things that she achieved in 95 years of life – a life that started right at the eve of the Great Depression, and became a stretch that could hold all of our life spans so far. So many things happened in that life.

But I soon realized I was recounting her obituary, which you can find on the Ciriello and Carr Funeral Home website.

So instead I thought I’d try to capture qualities that shaped my mother and sometimes drove her, and which in turn shaped and sometimes drove us. I wanted to name the gifts that God placed in her, and that manifested in roles like performer, book keeper, wife, mother, lay minister, civic leader. You might call these charisms – gifts that are a little taller than grace because they are meant for the good of other people. Whatever they were, they were powerful in their ability to shape people and events, fueled by the immense force of my mother’s expectations and will.

My mother was smart and precocious and she spoke her mind freely. She didn’t lie, though she did cheat at games. My dad would not play chess with her, after she taught him how to play and then liberally bent the rules.

She was a gifted speaker and performer, honed by my grandparents who put their two daughters on the stage at an early age –on radio programs, in talent shows, as entertainment for hire. They were Pat and Pete the Keys girls from the time my mom was six until she was a teenager.  She recited poetry – her specialty was “Casey at the Bat.” She was in school plays and did a little bit of community theater early in her adult life.  She once convinced my dad to take a part as her husband Alfred in the community theater production of Goodnight Caroline. “Goodnight Caroline” was my dad’s repeated line in a farce about a couple who encounters a burglar after they go to bed one night. My mom was Caroline.

That gift of stage presence and clear speaking never left her, and it made her a particularly fine lector for so many years at St. Hilary’s Church.  Even after she moved to The Community of St. Edwards five years ago, she was asked to read during daily Mass, which I think helped put a bit of purpose and shine on a really difficult time, limited by the pandemic and by advancing age.

My mother pushed conventions and was ahead of her time, though I’m not sure she would have described herself that way. While she had a strong adherence to practical approaches and formulas and social norms, there were some notable times when she pushed the envelope. For example, from a young age she was determined to go to college, at a time when young women from working class families didn’t seek degrees but husbands. She wanted to be a lawyer like her uncle, but settled on getting a math degree as that is what was available to her at her local college, Purdue University in her hometown of Lafayette, Indiana. She paid the tuition mostly with money she saved working at a soda fountain and a grocery store when she was in high school.

She also defied conventions when she married my dad, Jesse Gerber, an unbaptized Protestant, who didn’t make good on his promise to join the Catholic Church for another 35 years or so. He was her best friend, whom she met at the Piggly Wiggly where she worked when she was in high school and where he had taken a job after returning from the war. He was six years older than she.  They went on to Purdue together, and after they graduated, they got married in 1951.

My mom even managed to use that degree for five years, which was also quite something for a woman in the years after the war, working as a statistician for a nuclear processing facility, before she had my sisters Jennifer and Anna. Later, she worked from home as a bookkeeper for St. Hilary School. Her office was in the basement. My dad made her a desk, which sat between the washing machine and the picnic table. That’s where I could find her for most of my childhood.

My mom was a natural leader. Her life was filled with civic and church involvement, in addition to managing a household. She was either the treasurer or the president of just about every organization she joined – and there were many – Fairlawn City Women’s Club, the Altar Society, The National Council of Catholic Women, The Women’s Auxiliary of Catholic Social Services, Surviving Spouses, the Girl Scouts. She was on the Fairlawn Parks and Recreation Board and was chairwoman of two Fourth of July Parades.

And she was curious about many things. She loved to learn, and would often leap up in the middle of a dinnertime conversation to verify a fact in our set of World Book Encyclopedias. She read the paper and news magazines and novels after supper. She and my dad loved to take us camping and hiking, and she always brought with her a set of guidebooks so we could identify birds, and trees and flowers along the way. She was a frustratingly avid reader of plaques and historical markers, beginning to end.

But above all she was a woman of faith, what the author of the Book of James would call a “doer of the Word.”  She loved the Word. She not only proclaimed it as a lector, but she loved to learn about the Word in numerous Bible Studies over the years. She lived the Word in liturgical ministries, and service organizations, and prayer groups and faith sharing groups. She was as good as her word – she did not lie, did not varnish the truth, did not hold back on what she thought or felt.  She did not suffer fools. She also loved to laugh, full throated until tears ran down her face. That is another way of doing the Word.

I think it was hardest for us to imagine her not in the act of doing, not leading, or planning or coordinating or convening. But there came a point in the last year or so when all the doing dropped away and only the silent, hidden mysteries of her remained – the faith that has no words, the smiles that greeted people out of nowhere, a flash of bright blue eyes that were more often closed in long stretches of quiet and sleep.

And that’s the mystery that remains now, as her last breath in this life finds itself expressed anew among the “saints in light.”  She is all Word now, a ringing in our ears and a burning in our hearts, as close and as vast as God. That will take some getting used to. We will explore this new thing together, she and us. It will be something between remembering and imagining, until we are all together again in an eternal now.