Eulogy for Jane Wilson

This is the eulogy I gave at my mother's funeral. The reference in the text to Vi, is to Viola Rhoads, her long-time friend, who conducted the service. A photograph of the painting mentioned is at the end. All quotes may be found on Brainy Quotes (https://www.brainyquote.com/) with the exception of the Ira Gershwin line from the song of the same name. 

Outwardly, my mother led an average life. She married, taught school, raised a child, attended church for decades, painted, drew and read. That was one side of my mother, but not what I saw day in and day out. I have been looking through quotes from some of her favorite author that highlight other sides of her personality and beliefs. I found a few that capture aspects.

Teilhard de Chardin wrote: "He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed." As Vi will tell you, mom would not let her mind or soul be limited by anyone or any book, not even the Bible. She could live "in the question," as some philosophers put it. That is to say, she could live with the questions that mattered most to her open, always subject to inquiry, with no fixed solution. There was, in the end, very little that was conventional in her belief or world view. Or, as she herself sometimes said, when confronted with the need of someone to decide exactly what God was or meant, "you can’t put God in a box."

Thomas Merton wrote: "Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time." Even when she was not painting or drawing, which she ceased to be able to do after her stroke fourteen years ago, she was always immersed in an artist’s way of seeing the world. It is a very different way than a businessman, a scholar, a lawyer, or doctor has. It informed everything she did and thought. The artist's way of seeing is, I think, closer to that of the mystic. It is about more than looking at things; it is, at its best, looking through them, into their nature, and at that to which they point.

May Sarton wrote: "We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be." Mom was unafraid to be herself, to understand who she was and might become, and to tell others when they were wrong. It wasn’t always comfortable and sometimes maddened people. She wanted to be true to herself, her beliefs, and to her intellect, seeing no inherent conflict between the things of the mind and the things of the soul.

All of those capture aspects of her, but I finally realized the other morning that my favorite Miles Davis quote was the most appropriate. I don’t claim she liked all of his music or or the way he lived his life, but she did love his Sketches of Spain. Miles famously said: "Don't play what's there, play what's not there." The silences and potentials in a piece of music, in a book, or in a life, not the things that are obvious on the surface or the things that are easy, those are what are most important.

Those of you who know her paintings, know the one that has alway hung in the living room above the divan. She renamed it at least once, but it is about a person trying to break free of a box; about those who also know they are in boxes and are waiting to see what happens; about those who think themselves superior, but who are unaware that they too are boxed in; and about how we can never break out of all the boxes, only breakthrough into larger and less confining ones. This is one of the keys to understanding who she was and what she taught me.

Another key is the way she constantly watched and tried to understand the needs and the things that drove others. This was a life-long habit, a product of her childhood, and always being aware of the spoken and unspoken currents in the relationships she saw around her. She refused to stop at what she saw on the surface. She rarely took any statement at face value. It maddened people, but she was always trying to dig deeper and  connect what had just been said or done with what she knew of that person’s past. She missed very little, and she forgot very little, and her memory stretched back to her second year and the day she moved to Sedalia. Those memories and, I think, her curiosity about others persisted to her last days.

This was also the source of her empathy. It was deeply rooted in her desire to listen and understand, but also in her memory and ability to identify what was happening to others through her own store of experiences. It was also all tied up with her artist’s eye, the ability to observe, to analyze, and to see the whole picture without missing the small details that made someone or something unique.

I never doubted her love for me, nor the love of my parents for one another. I tried to ensure that she never need doubt mine. I grew up very loved, very wanted by both my father and mother. She always encouraged me to follow my dreams, follow my reading, and my thought wherever it took me. Those are gifts I would wish for every child.

Mom loved no one's music like George Gershwin's, whose death she mourned for eighty years, so let me end with the line that Ira Gershwin wrote on his brother’s death, "Our love is here to stay."