My dad did, too, but that’s another story. My mother was what you would call an extremely hard-working, high-achieving champion of her beliefs and her family. I am the 3rd son born to my parents, and after I was born, my parents started adopting. They didn’t stop until they had adopted 13 more – 5 from Korea, 3 from the Philippines, and 5 mixed-race from the U.S. All considered “hard-to-place” kids. Both of my parents were highly involved in the equal rights movement of the ‘60’s in Milwaukee, taking us to picket for our first time when I was only 5 years old, protesting the prohibition of black membership in social clubs like the Elks. She took us all along as kids while she taught English to migrant worker families (some of whom ended up lifelong friends), but most of all, our parents taught us to appreciate other cultures, foods, music, people who didn’t look like us or talk like us. It shaped us all, and I didn’t really appreciate that for many years. She also taught us to live thankfully, with gratefulness simmered into our sauce, and with a song on our hearts and a smile on our face.
Our family gathered recently and we buried the ashes of our parents, together in the same container, after they had both donated their bodies for medical research. It had been 6 years since our dad’s passing, and 2 years for our mother’s ashes to come back to us. Neither of them wanted to be recognized or remembered in any special way, but we knew how important family was to them, for us to help each other to have connections, to find connections, to make connections. Generations of relatives and their memories attended and now surround them in the cemetery where we placed their cremains. One of my favorite sayings is that “Children are a message we send to a time we will not see.” If that’s true, well, they sent a whopper of a message. Our parents were inspired by so many people in their lives: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Harry and Bertha Holt, Pearl Buck, each other, people too numerous to count. We as their children had them, Skip and Becky, mom and dad, to challenge us, to inspire us, throughout our lives with them, and even after they’ve gone. They saw their purpose as way beyond their beginnings, and I believe they challenge us all to continue that tradition, to spread our wings and make the most of the time we have with each other, at home, and in the world around us, and to be grateful every day for the wonderful experiences we are able to enjoy. It is the core of the table prayer we all learned and prayed together: “GIVE US THANKFUL HEARTS, AND KEEP US EVER MINDFUL OF THE NEEDS OF OTHERS.”
I don’t think that was by chance that they taught us that.