Goettsch

Eulogy By Chris Fulford 16 April 2010

My name is Chris. Mary was my grandmother. A few years ago, my parents finally cleaned out their house of the things I’d left behind when I moved out over twenty years ago. They shipped 17 boxes of stuff to me in Seattle. The boxes sat untouched for several years in my basement, until, a few months ago I got curious about their contents. I opened a couple the boxes from the top of the pile to see what was in them. One of the things I found was this album. I recognized it immediately without even opening it. There’s no date or other writing inside – you can see that it’s just a photo album with leaves in it. The album was put together one fall afternoon when I was a small child visiting grandparents’ house in Minneapolis. My grandmother and I, just the two of us, walked down Coffey Lane, collecting leaves that we thought were pretty from the sidewalk. We returned to my grandma’s house and ­put them in this album together. It’s one of my many loving memories of my grandmother. My brother Craig and I were always welcome at her house. We were able to spend a lot of time with her growing up. She was a big part of our lives. She was always very generous to us and always came to the big events in our lives, even when it meant travelling long distances. My grandmother didn’t talk a lot about her own life. Most of what I learned about her life came from asking her direct questions. But even the things she didn’t talk about told me about how strong she was. When she was ten, her father died. That must have been hard on her, but she never told me about it. After her father’s death, her family had to move halfway across the country, but she never talked about how hard that must have been for her. She gave birth to her first child by herself, my grandfather having been sent away to war some months before. When I asked about how hard this period of her life must have been, she just said everyone had to make sacrifices during the war, that’s just what people did. She was very modest. One story she did tell me occurred when my grandmother was in her twenties. She was going to a convention in Denver with members of her church. On the train ride there, the employees refused to serve one of the congregation members in the dining car because she was black. My grandmother joined this woman in the back of the train for dinner so that she wouldn’t have to eat alone. Now, one reason this story stands out to me is that, if you knew my grandmother, you’d know she wasn’t exactly a civil rights activist. It must have been hard for my grandmother to defy the social conventions of the time -- but she did. She did it because she cared about this woman. My grandmother cared about a lot of people. She cared about her friends, keeping in touch with many for over sixty years, even when they had moved away decades before. She cared about her neighbors on Coffey Lane. She followed what was going on in their lives and offered help when she could. She appreciated the help that her neighbors gave her as she and my grandfather got older. She cared about her family. She was very proud of her children and their families. She was proud of her son, Fred – proud of his success in business. She would always keep me up-to-date on my uncle’s recent business trips. She was very proud of her daughter, Elizabeth – proud of her involvement in the women’s group PEO. She told me several times how impressed she was that my mother had become president of the state chapter. She loved having Craig and I visit her with our families. She’d tell us how much she loved us, our wives and our children. She always told us how much she appreciated us and how lucky we were to have such wonderful families. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how the people that were around us growing up influence us, how their words and behaviors shape us, shape who we become. Some of their values we internalize, others we may reject, but the influence of our families, both conscious and unconscious, makes us who we are. Through my grandmother, I learned a lot about kindness, strength, humility and manners. She helped teach me about what it means to be a family. I believe that when people die, their bodies may disappear, but they still live on, inside of us. They will continue to guide us and guide those who we in turn influence. To my children, nieces and nephew, when the time comes that I’m no longer here, and you have to sort through my stuff, I don’t mind that you’ll throw the book of leaves away. I won’t even mind if you don’t remember what it was or why I kept it, because I know that the woman who put it together will be inside of you. Thank you, Grandma, for what you’ve done for me and will continue to do for me. I love you.