A Woman of Valor

When my mother died, her two full brothers and her sister traveled from Kansas, Nevada and Arizona to honor her. The oldest child, she had mothered the three other children during a Depression-era period when my grandmother worked in a factory in town, my grandfather was sharecropping at a farm further north and the four children by my grandfather were left on the family farm alone.

Now one of her brothers was a professor at the University of Kansas, one was a civil engineer and her sister was a human resources professional, with a master's degree in industrial psychology. My mother had never attended college.

Her brothers and sister were joined by congregation members of my stepfather's church where the funeral was being held. By my Jewish husband, mother-in-law, brother-in-law and sister-in-law, honoring my mother's memory for my sake. By my brother's conservative Presbyterian inlaws, his wife and his daughter, my mother's only grandchild.

My mother had no close women friends, but many women with whom she had worked on committees or bake sales or bazaars. And they came to recognize her passage in the customary way, with cold sliced meats, homemade breads, a variety of salads ...and appraising looks at her motley family, its own testament to my mother's ecumenical beliefs. For she did believe that there is One God.

The God who blessed my synagogue marriage, the fundamentalist baptism of her adopted granddaughter and the agnostic funeral of her own mother (which in a last vehement statement about her relationship with her own mother, my mother refused to attend).

I asked to speak during the service. I read a psalm and sang the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer honoring the deceased, my own last statement of rebellion for and against the strong woman who was my mother.

The psalm was "A Woman of Valor" and I sang the Kaddish in transliterated Hebrew ... the officiating Methodist minister could barely wait to get me off the altar.

Mother would have liked it. Not one for overt rebellion herself, in her later years she despised hypocrisy and conservative Republicans. She would have enjoyed the tight-collared cleric's discomfort. She liked my Jewish family and I believe was grateful to them for taking me in, since I could never accept the family she had tried to create.

Although she wouldn't believe it of herself, so distanced was she from her own emotions ... my mother was a woman of valor, treasured above rubies ... Yis ga dal, va yis kadesh, vo yis ramei ...