Michael Fleming’s Eulogy for Lorraine Theresa Fleming St. Anthony’s Church, Casper, Wyoming April 4, 2007   I wouldn’t be my mother’s son if I didn’t begin with thank-yous: First, of course, many thanks to Monsignor James O’Neill and particularly to Father Michael Carr, who has been unfailingly kind and attentive to our family during both my father’s and then my mother’s final illnesses, and who was an especially great comfort to my mother during her physical and spiritual trials of the past four months; we’re grateful to our altar boys, Luke and Matthew Gaddis; and to our Eucharistic ministers, our ushers, and the staff of Bustard’s Funeral Home; many thanks to our musicians: Janeth Stearns, Rebecca Marquez, Leo & Ken Malsom, Adele Coffman, Polly Grimshaw; special thanks to Caren Hegna, collage artist extraordinaire; and to Teresa Fuller, Lorraine’s granddaughter, our videomeister; and most of all, our family thanks all of you for coming to honor my mother’s life today, just as you gathered here just four years ago to honor my father. Even on such a sad occasion as this — especially on such a sad occasion — we feel deeply blessed by your presence. If you loved my mother (and why else would you be here on such a lovely spring day?), then at some point you must have learned to understand her when she spoke to you in her native tongue, Minnesotan. It can be mighty tricky indeed for non-Minnesotans to make sense of a Minnesotan’s polite silences and indirectness. Doncha know. For example, whereas someone from Wyoming or New Hampshire might say, “Oh yes, please, I would love a cup of coffee,” someone from St. Cloud, Minnesota, would say, “Oh no, not unless you’re gonna have some.”    Now, since I’m not a native Minnesotan, this kind of thing led to quite a few misunderstandings and hurt feelings over the years. Maybe it’s a throwback to the stoic pioneers who settled the prairie back in the nineteenth century — tough, independent people who learned not to put on any airs, not to put yourself first or expect to get your own way. “Who do you think you are?” was my mother’s most stinging reprimand, worse by far than a spanking, and early on I learned that nothing offended her sensibilities more than selfishness.    Well, selfishness and also disorder. Anyone who knew my mother knew what a meticulous housekeeper she was, with immaculate floors you could eat off of (not that you would ever dream of doing so) and closet shelves neatly stacked with linens perfectly ironed and folded. Dinnertime at our house meant 6:00, not 6:05 or — heaven forfend — 6:10. There was to be no grousing and no grumbling about going to church, where my sisters were to behave like ladies and I was to be a gentleman (or “gemelin,” as I heard it at age three), meaning: shoes tied, shirt tucked in, and, on special occasions, necktie clipped on straight. Because otherwise people might think we were born in a barn.    For a long time — well into my adult years, in fact — I held only grudging regard for such “small-p” virtues: punctuality, politeness, propriety. After all, isn’t a son supposed to bridle against his mother’s domestic restraints? And besides, it was the Sixties. And then the Seventies. Little by little, though, I began to appreciate the deeper values behind domestic virtues. Punctuality (a virtue I still haven’t quite mastered) is less about impressing other people than respecting them. Mere politeness isn’t “mere” at all; it’s a subspecies of courtesy, which is, in turn, a subspecies of the do-unto-others Golden Rule. Propriety isn’t just worrying about what other people will think; it’s doing the right thing even when there’s no better reason to do so than the sheer undeniable fact that it’s the right thing, which is the bedrock of morality. Respect, courtesy, doing the right thing — ultimately they’re all forms of love.    Not that my mom ever spoke in such highfalutin terms. In her vernacular, small virtues may be what you talk about, but real values are what you live.    Lorraine Fleming embodied her ideals. Her neat, elegant handwriting betokened a respect for clarity and for words that probably did more to propel me into the world of learning than all the English courses I would ever take. (And the fact that she devoured books couldn’t have hurt either, whether those books were the fine literature I was later taught to admire or the junky historical romances I was taught to sneer at. She was too busy reading to make such discriminations.) She never would have presumed to think of herself as smart — but she played a mean hand of bridge and she could blaze through a crossword puzzle like nobody’s business. I never once heard her talk about creativity but I sure saw her spending countless hours making things, mastering the humbler kinds of art forms that can be done right, where you color within the lines, where you can’t hide behind irony or extravagant gesture. Her mastery of such handicrafts as knitting and embroidery embodied her ideals of patience and useful beauty. And then there was the tole painting — the European decorative art that filled our house (and maybe some of your houses too) with boxes and bellows and clocks and coasters, all of it resplendent with gorgeously rendered flowers and lovingly imagined scenes of snow-covered cottages and dancing peasants.    Not exactly “realism.” But this was her reality, this vision of domestic bliss and idealized community that animated her whole life. Our house may have been spotless, but it was still the house where all the neighborhood kids wanted to come and play, because Mom was nice — she genuinely loved kids and made them feel welcome. Rather than preach the virtues of friendship, she simply befriended our friends, and we got the message. She regularly hosted card parties because, in social life just as in the games she loved, you have to take turns. She couldn’t bear the idea of anyone going hungry, so she delivered Meals on Wheels for twenty years, and helped finance the organization by donating her artwork for their annual fundraising sale. All in all, she was intent on making Casper the kind of village she wanted to live in, with or without the dancing peasants.    I took all this for granted because, well, I was a kid. Weren’t all moms like this? Didn’t all moms fill their days with cooking their husbands’ meals and sewing patches on their sons’ Boy Scout uniforms and driving their daughters to volleyball games? Only when I moved away from home did I soon realize that in fact, no, a lot of moms are not like this, so utterly and selflessly dedicated to their homes and their families and their communities. My mother made enormous sacrifices for the sake of husband and children because, well, that’s just what a dutiful woman did in those days, before Having It All was an option, even for a woman as smart and energetic as Lorraine. She gave up a career that she loved, a career in which, as chief operating-room nurse, she was at the top of her profession. She gave up a city that she loved, San Francisco at its golden, idyllic peak in the 1950s. And if she ever looked back (how could she not?), she never said so, not to us, not to the family she loved so fiercely. She never let on that she never actually liked to cook, that housekeeping was as boring to her as it is to me, that the oil-patch Casper of 1958 seemed like the most godforsaken, wind-blasted hellhole on earth to her. She did what she was supposed to do: she made the best of things. She did right.    A funeral eulogy is an occasion for praise and idealization, of course, and I don’t want to give short shrift to the woman most of you know as the woman in those photos in the vestibule of the church, the smiling, beautiful, fun-loving Lorraine who really knew how to have a good time — once her work was done. The truth is, though, that the last few months of my mother’s life were very hard, a time of wrenching loss, hopes raised and then dashed, heartbreaking confusion, and fearsome pain. Often that fine, sharp mind was dull with medicine and with sickness. Again and again, though, she amazed the hospice staff by pulling herself back from the edge of death. She just wasn’t ready yet. Even dying is something to be done right, and she would no more leave behind a messy life than she would walk away from an unmade bed. She had to visit her beloved home one more time. She had to finish knitting one more prayer shawl for the church. She had to play one more round of bridge, one more game of mah-jongg. (Both times she won, by the way.) She had to summon each grandchild in turn for a proper farewell. She had to say “goodbye” and “I love you” to everyone she loved. She had to be sure that we would all be all right.    Every day throughout this time I asked her (in English) how she was feeling and usually she answered (in Minnesotan or mother-ese) “fine,” leaving me to wonder what the truth was. Some days she was fine, dutifully and somehow even happily ticking off the items on her end-of-life to-do list. Some days her hoarse whisper betrayed that she was anything but fine. After fifty years, though, I could finally tell the difference: she just wouldn’t be able to enjoy her coffee until she was sure that we were all having some too. That’s how you say “I love you” in Minnesotan.   Again, thank you all for coming today, and I hope that you’ll be able to join us at a reception downstairs in the church hall, immediately after this Mass and an interment ceremony at the Oregon Trail Veterans Cemetery in Evansville. My mother’s main concern was always the happiness of those she loved — all of us here. You can do her no greater honor than to remember her with gladness and laughter. Please have some fun for Mom.   Michael Fleming Casper, Wyoming April, 2007   top of page    e-mail to Mike    Fox Paws home page