When people use the term "Celebration of Life" it's often a euphemism. Though I was/am devastatingly sad, my mom loved a good party, so we gave her one. For people who were unable to attend, here are the written remarks I shared to celebrate my mother's life.
When I was a small child, my parents would drive to Logan, Utah for Tupperware conventions, leaving their children with the grandparents. Mom and dad would call home to see how we were doing. There was so much to do on the farm. We loved that time running around outside and spending time with our grandparents and their neighbors.
Yet the moment I heard my mom‘s voice on the phone, I would begin to cry. Every year.
My mom and I talked about it after I became an adult. “I never understood why you cried so much. You were having such a good time.” Looking back on those times I was finally able to explain to her that, sometimes a person just has too many emotions to fit into words and everything gets balled up inside and it explodes out of your eyes.
Pretty certain that’s gonna happen here. I’m gonna have some big emotions, BIG, and they might come out of my eyes. But we’re going to make it through, as my mom would say, "Afterwards, if we’re all very good, there will be cookies."
Now, If everyone could turn their order form over and make a tic-tac-toe grid, it is time to play Pie Bingo!
Barb Kehl lived a big life existing in all the small details. She never moved out of Whatcom County. The furthest she traveled was to Florida and Acapulco, Mexico, and both of those trips were either for Tupperware or free from Tupperware. When we talked about travel for pleasure, she would say, “I’m so busy, and I really like my house. If I have any free time, I just want to stay home and read.”
She was successful in her own right, yet her proudest accomplishments were in giving success to others. Promoting Tupperware managers, seeing women come into their own voice, and raising children who were successful. Not in material things, but in relationships, in caring, and in empathy.
She was "content." It was difficult to buy her birthday gifts because she kept saying she already had everything she needed. “If you want to give me a gift, you can take me out to lunch.” The gift she wanted was time with you.
She was a feminist. She had her own job and her own money. I’m realizing my dad must’ve been a feminist as well (which is hilarious to say about him) because he supported her decisions. I remember in the early 1970s she had a Bon Marché credit card with the name "Mrs. Ted Kehl." At the time, women weren’t able to open credit cards in their own names or without a male co-signer. The law changed, and my mom wanted a credit card with her own name. The store kept telling her she didn’t need one; she already a credit card with them. She insisted, “I want one in my own name. I make my own money. I pay my own bills.” She threatened to close her married account and tell all her friends to do the same. They gave in, and she opened her first charge card with a credit limit of $100.
Contrary to what I will claim later, I was not her favorite. Yes, there were times she and I spent more time together. She would tell me it’s because I demanded attention 26 hours a day, 8 days a week. (Weirdly, my husband says the same thing.) But she didn’t play favorites. She had an inherent sense of fairness. Christmas was a great example. She set aside a dollar amount to spend on her children and divided it to be exactly equal. She kept all her receipts and a running list of what was spent on whom. She used various codes to conceal what she had purchased and who each gift was for. A completely unnecessary step because no one could read her handwriting, not even her.
She was excellent at coming in on budget, never more than a dollar difference in any direction. And it wasn’t just the dollar amount. She also gave each of us the exact same number of gifts to unwrap. Impressive in theory, and only slightly odd to find yourself opening a large box with 2 colored pencils in it or just one of your favorite candy bars. Hopefully the right candy bar because she couldn’t quite tell if that faint pencil scratch in the corner was a “J” or a “G." No wait, it’s a “T” for Ted!
I wasn’t a fan of how much I had to share my mom growing up. She wasn’t a regular mom; she was a cool mom. Everyone wanted to talk to her. Eternally on the phone. fingers snapping, wildly gesturing at dinner cooking on the stove, trying to convey to her children what needed to happen without breaking the conversation on the end of the line.
(imitation of mom on phone, snapping fingers, gesturing wildly)
Her office door was always open. In reality, her office didn’t actually have a door. Which is a very obvious metaphor of how she lived her life. In spite of ourselves, as a family we joined her ethos of "more is more," which is not just a decorating style; it includes people. “Yes, I can fit more of your friends in the car. No, I don’t mind giving them rides home. No, I’m not angry that you woke me up at 3 am to get a ride home; I’m glad none of you are driving.”
Now, was Dad as thrilled about a 3 am phone call? Let’s just say the mom-ride privilege was not an option we abused.
Mom was full of wisdom. I called her “Oh wise Yoda” behind her back, but only because she didn’t pay enough attention to popular culture for her to get the reference.
She wasn’t against giving advice. She knew her opinions and her own life experience. She would listen and steer you to the correct answer, all while letting you believe you’d figured it out for yourself. Saying, “You have to ask the question, but I think you know the answer”
She had great intuition. Listening to what went unsaid, reading body language, she knew your decision before you did.
When Gary was unhappy at college, he phoned home and discussed whether he should stay and finish his current course of study or come home to Bellingham, change schools, and change his major. The call ended with everyone agreeing to wait a week to decide. Mom hung up, and I said, "Should we start cleaning up his room at home now while we have more time, or wait until he tells us and then we have to hurry?” She answered, “We can start tomorrow. He’ll be here in two weeks.”
Sometimes I would call her and vent all my life’s troubles to her, and she would “uh huh” and “Ummhmmm” at me while I could hear that crochet hook moving in her background. One time I was so frustrated I blurted out, “Can you do that thing where you already know what I’m going to do and just tell me now and spare me the next week of torment?”
She answered in a Yoda-like sentence, “You’ve already figured it out. You’ll decide what to do when you accept that."
A month after our dad died, my dog died. I told my mom that the back-to-back losses were more than I could bear. “It just hurts too much. I don’t think I can take it.”
Obviously she was going through her own grief at the same time. “The way I see it,” she said, “is that the loss is going to hurt you as deeply as you loved and cared for that person.”
"Well, I don’t ever want to feel this bad again. So what you’re telling me, is that to protect myself, I should just stop caring?”
“Of course you’re going to keep caring about people; that’s who we are. But think about it like this: wouldn’t it be sad to live in a world where you couldn’t feel BOTH of those feelings, that intense love and that sad pain, as deeply?” Oh, wise Yoda.
As mom got older, some of the sharpness started to fade. Though she had adapted to new technology over and over again, from learning shorthand in business school to the electric typewriter and on to the computer. She even joined Facebook and Instagram “to see what the big deal was." And here is where I will apologize to you all.
One day, she complained to me that social media wasn’t showing her all of her friend’s posts. I tried explaining how an algorithm works. The gist of it was "The program shows you who you talk to. The more you comment on, the more you see of them. “What do I have to say in my comment?”
“You can say whatever you want. You could just say something like “Thank you for sharing." And then the algorithm will know you like that person and show you more of them.
“Oh, I can do that!” So, if you ever got tired of reading that, My bad.
When I was 17, the mom of my best friend was dying. Pat asked my parents to become his guardians and to streamline the story (something my mother never excelled at); they agreed. My mom took the challenge on in her usual way by going ALL IN. Reading and studying a topic in great detail. If she could understand it, she could control it. If she could control it, she could fix it. Only this topic was death. Not a topic most people dive into by choice, yet in she went. 100% and with a smile. Weekend seminars, support groups, and every book available. She literally dragged us into death and out the other side.
Since she’s our mom and we’ve established she’s a giver, she then gave us all gifts.
The first gift is Scott.
The second gift is the ability to talk about death with empathy and without fear.
The third gift is her answers to a questionnaire from a class she took in 1982.
When I think of dying or when circumstances make me aware of my own mortality, I feel: "pleasure in being alive."
If my physician knew that I had a terminal illness or disease, I would want them to tell me. “So I could help prepare actions to accept it."
When I think of dying, I most fear: "nothing."
What do you think happens to you after you die?: “I start my next chapter.”
My sister will tell you she is not sentimental. When we needed to clean out mom’s house after she moved into assisted living, I told her she had to wait for me. I had to be there to protect, select, and collect ALL the memories. So, of course, I caught Covid. We divided the house upstairs and downstairs to avoid contact. We struck a deal on Mom's office; Debbie could be ruthless on papers and paperwork as long as she saved one copy of all the handouts for me, which she did. Which was still a lot. If you need to know which seasonal color palette you should be dressing in, see me in the lobby.
Once Mom moved out of West Maplewood, the day-to-day managing of Mom's care was taken on by Debbie. One visit with Mom, as Debbie and I were leaving, I just started crying. All the things I shared with my mom, conversations, jokes, insights, and phone calls, were being stripped away, and the enormity of it was crushing me. Unsentimental Debbie gave me a hug (not too big) and told me, “We’re all out of quality time. All we’ve got left is spending time. Don’t try to make it count. Just sit with her and enjoy.”
When I saw Mom last September, she knew she knew me. She knew she was happy to see me. But she couldn't find the piece of the puzzle that connected her to me.
👵🏻 I was just thinking about you and then you walked in! Where do I know you from?
“I’m Jim. Your child. The favorite one.
👵🏻 Of course you are, right? Right. I’ve been thinking of you, so I knew you’d show up any minute. And how do you fit in?
“You know me from being in your house, growing up. I’m Jim, the youngest and prettiest of all your children.”
👵🏻 Well of course you are. And I know I’m glad to see you. But why can’t I place where I know you from?
“I came out of your vagina.”
She rolled back with her huge laugh, pointed at me, and said, “Of course I know YOU. You’re the smartass!”
Our mom loved a good laugh. She literally held parties for a living. She could be sad, she could be angry, but she put on her lipstick, drove out the driveway, and turned into the Tupperware Lady. I can’t tell you how many times we joked that one day she would be buried in Tupperware and her coffin would be burped for freshness.
I went so far as to immortalize the idea in a creative writing class and then sent it to her. She made me read it at Thanksgiving for the entire family and then filed it away in her office for Debbie to find later.
The fictional story arrived at a dramatic end— "When my mother died, she couldn’t have written a more appropriate way for herself to go. She was driving to hold yet another Tupperware party. She had a heart attack and wrecked her Tupperware minivan, dying instantly. The police report said it was quite a mess, with Tupperware smashed all over the highway. We were able to get all the Tupperware replaced due to the Tupperware unconditional guarantee, but sadly, not my mother. Contrary to what many people expected, we did not have her buried in a Tupperware coffin and burped for freshness. She was to be cremated, and the plastic would have made it all one big glob.”
THAT is from my piece of fiction.
However… I can tell you that we came “this close” to making it true. Though not able to place her ashes in the ground with my father’s ashes “inside” a piece of Tupperware, we DID deliver her ashes in a Tupperware Servalier Harvest Gold canister number 805-2 with a push lock lid.
And now we return to our fictional story— "Late at night when I begin to miss her, I go to the refrigerator and pull out - well, anything, it’s all in Tupperware—and there in the dim light of the bulb at the back, I take that bowl and slightly lift one edge while I force a little air out with my other hand flat on the top, and with a small “whoosh,” I remember Mamma."
As my mom would say, if you have a choice, and you always have a choice, choose happy.
And right now, my mom is having the best laugh.
