How do you compress a life well lived into a space on a web page? How do you capture all the wonderful moments that go beyond what appears in a typical obituary? I don't believe it can be done adequately. My Mom, as was everyone, lived a life more complex than can be presented in one column by three inches of newspaper type.
My brother, Ron, authored and read the eulogies at both my Mom's and Dad's funerals and did a masterful job of capturing each of their unique personalities. I want to present both of those eulogies on each of their respective memorials. They are both longer than what one normally reads on these pages, but I believe they are worth spending a few minutes to read.
But first, the basics…
Jean Marie Marks was born on January 18, 1928 in Elkhart, Elkhart County, Indiana. She was the sixth of the seven children born to Charles Augustus and C. Edna (Pletcher) Marks and was the last of them to pass from this world.
Jean grew up in Elkhart and graduated from Elkhart Central High School in 1946. She met the first love of her life, Robert Eugene Grames, there sometime in 1947. They married in Elkhart on June 26, 1949 while Dad was on summer break from Purdue University. Dad passed on in March 1995.
Jean and the second love of her life, Walter Sale, were companions from 2004 until his death in June 2014.
Jean made many friends in many places over the years. She and Dad lived in Michigan, Utah, Texas and Wisconsin before finally settling down in Godfrey, Illinois in 1975. Her three sons were born during those earlier years in Michigan and Utah. Ronald and his wife Lynn, Arthur and his wife Linda, and Charles and his wife Sandra survive along with her eight grandchildren and nine great grandchildren.
Jean passed on peacefully on April 30, 2015 in her 88th year of life.
The following eulogy was read by Ron Grames at her funeral service at Godfrey 1st United Methodist Church on May 15, 2015.
Jean Grames never was a Hallmark Mom. I am a pretty quick card chooser, but I can remember long searches at the greeting card racks, looking at birthday or Mother's Day cards for her, looking at the flowery art work, and the even more flowery verse and thinking "this just isn't her." Not that she didn't inspire love, and admiration, and gratitude, and as the years went on, nostalgia. But somehow, the verses just didn't encapsulate the person I knew, and loved, and wanted to remember on that occasion. Maybe we all have that kind of experience, although obviously someone is buying those cards with the frills and the lace and the little poems by persons you've never heard of. I usually ended up just getting a simple card—Happy Birthday to the best Mom ever or Mom, you gave us more than we could ever say, Happy Mother's Day. Sadly, she didn't quite make it to her 62nd Mother's Day. Her first one was in 1953 and she used to tell me that I was her first Mother's Day present, as I was born the Thursday before. It was definitely a high maintenance gift. Lots of upkeep. Her life's work. But you know, best Mom ever, she always seemed to think that it, and me, and we three brothers, and Dad, her husband, partner and love of almost 46 eventful years, were all worth it somehow.
All that said, then, one would think that this eulogy—my last greeting card, so to speak—would be pretty easy to write. It has not been. I wrote Dad's eulogy 20 years ago, and hard as that was to lose him so young, that writing came pretty effortlessly. I "got" Dad, if not when I was young, at least as I became an adult and a father myself. But Mom was always something of a mystery to me, not least in understanding what "made her tick." Oh some of it was simple to see. She was a woman of deep and abiding love, and almost everything she did was informed by that almost to the point of self-sacrifice. She loved her husband, she loved her late-life companion Walter, she loved her kids and her family and friends. This last, the love of friends, was often made difficult, as the nature of Dad's work frequently took her away from all but her immediate family. But it says much of her that when job changes required that she pull up roots—and there were six major moves that took her away from friends and loved ones—there were always friendships that abided. In Michigan, in Utah, in Texas, and in Wisconsin, there were friendships that she nurtured with care and concern until death brought them to an end. The same was true of her own nuclear family, three brothers and three sisters, all gone before her, with whom she did her utmost to stay in touch over the often long distances. She was pretty successful. She was an inveterate letter, and later email, writer, even to those who were less so, often starting a missive while she waited for a reply, and sending it on schedule even if one had not yet come in return. And going to visit family is really the only extended vacations we took. Art and I remember well the trips to Indiana by train or plane, and Charlie can remember trips by car when we were within driving distance, and the whirlwind of visits with aunts and uncles and cousins. Mom didn't much like traveling—cars and planes made her very nervous—but she did, and that was often the glue that kept those family bonds strong. When it was just she and her younger sister Kathleen left, and both of them were suffering from dementia, she would still make calls to check on her. They became fewer as time went on, and I have no idea what transpired during those conversations since neither of them could articulate their thoughts very well, but she would not let that thread be broken while it was in her power to preserve it.
But beyond the love of friends and family, there is much else about her that it would be easy to miss, because she never set much store in advancing her own interests or in calling attention to herself. She was a musician of talent and taste, blessed with a lovely, rich mezzo-soprano voice. We were most often the beneficiaries of this, as for many years she sang songs remembered from her youth and early adulthood while she worked at home. And when Mom wasn't singing, there was always music playing in the house. There was a wonderful classical radio station in Utah, and she and Dad had a record collection, mostly classical, for as long as I can remember. You might not think this unusual until you know that Mom grew up in a home where standard Saturday musical fare was not the Metropolitan Opera, but the Grand Ole Opry. Lawrence Welk was the music of choice in later years when we visited.
And Mom, unlike many untrained listeners, did not just seek a pretty background to her labors. She knew the music, and she was a critical listener. She wasn't shy about taking a famous composer to task for perceived deficiencies ("but Mom, it's Schubert." "I know, but he still didn't know when to end the silly thing.") or in decrying a lackluster performance. And she liked to play a game where she would ask me the composers of works that we were hearing on the radio as we did the dishes together. (I was usually wrong, to her mixed amusement and frustration. I got better, which I think was the point.)
For the most part, this was the extent to which her considerable knowledge of repertoire was used, and outside the home her musical performances were almost exclusively in church choir. Some may remember, as well, a few outings for the Grames family quartet. However, most of you do not know that for a number of years she was, through the encouragement of the publisher, the music and drama critic for the local paper in Baraboo, Wisconsin. Memories of her all-night sessions to meet her own high standards and the paper's deadlines anticipate some of my own experiences with writing criticism. And she even developed a format for a music appreciation program for the local radio station. It was very well done, actually, but ran afoul of a (probably predictable) lack of interest in the hour-long broadcast pilot. The Life and Music of Frederick Delius, was not well received by the listeners who otherwise tuned in for farm reports. There were calls and letters…
Similarly, few will have reason to know of her love of reading, and especially of history. She had two favorite subjects: the British monarchy and the American Civil War. Her knowledge of both was prodigious, minus the battle plans; she claimed that she had no head for battle strategy. She would enthusiastically engage anyone she met who shared her love of those topics, and on more than one occasion she caused that acquaintance to wonder where she had studied. But high school was the extent of her formal education, and her books were her university. Here too she had a remarkable memory and a scholar's eye for cause and effect, and nothing irritated her more than to find sloppy research or unsupported assertions in the books she read. My ears still burn a bit from the memory of her assessment of one author's biography of Mary, Queen of Scots. Whew! For such a quiet, unassuming, lady-like person, she had a devastating smack-down. Glad she never used it on any of us. (Well, on Dad occasionally when he lost track of time and was really late for dinner. But the storm always blew over quickly.)
I have already talked a long time, and I haven't even touched on her drawing skills, essentially untutored as far as I know, of which you can see some examples in the display of memorabilia, and her love of old (to us) movies, about which she had an encyclopedic memory of titles, plots, and stars. But that must bring us to her final, sad years.
Actually, first, there were some wonderful years with Walter Sale, whom she met on one of her daily walks, after she had been living alone for some time. They found mutual comfort to their loneliness after losing spouses, they traveled together, taking Caribbean cruises and Valentine's Day trips to Trout Lodge, and eventually, blessed by the church, they had a married life in all but name. She shared her love of movies with him, and cheered him on in his interest in bridge. I don't think she was ever happier than she was during their years together, or at least until the last few when ill-health began to catch up with them. She lost Walter less than a year ago, and while she tried to soldier on, she clearly lost some of her zest for life. And in any case, she had been struggling for some years with the effects of vascular dementia. It is a cruel disease, for unlike Alzheimer's, awful as that is, it steals away one's intellect and memories, and one's physical skills, while leaving its victim painfully aware of each deficit. Well before the end, she remembered little of music, though she still enjoyed listening to Brahms and Bach, or the big-band jazz Charlie played for her. She couldn't tell you a king of England, or who was in whatever movie that was. But she knew she should know. She would sometimes pound her head in frustration.
I wouldn't, if I may be uncharitable for a moment, wish such a fate on my worst enemy. For the last year or more, and especially the last few months when there were ever fewer flashes of the person I just described, she was an unhappy, occasionally angry, person who could still remember some of who and what she had been, but could not speak, read, write, walk, take herself to the bathroom, or even eat on her own. She knew what she wanted to say, at least until very near the end, and tried to communicate, but it was usually in vain. She retained her deep need for privacy, which made the nursing home, especially in her condition, hell.
It is hard to know why such an end would be visited on anyone, but especially on someone like Mom. One looks for justice in it, but there is none. One co-worker suggested that God must be preparing her for a very special place in heaven. I am sure she meant well. All I could say was that I suspected, if Mom had a choice, that she would be just as happy with the standard room in the promised mansion, and forgo the honor, thanks very much. In any case, I don't believe God works that way. What would we say of a father who beat and abused his child for years, and then gave him the pony he always wanted? I rest my case.
I am occasionally asked, and more often feel that the question is going unasked, why I am not more emotional about Mom's death. (At least until now.) How could I be sad that she is no longer suffering? And in any case, my brothers and I, and all who loved her, have been saying good-bye to the person Mom was for years now. Watching her peacefully stop breathing that quiet Thursday afternoon, with all her sons around her, was simply the last, and far from the most painful, parting that had occurred.
But here I am now, many paragraphs into this remembrance, and I have still only told you why it has been so hard to write. I feel like I am standing again in front of that greeting card rack, and none of the cards I pick up to read seem to say what I want them to. Which to pick… This one…? No. This? *Sigh* I guess, like every year before, I will simply have to pick the simple one, the one that says the obvious, but is the most true.
Best Mom ever.
Go in peace. We love you, always.
A cenotaph has been erected for Bob and Jean about a mile south at Godfrey Cemetery. I felt it was fitting considering the anonymity of burial locations in the prayer garden.
My brother, Ron, authored and read the eulogies at both my Mom's and Dad's funerals and did a masterful job of capturing each of their unique personalities. I want to present both of those eulogies on each of their respective memorials. They are both longer than what one normally reads on these pages, but I believe they are worth spending a few minutes to read.
But first, the basics…
Jean Marie Marks was born on January 18, 1928 in Elkhart, Elkhart County, Indiana. She was the sixth of the seven children born to Charles Augustus and C. Edna (Pletcher) Marks and was the last of them to pass from this world.
Jean grew up in Elkhart and graduated from Elkhart Central High School in 1946. She met the first love of her life, Robert Eugene Grames, there sometime in 1947. They married in Elkhart on June 26, 1949 while Dad was on summer break from Purdue University. Dad passed on in March 1995.
Jean and the second love of her life, Walter Sale, were companions from 2004 until his death in June 2014.
Jean made many friends in many places over the years. She and Dad lived in Michigan, Utah, Texas and Wisconsin before finally settling down in Godfrey, Illinois in 1975. Her three sons were born during those earlier years in Michigan and Utah. Ronald and his wife Lynn, Arthur and his wife Linda, and Charles and his wife Sandra survive along with her eight grandchildren and nine great grandchildren.
Jean passed on peacefully on April 30, 2015 in her 88th year of life.
The following eulogy was read by Ron Grames at her funeral service at Godfrey 1st United Methodist Church on May 15, 2015.
Jean Grames never was a Hallmark Mom. I am a pretty quick card chooser, but I can remember long searches at the greeting card racks, looking at birthday or Mother's Day cards for her, looking at the flowery art work, and the even more flowery verse and thinking "this just isn't her." Not that she didn't inspire love, and admiration, and gratitude, and as the years went on, nostalgia. But somehow, the verses just didn't encapsulate the person I knew, and loved, and wanted to remember on that occasion. Maybe we all have that kind of experience, although obviously someone is buying those cards with the frills and the lace and the little poems by persons you've never heard of. I usually ended up just getting a simple card—Happy Birthday to the best Mom ever or Mom, you gave us more than we could ever say, Happy Mother's Day. Sadly, she didn't quite make it to her 62nd Mother's Day. Her first one was in 1953 and she used to tell me that I was her first Mother's Day present, as I was born the Thursday before. It was definitely a high maintenance gift. Lots of upkeep. Her life's work. But you know, best Mom ever, she always seemed to think that it, and me, and we three brothers, and Dad, her husband, partner and love of almost 46 eventful years, were all worth it somehow.
All that said, then, one would think that this eulogy—my last greeting card, so to speak—would be pretty easy to write. It has not been. I wrote Dad's eulogy 20 years ago, and hard as that was to lose him so young, that writing came pretty effortlessly. I "got" Dad, if not when I was young, at least as I became an adult and a father myself. But Mom was always something of a mystery to me, not least in understanding what "made her tick." Oh some of it was simple to see. She was a woman of deep and abiding love, and almost everything she did was informed by that almost to the point of self-sacrifice. She loved her husband, she loved her late-life companion Walter, she loved her kids and her family and friends. This last, the love of friends, was often made difficult, as the nature of Dad's work frequently took her away from all but her immediate family. But it says much of her that when job changes required that she pull up roots—and there were six major moves that took her away from friends and loved ones—there were always friendships that abided. In Michigan, in Utah, in Texas, and in Wisconsin, there were friendships that she nurtured with care and concern until death brought them to an end. The same was true of her own nuclear family, three brothers and three sisters, all gone before her, with whom she did her utmost to stay in touch over the often long distances. She was pretty successful. She was an inveterate letter, and later email, writer, even to those who were less so, often starting a missive while she waited for a reply, and sending it on schedule even if one had not yet come in return. And going to visit family is really the only extended vacations we took. Art and I remember well the trips to Indiana by train or plane, and Charlie can remember trips by car when we were within driving distance, and the whirlwind of visits with aunts and uncles and cousins. Mom didn't much like traveling—cars and planes made her very nervous—but she did, and that was often the glue that kept those family bonds strong. When it was just she and her younger sister Kathleen left, and both of them were suffering from dementia, she would still make calls to check on her. They became fewer as time went on, and I have no idea what transpired during those conversations since neither of them could articulate their thoughts very well, but she would not let that thread be broken while it was in her power to preserve it.
But beyond the love of friends and family, there is much else about her that it would be easy to miss, because she never set much store in advancing her own interests or in calling attention to herself. She was a musician of talent and taste, blessed with a lovely, rich mezzo-soprano voice. We were most often the beneficiaries of this, as for many years she sang songs remembered from her youth and early adulthood while she worked at home. And when Mom wasn't singing, there was always music playing in the house. There was a wonderful classical radio station in Utah, and she and Dad had a record collection, mostly classical, for as long as I can remember. You might not think this unusual until you know that Mom grew up in a home where standard Saturday musical fare was not the Metropolitan Opera, but the Grand Ole Opry. Lawrence Welk was the music of choice in later years when we visited.
And Mom, unlike many untrained listeners, did not just seek a pretty background to her labors. She knew the music, and she was a critical listener. She wasn't shy about taking a famous composer to task for perceived deficiencies ("but Mom, it's Schubert." "I know, but he still didn't know when to end the silly thing.") or in decrying a lackluster performance. And she liked to play a game where she would ask me the composers of works that we were hearing on the radio as we did the dishes together. (I was usually wrong, to her mixed amusement and frustration. I got better, which I think was the point.)
For the most part, this was the extent to which her considerable knowledge of repertoire was used, and outside the home her musical performances were almost exclusively in church choir. Some may remember, as well, a few outings for the Grames family quartet. However, most of you do not know that for a number of years she was, through the encouragement of the publisher, the music and drama critic for the local paper in Baraboo, Wisconsin. Memories of her all-night sessions to meet her own high standards and the paper's deadlines anticipate some of my own experiences with writing criticism. And she even developed a format for a music appreciation program for the local radio station. It was very well done, actually, but ran afoul of a (probably predictable) lack of interest in the hour-long broadcast pilot. The Life and Music of Frederick Delius, was not well received by the listeners who otherwise tuned in for farm reports. There were calls and letters…
Similarly, few will have reason to know of her love of reading, and especially of history. She had two favorite subjects: the British monarchy and the American Civil War. Her knowledge of both was prodigious, minus the battle plans; she claimed that she had no head for battle strategy. She would enthusiastically engage anyone she met who shared her love of those topics, and on more than one occasion she caused that acquaintance to wonder where she had studied. But high school was the extent of her formal education, and her books were her university. Here too she had a remarkable memory and a scholar's eye for cause and effect, and nothing irritated her more than to find sloppy research or unsupported assertions in the books she read. My ears still burn a bit from the memory of her assessment of one author's biography of Mary, Queen of Scots. Whew! For such a quiet, unassuming, lady-like person, she had a devastating smack-down. Glad she never used it on any of us. (Well, on Dad occasionally when he lost track of time and was really late for dinner. But the storm always blew over quickly.)
I have already talked a long time, and I haven't even touched on her drawing skills, essentially untutored as far as I know, of which you can see some examples in the display of memorabilia, and her love of old (to us) movies, about which she had an encyclopedic memory of titles, plots, and stars. But that must bring us to her final, sad years.
Actually, first, there were some wonderful years with Walter Sale, whom she met on one of her daily walks, after she had been living alone for some time. They found mutual comfort to their loneliness after losing spouses, they traveled together, taking Caribbean cruises and Valentine's Day trips to Trout Lodge, and eventually, blessed by the church, they had a married life in all but name. She shared her love of movies with him, and cheered him on in his interest in bridge. I don't think she was ever happier than she was during their years together, or at least until the last few when ill-health began to catch up with them. She lost Walter less than a year ago, and while she tried to soldier on, she clearly lost some of her zest for life. And in any case, she had been struggling for some years with the effects of vascular dementia. It is a cruel disease, for unlike Alzheimer's, awful as that is, it steals away one's intellect and memories, and one's physical skills, while leaving its victim painfully aware of each deficit. Well before the end, she remembered little of music, though she still enjoyed listening to Brahms and Bach, or the big-band jazz Charlie played for her. She couldn't tell you a king of England, or who was in whatever movie that was. But she knew she should know. She would sometimes pound her head in frustration.
I wouldn't, if I may be uncharitable for a moment, wish such a fate on my worst enemy. For the last year or more, and especially the last few months when there were ever fewer flashes of the person I just described, she was an unhappy, occasionally angry, person who could still remember some of who and what she had been, but could not speak, read, write, walk, take herself to the bathroom, or even eat on her own. She knew what she wanted to say, at least until very near the end, and tried to communicate, but it was usually in vain. She retained her deep need for privacy, which made the nursing home, especially in her condition, hell.
It is hard to know why such an end would be visited on anyone, but especially on someone like Mom. One looks for justice in it, but there is none. One co-worker suggested that God must be preparing her for a very special place in heaven. I am sure she meant well. All I could say was that I suspected, if Mom had a choice, that she would be just as happy with the standard room in the promised mansion, and forgo the honor, thanks very much. In any case, I don't believe God works that way. What would we say of a father who beat and abused his child for years, and then gave him the pony he always wanted? I rest my case.
I am occasionally asked, and more often feel that the question is going unasked, why I am not more emotional about Mom's death. (At least until now.) How could I be sad that she is no longer suffering? And in any case, my brothers and I, and all who loved her, have been saying good-bye to the person Mom was for years now. Watching her peacefully stop breathing that quiet Thursday afternoon, with all her sons around her, was simply the last, and far from the most painful, parting that had occurred.
But here I am now, many paragraphs into this remembrance, and I have still only told you why it has been so hard to write. I feel like I am standing again in front of that greeting card rack, and none of the cards I pick up to read seem to say what I want them to. Which to pick… This one…? No. This? *Sigh* I guess, like every year before, I will simply have to pick the simple one, the one that says the obvious, but is the most true.
Best Mom ever.
Go in peace. We love you, always.
A cenotaph has been erected for Bob and Jean about a mile south at Godfrey Cemetery. I felt it was fitting considering the anonymity of burial locations in the prayer garden.
How do you compress a life well lived into a space on a web page? How do you capture all the wonderful moments that go beyond what appears in a typical obituary? I don't believe it can be done adequately. My Mom, as was everyone, lived a life more complex than can be presented in one column by three inches of newspaper type.
My brother, Ron, authored and read the eulogies at both my Mom's and Dad's funerals and did a masterful job of capturing each of their unique personalities. I want to present both of those eulogies on each of their respective memorials. They are both longer than what one normally reads on these pages, but I believe they are worth spending a few minutes to read.
But first, the basics…
Jean Marie Marks was born on January 18, 1928 in Elkhart, Elkhart County, Indiana. She was the sixth of the seven children born to Charles Augustus and C. Edna (Pletcher) Marks and was the last of them to pass from this world.
Jean grew up in Elkhart and graduated from Elkhart Central High School in 1946. She met the first love of her life, Robert Eugene Grames, there sometime in 1947. They married in Elkhart on June 26, 1949 while Dad was on summer break from Purdue University. Dad passed on in March 1995.
Jean and the second love of her life, Walter Sale, were companions from 2004 until his death in June 2014.
Jean made many friends in many places over the years. She and Dad lived in Michigan, Utah, Texas and Wisconsin before finally settling down in Godfrey, Illinois in 1975. Her three sons were born during those earlier years in Michigan and Utah. Ronald and his wife Lynn, Arthur and his wife Linda, and Charles and his wife Sandra survive along with her eight grandchildren and nine great grandchildren.
Jean passed on peacefully on April 30, 2015 in her 88th year of life.
The following eulogy was read by Ron Grames at her funeral service at Godfrey 1st United Methodist Church on May 15, 2015.
Jean Grames never was a Hallmark Mom. I am a pretty quick card chooser, but I can remember long searches at the greeting card racks, looking at birthday or Mother's Day cards for her, looking at the flowery art work, and the even more flowery verse and thinking "this just isn't her." Not that she didn't inspire love, and admiration, and gratitude, and as the years went on, nostalgia. But somehow, the verses just didn't encapsulate the person I knew, and loved, and wanted to remember on that occasion. Maybe we all have that kind of experience, although obviously someone is buying those cards with the frills and the lace and the little poems by persons you've never heard of. I usually ended up just getting a simple card—Happy Birthday to the best Mom ever or Mom, you gave us more than we could ever say, Happy Mother's Day. Sadly, she didn't quite make it to her 62nd Mother's Day. Her first one was in 1953 and she used to tell me that I was her first Mother's Day present, as I was born the Thursday before. It was definitely a high maintenance gift. Lots of upkeep. Her life's work. But you know, best Mom ever, she always seemed to think that it, and me, and we three brothers, and Dad, her husband, partner and love of almost 46 eventful years, were all worth it somehow.
All that said, then, one would think that this eulogy—my last greeting card, so to speak—would be pretty easy to write. It has not been. I wrote Dad's eulogy 20 years ago, and hard as that was to lose him so young, that writing came pretty effortlessly. I "got" Dad, if not when I was young, at least as I became an adult and a father myself. But Mom was always something of a mystery to me, not least in understanding what "made her tick." Oh some of it was simple to see. She was a woman of deep and abiding love, and almost everything she did was informed by that almost to the point of self-sacrifice. She loved her husband, she loved her late-life companion Walter, she loved her kids and her family and friends. This last, the love of friends, was often made difficult, as the nature of Dad's work frequently took her away from all but her immediate family. But it says much of her that when job changes required that she pull up roots—and there were six major moves that took her away from friends and loved ones—there were always friendships that abided. In Michigan, in Utah, in Texas, and in Wisconsin, there were friendships that she nurtured with care and concern until death brought them to an end. The same was true of her own nuclear family, three brothers and three sisters, all gone before her, with whom she did her utmost to stay in touch over the often long distances. She was pretty successful. She was an inveterate letter, and later email, writer, even to those who were less so, often starting a missive while she waited for a reply, and sending it on schedule even if one had not yet come in return. And going to visit family is really the only extended vacations we took. Art and I remember well the trips to Indiana by train or plane, and Charlie can remember trips by car when we were within driving distance, and the whirlwind of visits with aunts and uncles and cousins. Mom didn't much like traveling—cars and planes made her very nervous—but she did, and that was often the glue that kept those family bonds strong. When it was just she and her younger sister Kathleen left, and both of them were suffering from dementia, she would still make calls to check on her. They became fewer as time went on, and I have no idea what transpired during those conversations since neither of them could articulate their thoughts very well, but she would not let that thread be broken while it was in her power to preserve it.
But beyond the love of friends and family, there is much else about her that it would be easy to miss, because she never set much store in advancing her own interests or in calling attention to herself. She was a musician of talent and taste, blessed with a lovely, rich mezzo-soprano voice. We were most often the beneficiaries of this, as for many years she sang songs remembered from her youth and early adulthood while she worked at home. And when Mom wasn't singing, there was always music playing in the house. There was a wonderful classical radio station in Utah, and she and Dad had a record collection, mostly classical, for as long as I can remember. You might not think this unusual until you know that Mom grew up in a home where standard Saturday musical fare was not the Metropolitan Opera, but the Grand Ole Opry. Lawrence Welk was the music of choice in later years when we visited.
And Mom, unlike many untrained listeners, did not just seek a pretty background to her labors. She knew the music, and she was a critical listener. She wasn't shy about taking a famous composer to task for perceived deficiencies ("but Mom, it's Schubert." "I know, but he still didn't know when to end the silly thing.") or in decrying a lackluster performance. And she liked to play a game where she would ask me the composers of works that we were hearing on the radio as we did the dishes together. (I was usually wrong, to her mixed amusement and frustration. I got better, which I think was the point.)
For the most part, this was the extent to which her considerable knowledge of repertoire was used, and outside the home her musical performances were almost exclusively in church choir. Some may remember, as well, a few outings for the Grames family quartet. However, most of you do not know that for a number of years she was, through the encouragement of the publisher, the music and drama critic for the local paper in Baraboo, Wisconsin. Memories of her all-night sessions to meet her own high standards and the paper's deadlines anticipate some of my own experiences with writing criticism. And she even developed a format for a music appreciation program for the local radio station. It was very well done, actually, but ran afoul of a (probably predictable) lack of interest in the hour-long broadcast pilot. The Life and Music of Frederick Delius, was not well received by the listeners who otherwise tuned in for farm reports. There were calls and letters…
Similarly, few will have reason to know of her love of reading, and especially of history. She had two favorite subjects: the British monarchy and the American Civil War. Her knowledge of both was prodigious, minus the battle plans; she claimed that she had no head for battle strategy. She would enthusiastically engage anyone she met who shared her love of those topics, and on more than one occasion she caused that acquaintance to wonder where she had studied. But high school was the extent of her formal education, and her books were her university. Here too she had a remarkable memory and a scholar's eye for cause and effect, and nothing irritated her more than to find sloppy research or unsupported assertions in the books she read. My ears still burn a bit from the memory of her assessment of one author's biography of Mary, Queen of Scots. Whew! For such a quiet, unassuming, lady-like person, she had a devastating smack-down. Glad she never used it on any of us. (Well, on Dad occasionally when he lost track of time and was really late for dinner. But the storm always blew over quickly.)
I have already talked a long time, and I haven't even touched on her drawing skills, essentially untutored as far as I know, of which you can see some examples in the display of memorabilia, and her love of old (to us) movies, about which she had an encyclopedic memory of titles, plots, and stars. But that must bring us to her final, sad years.
Actually, first, there were some wonderful years with Walter Sale, whom she met on one of her daily walks, after she had been living alone for some time. They found mutual comfort to their loneliness after losing spouses, they traveled together, taking Caribbean cruises and Valentine's Day trips to Trout Lodge, and eventually, blessed by the church, they had a married life in all but name. She shared her love of movies with him, and cheered him on in his interest in bridge. I don't think she was ever happier than she was during their years together, or at least until the last few when ill-health began to catch up with them. She lost Walter less than a year ago, and while she tried to soldier on, she clearly lost some of her zest for life. And in any case, she had been struggling for some years with the effects of vascular dementia. It is a cruel disease, for unlike Alzheimer's, awful as that is, it steals away one's intellect and memories, and one's physical skills, while leaving its victim painfully aware of each deficit. Well before the end, she remembered little of music, though she still enjoyed listening to Brahms and Bach, or the big-band jazz Charlie played for her. She couldn't tell you a king of England, or who was in whatever movie that was. But she knew she should know. She would sometimes pound her head in frustration.
I wouldn't, if I may be uncharitable for a moment, wish such a fate on my worst enemy. For the last year or more, and especially the last few months when there were ever fewer flashes of the person I just described, she was an unhappy, occasionally angry, person who could still remember some of who and what she had been, but could not speak, read, write, walk, take herself to the bathroom, or even eat on her own. She knew what she wanted to say, at least until very near the end, and tried to communicate, but it was usually in vain. She retained her deep need for privacy, which made the nursing home, especially in her condition, hell.
It is hard to know why such an end would be visited on anyone, but especially on someone like Mom. One looks for justice in it, but there is none. One co-worker suggested that God must be preparing her for a very special place in heaven. I am sure she meant well. All I could say was that I suspected, if Mom had a choice, that she would be just as happy with the standard room in the promised mansion, and forgo the honor, thanks very much. In any case, I don't believe God works that way. What would we say of a father who beat and abused his child for years, and then gave him the pony he always wanted? I rest my case.
I am occasionally asked, and more often feel that the question is going unasked, why I am not more emotional about Mom's death. (At least until now.) How could I be sad that she is no longer suffering? And in any case, my brothers and I, and all who loved her, have been saying good-bye to the person Mom was for years now. Watching her peacefully stop breathing that quiet Thursday afternoon, with all her sons around her, was simply the last, and far from the most painful, parting that had occurred.
But here I am now, many paragraphs into this remembrance, and I have still only told you why it has been so hard to write. I feel like I am standing again in front of that greeting card rack, and none of the cards I pick up to read seem to say what I want them to. Which to pick… This one…? No. This? *Sigh* I guess, like every year before, I will simply have to pick the simple one, the one that says the obvious, but is the most true.
Best Mom ever.
Go in peace. We love you, always.
A cenotaph has been erected for Bob and Jean about a mile south at Godfrey Cemetery. I felt it was fitting considering the anonymity of burial locations in the prayer garden.
My brother, Ron, authored and read the eulogies at both my Mom's and Dad's funerals and did a masterful job of capturing each of their unique personalities. I want to present both of those eulogies on each of their respective memorials. They are both longer than what one normally reads on these pages, but I believe they are worth spending a few minutes to read.
But first, the basics…
Jean Marie Marks was born on January 18, 1928 in Elkhart, Elkhart County, Indiana. She was the sixth of the seven children born to Charles Augustus and C. Edna (Pletcher) Marks and was the last of them to pass from this world.
Jean grew up in Elkhart and graduated from Elkhart Central High School in 1946. She met the first love of her life, Robert Eugene Grames, there sometime in 1947. They married in Elkhart on June 26, 1949 while Dad was on summer break from Purdue University. Dad passed on in March 1995.
Jean and the second love of her life, Walter Sale, were companions from 2004 until his death in June 2014.
Jean made many friends in many places over the years. She and Dad lived in Michigan, Utah, Texas and Wisconsin before finally settling down in Godfrey, Illinois in 1975. Her three sons were born during those earlier years in Michigan and Utah. Ronald and his wife Lynn, Arthur and his wife Linda, and Charles and his wife Sandra survive along with her eight grandchildren and nine great grandchildren.
Jean passed on peacefully on April 30, 2015 in her 88th year of life.
The following eulogy was read by Ron Grames at her funeral service at Godfrey 1st United Methodist Church on May 15, 2015.
Jean Grames never was a Hallmark Mom. I am a pretty quick card chooser, but I can remember long searches at the greeting card racks, looking at birthday or Mother's Day cards for her, looking at the flowery art work, and the even more flowery verse and thinking "this just isn't her." Not that she didn't inspire love, and admiration, and gratitude, and as the years went on, nostalgia. But somehow, the verses just didn't encapsulate the person I knew, and loved, and wanted to remember on that occasion. Maybe we all have that kind of experience, although obviously someone is buying those cards with the frills and the lace and the little poems by persons you've never heard of. I usually ended up just getting a simple card—Happy Birthday to the best Mom ever or Mom, you gave us more than we could ever say, Happy Mother's Day. Sadly, she didn't quite make it to her 62nd Mother's Day. Her first one was in 1953 and she used to tell me that I was her first Mother's Day present, as I was born the Thursday before. It was definitely a high maintenance gift. Lots of upkeep. Her life's work. But you know, best Mom ever, she always seemed to think that it, and me, and we three brothers, and Dad, her husband, partner and love of almost 46 eventful years, were all worth it somehow.
All that said, then, one would think that this eulogy—my last greeting card, so to speak—would be pretty easy to write. It has not been. I wrote Dad's eulogy 20 years ago, and hard as that was to lose him so young, that writing came pretty effortlessly. I "got" Dad, if not when I was young, at least as I became an adult and a father myself. But Mom was always something of a mystery to me, not least in understanding what "made her tick." Oh some of it was simple to see. She was a woman of deep and abiding love, and almost everything she did was informed by that almost to the point of self-sacrifice. She loved her husband, she loved her late-life companion Walter, she loved her kids and her family and friends. This last, the love of friends, was often made difficult, as the nature of Dad's work frequently took her away from all but her immediate family. But it says much of her that when job changes required that she pull up roots—and there were six major moves that took her away from friends and loved ones—there were always friendships that abided. In Michigan, in Utah, in Texas, and in Wisconsin, there were friendships that she nurtured with care and concern until death brought them to an end. The same was true of her own nuclear family, three brothers and three sisters, all gone before her, with whom she did her utmost to stay in touch over the often long distances. She was pretty successful. She was an inveterate letter, and later email, writer, even to those who were less so, often starting a missive while she waited for a reply, and sending it on schedule even if one had not yet come in return. And going to visit family is really the only extended vacations we took. Art and I remember well the trips to Indiana by train or plane, and Charlie can remember trips by car when we were within driving distance, and the whirlwind of visits with aunts and uncles and cousins. Mom didn't much like traveling—cars and planes made her very nervous—but she did, and that was often the glue that kept those family bonds strong. When it was just she and her younger sister Kathleen left, and both of them were suffering from dementia, she would still make calls to check on her. They became fewer as time went on, and I have no idea what transpired during those conversations since neither of them could articulate their thoughts very well, but she would not let that thread be broken while it was in her power to preserve it.
But beyond the love of friends and family, there is much else about her that it would be easy to miss, because she never set much store in advancing her own interests or in calling attention to herself. She was a musician of talent and taste, blessed with a lovely, rich mezzo-soprano voice. We were most often the beneficiaries of this, as for many years she sang songs remembered from her youth and early adulthood while she worked at home. And when Mom wasn't singing, there was always music playing in the house. There was a wonderful classical radio station in Utah, and she and Dad had a record collection, mostly classical, for as long as I can remember. You might not think this unusual until you know that Mom grew up in a home where standard Saturday musical fare was not the Metropolitan Opera, but the Grand Ole Opry. Lawrence Welk was the music of choice in later years when we visited.
And Mom, unlike many untrained listeners, did not just seek a pretty background to her labors. She knew the music, and she was a critical listener. She wasn't shy about taking a famous composer to task for perceived deficiencies ("but Mom, it's Schubert." "I know, but he still didn't know when to end the silly thing.") or in decrying a lackluster performance. And she liked to play a game where she would ask me the composers of works that we were hearing on the radio as we did the dishes together. (I was usually wrong, to her mixed amusement and frustration. I got better, which I think was the point.)
For the most part, this was the extent to which her considerable knowledge of repertoire was used, and outside the home her musical performances were almost exclusively in church choir. Some may remember, as well, a few outings for the Grames family quartet. However, most of you do not know that for a number of years she was, through the encouragement of the publisher, the music and drama critic for the local paper in Baraboo, Wisconsin. Memories of her all-night sessions to meet her own high standards and the paper's deadlines anticipate some of my own experiences with writing criticism. And she even developed a format for a music appreciation program for the local radio station. It was very well done, actually, but ran afoul of a (probably predictable) lack of interest in the hour-long broadcast pilot. The Life and Music of Frederick Delius, was not well received by the listeners who otherwise tuned in for farm reports. There were calls and letters…
Similarly, few will have reason to know of her love of reading, and especially of history. She had two favorite subjects: the British monarchy and the American Civil War. Her knowledge of both was prodigious, minus the battle plans; she claimed that she had no head for battle strategy. She would enthusiastically engage anyone she met who shared her love of those topics, and on more than one occasion she caused that acquaintance to wonder where she had studied. But high school was the extent of her formal education, and her books were her university. Here too she had a remarkable memory and a scholar's eye for cause and effect, and nothing irritated her more than to find sloppy research or unsupported assertions in the books she read. My ears still burn a bit from the memory of her assessment of one author's biography of Mary, Queen of Scots. Whew! For such a quiet, unassuming, lady-like person, she had a devastating smack-down. Glad she never used it on any of us. (Well, on Dad occasionally when he lost track of time and was really late for dinner. But the storm always blew over quickly.)
I have already talked a long time, and I haven't even touched on her drawing skills, essentially untutored as far as I know, of which you can see some examples in the display of memorabilia, and her love of old (to us) movies, about which she had an encyclopedic memory of titles, plots, and stars. But that must bring us to her final, sad years.
Actually, first, there were some wonderful years with Walter Sale, whom she met on one of her daily walks, after she had been living alone for some time. They found mutual comfort to their loneliness after losing spouses, they traveled together, taking Caribbean cruises and Valentine's Day trips to Trout Lodge, and eventually, blessed by the church, they had a married life in all but name. She shared her love of movies with him, and cheered him on in his interest in bridge. I don't think she was ever happier than she was during their years together, or at least until the last few when ill-health began to catch up with them. She lost Walter less than a year ago, and while she tried to soldier on, she clearly lost some of her zest for life. And in any case, she had been struggling for some years with the effects of vascular dementia. It is a cruel disease, for unlike Alzheimer's, awful as that is, it steals away one's intellect and memories, and one's physical skills, while leaving its victim painfully aware of each deficit. Well before the end, she remembered little of music, though she still enjoyed listening to Brahms and Bach, or the big-band jazz Charlie played for her. She couldn't tell you a king of England, or who was in whatever movie that was. But she knew she should know. She would sometimes pound her head in frustration.
I wouldn't, if I may be uncharitable for a moment, wish such a fate on my worst enemy. For the last year or more, and especially the last few months when there were ever fewer flashes of the person I just described, she was an unhappy, occasionally angry, person who could still remember some of who and what she had been, but could not speak, read, write, walk, take herself to the bathroom, or even eat on her own. She knew what she wanted to say, at least until very near the end, and tried to communicate, but it was usually in vain. She retained her deep need for privacy, which made the nursing home, especially in her condition, hell.
It is hard to know why such an end would be visited on anyone, but especially on someone like Mom. One looks for justice in it, but there is none. One co-worker suggested that God must be preparing her for a very special place in heaven. I am sure she meant well. All I could say was that I suspected, if Mom had a choice, that she would be just as happy with the standard room in the promised mansion, and forgo the honor, thanks very much. In any case, I don't believe God works that way. What would we say of a father who beat and abused his child for years, and then gave him the pony he always wanted? I rest my case.
I am occasionally asked, and more often feel that the question is going unasked, why I am not more emotional about Mom's death. (At least until now.) How could I be sad that she is no longer suffering? And in any case, my brothers and I, and all who loved her, have been saying good-bye to the person Mom was for years now. Watching her peacefully stop breathing that quiet Thursday afternoon, with all her sons around her, was simply the last, and far from the most painful, parting that had occurred.
But here I am now, many paragraphs into this remembrance, and I have still only told you why it has been so hard to write. I feel like I am standing again in front of that greeting card rack, and none of the cards I pick up to read seem to say what I want them to. Which to pick… This one…? No. This? *Sigh* I guess, like every year before, I will simply have to pick the simple one, the one that says the obvious, but is the most true.
Best Mom ever.
Go in peace. We love you, always.
A cenotaph has been erected for Bob and Jean about a mile south at Godfrey Cemetery. I felt it was fitting considering the anonymity of burial locations in the prayer garden.
