Eulogy for My Mother

In Memoriam, Deborah R. Labovitz, Ph.D., OTR, FAOTA
October 13, 1942-July 14, 2006

My mother died an untimely death at the young age of 63. Sadly, it was the first time she had been early for anything.

I had always assumed, as good sons do, that my mother was immortal. This was not just an exercise in faith or filial longing, but was based on certain quasi-scientific observations. For one thing, my personal experience with the death of family members seems to have always involved longevity. Grandmom Gi, zichrona livracha, died in her 90s; Greatgrandmom Ida, in her mid-90s also; Grandmom Clara in her 80s; Frank, Gittel’s third husband, also in his eighties. I therefore took for granted - naively, perhaps - that longevity was the natural way of things.

Second, my mother had an indomitable will to live her life in full. I say this not only because she was a constant frenzy of motion, with a schedule to match, but also because she fully intended to live multiple lives. One of her favorite phrases was “in my next life”, which was always a prelude to some idea that she had about what she would do after she was done being a mother, or an occupational therapist or a university administrator, or whatever. There was even a room in our house that was optimistically named the “art room”, because that was the room that my mother always intended as her studio when she finally took up art full time in one of her many lives. After hearing her say “in my next life” often enough, and after seeing how much she could accomplish in the average day of this life, I came to take this “multiple lives” thing seriously. I anxiously awaited what might come next, whether it was resuming her career as a weaver in the loft over the garage in Vermont, or her career as editor of a series of inspirational books about the helping professions, or something else that hadn’t occurred to her yet and that therefore I hadn’t heard about yet.

In any event, given all of this, it was something of a shock, to say the least, to find out, a little over three years ago, that my mother was indeed mortal. She had been having unexplained seizures for a few months, which she approached academically, almost clinically. After long research, she and my father and her doctors considered, and ruled out, diagnoses of things that were mundane, but treatable, then considered and ruled out the more exotic maladies. Finally, the doctors narrowed down her diagnosis to a stage-4 brain tumor, the worst kind. The mortality statistics were pretty grim – according to her doctors, only 2-3% of patients with stage-4 cancers of this type survived more than 9 months.

Others might have heard this news and simply given up, but not Mom. Quite the contrary – “2 to 3 percent” became her watchwords. My mother fully intended to beat the odds, to be part of that "2 to 3 percent". Those of you who knew her probably weren’t surprised to find out that she did beat the odds, for a good long time.

But this was a mixed blessing, since one of the side effects of her treatments was that she lost some of her former vitality. Weakened by the disease, and chemotherapy, and radiation therapy, and two brain surgeries, my mother in some ways ceased to be the person I had grown up with, and became someone else – still my mother, but somehow different.

It’s a flaw of our memories that we tend to remember the recent much more vividly than the more distant, and so there is tendency to think that what was recently has always been. In my mother’s case, this obviously obscures so much of who she was.

For example, it obscures that my mother was an artist, whose creations in pastel, and watercolor, and macramé and weaving adorned the walls of our home and today decorate my office, among other places.

It obscures that she was a master at real life logic puzzles, usually involving train trips by various family members to and from New York and cars left strategically at 30th Street Station or North Philadelphia station for them to transport themselves home. Compared to some of the machinations that she concocted, I fully believe that the Normandy invasion was a piece of cake.

And it obscures that she had a wonderfully distinctive style, too. I always thought, growing up, that she was six feet tall, until I realized, much later, that six inches of that was her unique hairdo and four inches was her ever-present high heels. She was also the only person I knew in Vermont who wore suede pants even when the forecast called for snow – but, I have to admit, she looked fabulous doing so.

On a more serious note, perhaps the best way to remember her is in her own words. It’s not often that someone who dies writes her own eulogy, but two of my mother’s hallmarks were her ability to multitask, and her willingness to take charge of situations to make sure that things got done right. And so, true to form, in the preface to her book, Ordinary Miracles: True Stories About Overcoming Obstacles & Surviving Catastrophes, she not only introduced the book, but also presciently left us some insights into how she might want to be remembered.

The book, she wrote, was about optimism and hope, and the stories contained in it about people courageously overcoming adversity and improving their lives through resourcefulness and creativity. Then she wrote this:

In many ways, this reflects my own personality and the philosophy of my profession of occupational therapy. I believe that every problem has a solution, and we just have not discovered the best one yet for those problems still unsolved; that not only is the glass half-full, but refills are on the way. When people tell me that “those who can keep their heads when all about them are losing theirs just don’t understand the gravity of the situation,” my response is that only those who can keep their heads – and find a ray of hope – can ultimately fix the grave situation. I believe that even if we cannot control the circumstances we are in, we can control our reaction to those circumstances and can turn tragedy into triumph with our own strength and with the help of others.

She also left us some instructions on how we might mourn her. Reflecting on September 11, 2001 she wrote about how, in the face of such a large tragedy, the ordinary work of life seemed somehow trivial. Wrote my mother,

I must admit that the tragedy affected me deeply…It was difficult for me to resume life and work as usual, and particularly challenging to continue to compile and edit [the stories in the book] – stories about individual people who overcame adversity, unconnected to the tragedy. The people and the stories seemed not to reflect the immediacy and immense scope of the disaster.

True to my mother’s personality, however, she believed that the healing process was best facilitated by refusing to sit still:

As an occupational therapist [she wrote], I believe in the power of “doing”. To cope with the tragedy and to contribute to the recovery, I needed to act. So I volunteered my time, donated funds, read articles about the heroes and the victims, and examined the photographs. I attended tributes to heroes and visited street corner and police station and firehouse memorials, and I began collecting more stories…These activities were and continue to be very satisfying and helpful to me.

Finally, she sent a message to us all that even in the face of catastrophe, even when there seems to be a huge gaping hole in our lives that will never heal, that even when thing look their bleakest, we can recover our optimism if only we stop to appreciate the joy and wonder, the hope and rejuvenation that are to be found in the ordinary miracles of life. I’d like to leave you with her words, since I think they best describe what she would want us to feel right now:

Ultimately…it was resuming work on this book with its message of hope that was the most powerful and important activity that helped me begin to heal and to recapture my optimism. I came to realize that these stories, about the large and small miracles of life, about the courage and creativity of individuals, about the ability to recover from disaster, were exactly what I needed to begin my healing process. These stories represent the wonder, joy and hope that makes life worth living. They are the embodiment of life and the future. They make it possible to go on, to hope and to continue to face the future with optimism.