~John Porter~
There’s so much that I could say about my mom. Anyone that knows her can see the vitality and sheer love of life that she is so much a part of. My mom loves life! Anyone that shared any time with her at all could feel just that! She’s always ready to joke and to laugh. She lives to make others smile. How she loves to smile! I remember as a child watching some terrible low quality monster movies about giant lizards and such and she would join me on the couch. Suddenly the giant monsters would begin talking and having a very funny conversation to themselves! My mom thought it would be funny to ad lib some lines for the otherwise exclusive snarlers. And you know what, she was hilarious! My mom loves life!
My mom loves her family! The greatest part of my moms heart was reserved for her family and friends! My mom could quickly turn a child’s tears into dances of laughter in a heartbeat! As all of you know, my mom could easily laugh and joke the day away. But she always had a message. And that message was to always love each other…unconditionally, totally and without hesitancy! She taught us to be the best possible humans that we could be! And whenever we children faltered at that, she was always there to pick us up and help set us back on the right path, even when we thought we didn’t want it! My mom loves her family!
The last thing I want to say about my mom and it needs to be the last thing because I could talk for days about her! My mom loves God! I can’t put into words how she felt about him because they would be my words. So I am going to read a short excerpt from her diary she had begun sometime last year. I’ll begin it somewhere in the middle where my mom was still just a young girl…
“We went to church 2 times a week and all day on Sundays. With no electricity at home, our days were pretty short. I had to do homework right away because we had to utilize the daylight and then go to church. I LOVED GOING TO CHURCH! Singing in church was the best! I did that all through my life. Singing in church to God, NOTHING better than that!”
My mom is the strongest person I have ever met! But you know she wanted us all to be that strong, and to stay together through thick and thin. Some of you that know me well enough know that I fuss about my appearance, my hair because most of the time I feel inadequate and pretty much grew up that way worrying about how I might appear in public. When I went to the hospital for the first time, my mom was kind of out of it because of the morphine that was holding her pain at bay. But at this time she was alert enough and speaking to us. My mom sometimes had these short episodes where she did not know who she was or where she was or recognize the people that were around trying to console her. She was having one of those moments when we walked in. After some short time she began to remember everyone. I touched her arm gently, she turned quickly and looked at me, and she said very seriously, ‘you are touching my arm”. Thinking I had hurt her somehow I quickly pulled away and said ‘I’m sorry.’ She said in the same serious tone, ‘that’s the one that hurts you know.’ I was stunned and felt bad, but only for a moment. My mom in all her pain and confusion was making a joke, still trying to make us smile. It worked. The room burst into laughter and she was all smiles and so was I! (Our family’s taste of humor is silly and perhaps odd to others at times, but that’s us.) Then she looked at me for a long moment. I looked back into those beautiful and intelligent brown eyes. The last real words my mom ever said to me was this, “You’re beautiful.”
I can literally go on forever about my Mom and how she impacted our lives in such huge positive ways and I will. I wrote this for my Mom’s memorial service and now its here for everyone to share. I love my mom, she is the best person that ever entered my life, and its so very hard to realize that she’s gone. In fact its something that I haven’t quite grasped yet, I hope to come to terms with the fact as she would no doubt want me to simply live and be happy. But just the same its hard and rends my heart. So I’ll keep her alive through the music she loved, the people she loved, and through sharing stories about my mom here to share with everyone that loved her so much.
I love you Mom!