I wrote the eulogy for my mom’s funeral. It was the last big piece I have written since my mom died in July. I am not physically arrested or immobilized by grief. I am very much able to carry on the daily tasks of life, but my creative energy is bone dry. I stepped away from writing for a while because I couldn’t make the the words take shape. I worried that, in the refining process of grief, the strands of synapses that collectively contribute to my writing life were severed. I am sharing this with you as an oath to myself and you that I am not abandoning writing.
Tana doesn’t have an easy story to tell. Life did not unfold like a fairy tale. It was not neat or linear. Her narrative is sticky and messy, triumphant in one moment and tragic the next. I will give a highlight reel of the first portion but I want to hover over the years after I left home. It seemed that all the tearing down and rebuilding of a mother/daughter relationship was behind us by that point. Discovering my mother from an adult viewpoint enabled me to see her in sharper focus and with much more nuance and appreciation.
Tana was the second child born to Joyce and Bill Young. Her father was in the Air Force and this dictated wildly dramatic changes in geography. She traveled by ship to Japan in her early childhood, went to three different schools for third grade criss-crossing the country, spent a chunk of the 60s in Fairbanks, AK before returning to Spokane when her father retired from military service. She graduated from Shadle Park High School in 1973. In 1974 she was given two options: join the army or move out. Tana joined the army and was stationed at Ft. Monroe in Virginia working as an illustrator for Training and Doctrine Command. This time of her life was tumultuous and fraught.
She married in 1978 and resumed a life in the northwest making her own family. Tana perceived herself as a drifter on the margin, a throw-away person. Mothering seemed to patch a broken circle somewhere deep inside her heart. She told us often in childhood that we were the best thing she’s ever done. She described becoming a mother as the party she never thought she’d be invited to. The full force of her nature filled our sails. She sacrificed relentlessly for us as children, deferred her ambitions and goals, set aside her own comfort, and took humbling jobs. We didn’t see it at the time, but in time we did see her sacrifice with the sort of gratitude that aches.
I don’t know what I was thinking when I decided to write the Eulogy. It has been a heady task in the midst of grief. In all the typing and deleting of words, I have circled back to I Corinthians 13:13 as a way to understand my mother’s essence.
Three things will last forever — Faith, Hope, and Love — and the greatest of these is Love.
Her faith, her hope, and her love are imprinted on me like a road map. All the complicated emotions, failings, and imperfections have fallen away to reveal the transcendent parts of her nature that makes me feel rooted.
Tana was a woman of abiding faith. She became a Christian in high school and was subject to derision for that choice. It took some years to iron out her path.
Throughout my childhood she was deeply committed to participation in a faith community. We were a churched family by her initiative. She led that charge with gusto. We attended church at least twice a week. She took us to Vacation Bible School. We went to family camp and church camp in the summer. We went to every church potluck. She was involved in many para-church ministries like Bible Study Fellowship. I always got the sense that she was making up for lost time. There was a constant hunger and striving. It took me a long time to understand that her self-perception was the underlayment. She never felt like she could model the Christian life well enough for us and brought us into communities that had people she revered. As it turns out her faith, and not the so-called giants, made us feel at home with God.
Tana’s relationship with God was raw and honest. She was blunt and intimate in her prayer life. She read the Bible with intensity and robust intellectualism. She was diligent in her application. She used to recount for me things she was praying about and she would always use the words “I’ve been talking to God about such and such.” She wrestled with God through times of hardship and sacrifice. Tana was constantly conversing with God about life. I knew from the time I was very young that I was covered in her prayers. The language of the intercession was a protective layer. Her final three years left her little else to fill her time. Her prayer was an endless ribbon rising to heaven, never ceasing.
Her faith was ever-clarifying and it informed her engagement with the world. Recently we were discussing a book I was reading (The Second Mountain by David Brooks). I was sharing with her his metaphor of the the first mountain where we are self-focused and the transition to the second mountain where we become focused on others, delighting in giving ourselves away. In that conversation she related how transformative it was for her to care for her Grandma Margie in the last years of Margie’s life. She emerged from that season with a new purpose. She spent the next 25 years practicing love in motion.
In everything, Tana was a doer. There was no latent hope. Her hope was busy and tireless and generous. Her hope was creative and beautiful. She transformed and built and restored the tangible and the intangible. She looked at the future not with dread but with a hopefulness filled with delight. She toiled in the garden and created aesthetic beauty and fostered relationship believing in the permanence of their impact. This was her art. Even in transient life and shared spaces, she created beauty. It was sewn into her encouraging words and her affirming deeds. There was always hope. It was all pinned to making “earth as it is in heaven.”
Another element of her brand of hope was her grit and determination. Hoping was an act of defiance against the gravity weighing us down. Everything was uphill. She did hard things and she made us do hard things. There was no quitting. When something got hard she used to say for instance: “You’ve only got 2 weeks until the end of the term? You can do anything, ANYTHING, for 2 weeks.”
She employed this grit all the days of her life. Establishing a home and a family, going to college with two young children, taking care of her grandmother, remodeling her grandmother’s house, prioritizing our education, returning to school when we were grown to reclaim her dreams, working two jobs to make ends meet, and finally fighting for 1,293 days as a quadriplegic.
Tana’s success in this life was the rare way she loved people. She didn’t have fortunes or possessions or prestige or notoriety. She simply loved the people who crossed her path. Tana was cerebral and thoughtful, charming and endearing, inclusive and engaging, passionate and authentic. Her laugh was infectious. Her gap-toothed grin and the sparkle in her eyes could draw you into her joy. Over the last three years we learned from many of you that her special magic was inclusion. She felt like a perpetual outsider. I imagine many of you were feeling like an outsider when you first encountered Tana. She likely looped arms with you, a fellow friend on the perimeter. She struck up a conversation or welcomed you in. She saw you and told you to pull up a chair. She had this gravitational pull and people unsuspectingly bumped right into all that love. She asked about life and family. She helped in mundane ways. She was available and affirming. Even after her body was immobilized she showed that same sort of love to the people who crossed her path — nurses, therapists, doctors, custodians alike — all ran smack dab into that earnest authenticity.
As her daughters we had a constant stream of her love threading through daily life. She refused to miss a thing— the momentous or the mundane. She was part of every celebration and significant event. But also our interconnectedness was full of the unfolding of informal life. Her love came in the form of affirmation, checking in, lending a hand, or popping by with something cold to drink. It was simple, thoughtful, and regular. It was a call, a text, a visit.
After the accident her legs could no longer propel her to us as before, but the long practice of her loving was an irresistible force with an ancient polarity. We logged days, months, and years beside her in hospital rooms. And came in all haste to be by her side even after she slipped from this life.
I take with me these lasting things. The things that will not perish or be destroyed. Know Jesus, actively hope, and love simply whoever comes into your path. That is the Tana way.