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| Millie - May 2015, in her favorite place. Beautiful woman. |
We are here today to celebrate the life of our dear sweet
Millie, also known as The Milster, Grand Master Millie Mill, The Milverine…but
mostly known as Nana and Mom.
It’s hard to know where to start when talking about a woman
like Millie, so I’ll start from the beginning. She was the daughter of Polish
immigrants who came to this country looking for a better life. They settled in
Baltimore, where Millie grew up in a typical post-depression cold water flat.
Millie had a tough life growing up. When she was only 17 years old, her mother
passed away, leaving her with a hole in her heart and feeling lost. A couple
years later, she met my father. Their love story is that out of a Hollywood
movie. He had been dating her best friend’s sister and Millie and that friend
used to sneak into her bedroom when she was gone and read the love letters he
wrote to her. When I asked her what she thought of him from the letters, she
replied, “He sounded like a real Romeo.” One night, my dad was at one of the
local dance halls with some of his Air Force buddies when Millie walked in. He
was captivated by her and went over to the table where she was sitting and
asked her to dance. They danced and talked all night, and he asked if he could
come by her house the next day. She said that he could and he did just that.
Three weeks later, she found herself packing up her life in Baltimore to meet
him at the base in West Palm Beach, FL to marry him. Millie said she just knew
he was good – that he was going to be a good husband, a good provider and a
good father. And she was right. It took a great deal of courage on her part to
jump into such an unknown territory, but she was one brave and incredibly
strong woman.
My dad took a job with the railroad and they moved all over
the mid-Atlantic each time he took a new job. Millie was never adverse to up
and moving to a new place – she said it was great because she always got new
curtains. She worked so hard to make each new house a home, even if we were
only going to be there for a short time. Family gatherings with grandparents,
aunts, uncles and cousins were frequent and fun. Millie was magical in the
kitchen and could whip up a meal or a dozen sandwiches in no time and no one
ever left her house hungry. Sunday dinners at her house were always full of
laughter and very colorful conversation.
She was the best mom a kid could ask for and loved nothing
more than having us around. A lot of mom’s would be happy when September rolled
around, but she got depressed. All you had to do is sneeze and she would say,
“You should stay home sick today.”
Millie loved my father with all her heart and they celebrated
43 years of marriage together before he passed away. They always called each
other ‘hon’ in their Baltimore accent and were never afraid to show their
affection for one another – holding hands, hugging and kissing when he came
home from work each day or throwing an arm around the other. She was such a
devoted wife and worked so hard around the house keeping everything
immaculately clean and making sure our every need was looked after – she was
selfless. She brought us into this world and gave us our values, our faith and
our moral compass and wanted nothing more than for all of us to be happy.
Millie always said her greatest accomplishment were her grandchildren
and loved being a Nana. Sean, Brian, Katelyn, Joey, Casey, Allie and Sammy –
you were the light of her life and she bragged about all of you to everyone she
met. And there really is no place on earth like Nana’s house – so warm and
welcoming with a smell that just brings a sense of comfort over you the minute
you walk in the door.
Millie had a global following and the outpouring of love for
her has come from all ends of the earth this week – Australia, Ireland,
Honduras, Hong Kong, to name a few. Everyone fell in love with her the minute
they met her and she took so many of our friends under her wing, a testament to
the woman that she was…a true universal mother in every sense of the word. Millie was a force of nature yet she was so humble. She was kind and gentle,
yet not afraid to speak her mind.
She had so many little quirks, but one of my favorites was
how she took straw from the manger at church every year at Christmas. She said
if you kept that straw in your wallet or in your purse, you would never go
broke. And her purse is a story upon itself. Weighing in at roughly 30 lbs., it
doubles as a weapon, a pharmacy, an ATM machine and a filing cabinet. Just
yesterday, I had to go into that purse for something and found a Ziploc bag
full of manger straw – don’t worry Fr. Dan, we’ll settle up with the church on
this. This year, the manger was in a spot where she couldn’t reach the straw
and she said, “Diane, get up there on that alter and get me some straw.” I had
to explain I was not going up on the alter in a church full of people to take
straw from the baby Jesus.
Millie loved her Sunday shopping excursions to Market Basket,
where she could often be found harassing the butcher for the best cut of meat,
the hot food guy for the best chicken fingers or the bakery woman for a
cookie…because cookies shouldn’t be just for kids, seniors should get them,
too.
She had such a wonderful sense of humor and made us all laugh
out loud so many times without even trying. The stories we all have about her seem
to be endless and picking just a few to tell in a short amount of time up here
is impossible. We hope that many of you will choose to share some of those
stories this afternoon. Instead, I would rather finish out talking about the
woman she was and will continue to be in our hearts and minds. If I could sum
her up in one word, it would be LOVE. Her favorite words were “I love you” and
she loved everything and everyone with all her heart and soul. And it is that
love that we will carry forward as we go on trying to find a way to exist
without her here on this earth. It is that love that will sustain us in this
next phase of our journey because it is a mother’s love and a mother’s love
never dies. If everyone loved as deep and hard as Millie did, the world would
be a completely different place. Millie is LOVE. Pure, unconditional, honest
LOVE.
As I sat with her on Tuesday night, I had a beautiful vision.
Millie was in the kitchen in our old house in Maryland, cooking one of her
legendary dinners. Seated at the table in the dining room were all of those who
have gone before us – Joe and Elizabeth (her mother and father), Joe and
Concetta (my dad’s parents) and her brother and his wife, Norman and Edwina. My
father is seated at the head of the table and there is an empty chair at the
other end. They are all young, vibrant and free from sickness. As she comes
through the saloon doors to put dinner on the table, my father gets up and goes
over to pull out her chair. She sits down and they toast her arrival. She is
safely home…until we all meet again.
