Thursday, January 21, 2016

Come Safely Home Until We Meet Again - My Mother's Eulogy

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.

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