Below are the words I spoke at my mother's funeral last year, after a great eulogy by my sister. Her obituary is here: https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/bostonglobe/name/gloria-mulley-obituary?id=35033664
I’m not going to do another eulogy, but I did want to share a few more things about Mom, mostly focused on her final years, when I was privileged to spend a significant amount of time with her.
As I’ve been contemplating my mother’s life over the past couple of weeks, I keep seeing images of her at home. She loved her homes, and in so many ways, they always reflected who she was: stylish, welcoming, comfortable, and of course, very clean. Her home was her domain, and her presence filled the place with a powerful sense of peace, love and safety. The day that she died, I sat for a while in her bedroom where her scent still lingered and said my goodbye to that kind-hearted presence that had been with me for almost 60 years.
As you heard from Deb, Mom was a driven and independent person (dare I say, feisty?). In her final years, she was not going to give up her home without a fight. With her eyesight all but gone and her heart broken, she insisted on living alone in their Atkinson home after Dad passed away in 2018. Two more stays in hospitals and rehabs and one broken neck later, she still would not leave the home where they had spent so many years together. As dementia advanced its slow-but-relentless assault on her mind, we finally convinced her to move in with Deb in 2020.
After all of this suffering and loss, you wouldn’t blame her for just surrendering to sadness, despair, and defeat, but that’s not what happened. I was staying with her for a few days last year while Deb was on vacation in Florida, and shortly after she went to bed one night, I heard her voice on the baby monitor that we kept in her room for safety. She was praying. Feeling a little like I was invading her privacy, I reached for the volume to turn it down, but found that I couldn’t stop listening. There was no “Please God help me to feel better” or “please, no more loss” or “give me comfort” or “give me healing” or “give me” anything, although those certainly would have been legitimate prayers. What I heard instead was a 10-minute litany of pure thanksgiving where she named her husband, her kids, each of her grandchildren, and a multitude of other blessings before finally falling asleep. No bitterness and no fear, but instead, a heart full of gratitude.
This was not a prayer to a distant god or some universal spiritual force. This was an intimate and sincere conversation with someone she knew and loved and to whom she had dedicated the last 60-something years of her life. This was someone who had prepared a new home for her. A home where she would be reunited with past and present loved ones. A home where there is no more pain and no more sorrow and no more sickness and no more conflict and no more disappointment and no more goodbye. A home where my father is probably saying “welcome home, Hon” and a home where the Creator of the universe is saying “welcome home, my good and faithful servant”. Thanks be to Him, this is a home that she will never, ever have to leave again.
