Stitching a Life

Yesterday I conducted a memorial service.

As I prepared for this as is my wont I interviewed the individual’s daughter. I actually prefer more family members when possible, but if I can snag a daughter, I’m at least moderately confident I’ll get most of the details. (Those who only have sons are probably going to get a sketchy biography. It appears the majority of sons are moderately confident their parents were born. It goes downhill from there…) I got a good story…

And within that life story I heard something worth repeating here.

It had to do with the deceased’s mother. The family were Croatian coal miners who immigrated to America to work the soft coal fields in Southern Illinois. Father would die of black lung. Mother was the best educated having gone through the third grade.

I’m not sure she knew exactly what college was, but somehow sure figured out it was the ticket for her children to make better lives. She worried less about her son, other than being a fierce taskmaster and making sure he studied hard. And he did okay, became an architect.

It was the daughter she worried about. Had plenty of smarts, but we’re talking the early decades of the twentieth century. It was going to be hard for a girl from her background to get into college and then to get through college.

Beyond making sure her children put school first, the mother had one skill. She could sew. She taught her daughter that skill. Then somewhere along the line, I think during High School, she scrimped and saved. I’m pretty sure it took a couple of years. And she bought a sewing machine.

She presented it to her daughter, saying “Use this to go to college.”

It worked. The memorial service, for her daughter, was for a distinguished professor of Political Science. The mayor was present as were other dignitaries. And what was surprising for someone in her late eighties, there were lots of people present…

A footnote.

I needed to make a note in my text, marking a small shift in the program we’d agreed to. And I asked the professor’s daughter if she had a pen I could borrow.

She replied “No, I’m sorry, I never carry a pen. When I was coming up, I saw that women with pens became secretaries at meetings.”

She is a high powered attorney.

The strategy for one generation is not necessarily the right one for another.

But that’s a footnote.

For me, the lingering memory is of that woman born at the cusp of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who appeared never to quite master the English language, who worked hard her whole life, and who had a vision of something more for her children and their children.

And with enormous diligence, frankly some good luck, and more work than many I know understand, accomplished it…